‘Promettez-moi de me supprimer gentiment’: War Violence and Gendered Intimacy in Two Epistolary Novels of the First World War

The article examines two novels that use epistolary writing conventions to portray the blurred lines between intimacy and violence during the First World War. The forgotten writings of Jeanne Delorme-Jules-Simon and Jeanne Landre go against the grain of wartime discourses and current historiography by linking the First World War’s destabilizing effect upon gender relations not primarily to women’s ‘emancipation’, but to the impact of violence upon men. Delorme-Jules-Simon’s narrative of nursing, caring, and suffering at the Front provides a sobering portrait of the French soldiers’ desensitization to violence. Her novel, Âmes de guerre, âmes d’amour, retraces in this light the links between colonial and patriarchal domination, while Landre’s … puis il mourut posits the trivialization of femicide as a paradoxical by-product of patriotic celebrations of romantic love. Both authors invite readers to question their epistemological and emotional relation to stories that voice the materiality of violence, especially when the latter intertwines with gender, intimacy, and national trauma.