Medieval Visions and Modern Myth: the Making of the Medieval in World War II French Literature is situated at the intersection between the modern and the medieval; the pieces of France's past which surface and resurface in its present. This dissertation first establishes the existence and importance of a medieval trope, a set of images and stories which call to mind the legendary European Middle Ages without necessitating scholarship: cathedrals, knights in armor, Tristan and Isolde. This set of imagery became important during the second World War, as Pétain's government began to advocate a return to an older, religious France with an agriculturally-based economy. French artists under the Vichy régime and under the German occupation responded to this quasi-medieval vocabulary with imagery of their own, rewriting and recasting medieval legend for the purposes of the contemporary needs of France. This work analyzes the way in which four authors take up the threads of the medieval for their own reasons and in their own way during the second World War: Albert Camus, Julien Gracq, Louis Aragon, and Henry de Montherlant.
This study examines medieval imagery across genres: Aragon's poetry, Camus' novel, Gracq's play, and Montherlant's essays. It reaches across the political spectrum, with two résistants, a neutral, and a collaborator, and across time periods, tracing the medieval trope from its origins through the 19th century and into the contemporary period. The nature of the subject has also necessitated an interdisciplinary approach, with a close study of the intellectual and historical influences on these authors, as well as a focus on the visual media of posters and film. This fresh approach to some of the most famous pieces of World War II literature, as well as some of the more obscure, has enabled some real clarifications and innovations in the field. The literary and aesthetic medievalism that appears particularly in times of national stress is an element in the analysis of this period that has been insufficiently explored; this study provides a way to understand the trope that so many French authors adopted at the essential wartime intersection between the literary and the political.