{"title":"The Dubious Battle of Reichshoffen","authors":"Colin Foss","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv18kc0z2.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18kc0z2.8","url":null,"abstract":"Newspapers’ disregard for fact created fertile ground for the growth of national myth. A perhaps fictitious Parisian news report on the Battle of Reichshoffen, which took place just before the siege on the Franco-Prussian border, became one such myth. A few conflicting accounts of this early battle in the war turned into a play, a poem, and a panorama, and perhaps later led to the successful campaign of Patrice de Mac Mahon for President of the French Republic. But it is impossible to verify whether the Battle was a French victory or a defeat. This ambiguity was inherent to newspaper poetics during the siege, and while frustrating for any reader looking for truth, it shows how profitable and how ideologically productive ambiguity could be. Much like the Battle of Waterloo, the Battle of Reischshoffen grew to become a national-historical allegory due to the particularities of literature production in times of war.","PeriodicalId":346942,"journal":{"name":"The Culture of War","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127254725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Culture of WarPub Date : 2020-10-19DOI: 10.3828/LIVERPOOL/9781789621921.003.0007
Colin Foss
{"title":"Historians of the Present","authors":"Colin Foss","doi":"10.3828/LIVERPOOL/9781789621921.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/LIVERPOOL/9781789621921.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The last chapter shows with how the historical became personal during the Siege. This chapter shows how Siege diarists imagined their amateur contribution to historiography. While professional historians of the Romantic tradition wrote from a personal perspective, they did not privilege experience and anonymity as guarantors of authenticity. The modest perspective of Siege diarists, however, formed the basis of their ability to tell what many of them called the true story of the Siege. Personal claims to historical fact placed anonymous individuals at the heart of history. These diarists wrote the collective history of their present moment, meaning that they can be considered at once historiography and historical documents.","PeriodicalId":346942,"journal":{"name":"The Culture of War","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115302083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}