Abstract
This study discusses the genesis of war enthusiasm among cultural elites in Western Europe, with the focus on France and the Netherlands. My hypothesis is that the war enthusiasm of 1914 can be understood as a product of modernist culture. By modernist culture, I mean the expression of a search
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for an answer to the perceived shortcomings of the rational and functional sides of modernity, notably in art and literature. This study seeks to further explore modernist regeneration narratives from which the war enthusiasm of 1914 originated by tracing common developments in the lives of a select group of war enthusiasts. I have selected a specific group among whom the vast majority were enthusiastic about the outbreak of the war in 1914: a network of French and Dutch writers, artists and intellectuals who converted to Catholicism throughout the period 1870-1918. The first part of this study (chapter 1 to 8) covers the prewar years 1870-1914 and describes how regeneration discourses played a central role in the choices and actions of both French and Dutch converts. The second part of this study (chapter 9 to 12) covers the war years 1914-1918. It describes how the majority of the converts immediately recognized the war as a massive conversion of society as a whole: just as had happened in their own lives, society would violently break out of the vicious circle of decadent self-reflection and nihilism, rediscover its primordial spiritual roots, recover a firm sense of identity and, with that, again forge a strong unity. It also describes the process of politicization of the modernist religious discourses during the war years, the same sort of politicization that Italian historian Emilio Gentile described as a crucial phase in the rise of fascism. The conversions of these artists did not distance them from the modernist, avant-garde and emancipatory movements they had been active in, they just caused more conversions in these movements. This interpretation is the opposite of the predominant scholarly views on avant-garde and modernism as movements that were opposed to any religious or political totalitarianism. That is also the reason why the conversions of the main subjects of this study have so long been marginalized as anti-modern acts: the thought that maybe these converts are actually to be understood as symptomatic of the development of modern culture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, has disturbing implications. In that case, fascism and the other totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century have to be understood as an integral part of the modern culture that we, today, still for the most part know and appreciate.
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