World War I (1914–1918)
Being and NothingnessWorld War I (1914–1918) serves as a case study in how political purpose can turn a past event into history: the United States’ participation begins as a calculation of economic advantage, but is retrospectively framed as the fulfillment of a debt of honor to France. The account makes the war’s historical meaning depend not simply on what happened, but on the project through which a society takes up and memorializes what happened.
The utilitarian motive
The United States enters the European war of 1914–1918 because American capitalism sees an opportunity for profitable transactions. In that light, participation is utilitarian rather than historical: the immediate project supplies a practical reason for action, but does not by itself make the past into a shared historical inheritance.
Recasting relations with France
The transformation comes when the United States recovers its earlier relations with France and gives them a new meaning—as the payment of an American debt of honor. The famous sentence “Lafayette, we are here!” condenses that interpretation into a public memorial gesture: it connects present action to a selected past and presents the connection as grounds for collective adherence. The resulting common French-American past signifies both American economic interests and the actual affinities between the two democratic capitalisms.
The past as political construction
The passage emphasizes that this historical account was not inevitable. Had a different view of American interests led the United States to side with Germany, political advocates could have recovered other elements of the past, such as the proportion of Germans among nineteenth-century emigrants to America, and built propaganda around “blood kinship.” Such appeals cannot be reduced to publicity alone: they answer the masses’ demand for a political project that illuminates and justifies their past, while helping secure their adherence. The war thus illustrates how a present project selects and organizes inherited relations into a usable collective history.
