“Rise, Dead of Verdun!” A cultural history of Spiritualism after the Great War

Abstract

In the final sequence of J'Accuse , the legendary anti-war film filmed by Abel Gance in 1918-19, the deranged hero addresses an extension of battlefield tombs: "Morts de Verdun, levez-vous!" . Y "with the earthy figure and their orbits full of stars", the fallen soldiers answer to his call: an army of ghosts emerge from the ground and spreads in every direction. But the return of the dead after World War I was, in a certain sense, literal, and not just for the thousands of maimed and muted veterans who shakily resumed the civil existence. The end of the war led – especially in the United Kingdom but also in other European countries – to a resurgence of spiritualism and its practices of communication with the dead. This article, within a broader reflection on the interpretation of "unorthodox" socio-historical materials that question the neat division between truth and fiction, presents and analyzes this historical phenomenon as a response to the intensity of war trauma. The centrality assigned in this period to spirit photography is particularly interesting and leads us to reflect on the role of photographs in some processes of mourning.