First World War

World War I enters the novel not as a continuous battlefield narrative but through scattered memories, archival references, and civic commemoration. Its meaning differs sharply across these frames: Antoine Roquentin finds that memory cannot restore the past, the Self-Taught Man recalls wartime imprisonment as the source of a powerful feeling of human fellowship, and Bouville’s elite presents service and sacrifice as part of the town’s public identity.

The War in Public History

In Bouville’s gallery of portraits, the town’s elite is represented as having shaped civic life before and during the war. Its men founded the Federation of Shipowners and Merchants of Bouville, expanded port facilities, and broke the shipping strike of 1898; in 1914, they gave their sons to the country. The women are commemorated for charitable work and for raising children in the town’s traditions. This account makes wartime service the culmination of a longer civic story, linking sacrifice to the established social order.

The gallery’s polished account contrasts with the novel’s more uncertain private histories. Its dignified portraits and claims of service turn the war into part of a coherent public narrative, while the surrounding scenes show how difficult it is for individuals to recover or verify the past.

The Self-Taught Man’s Wartime Memories

The Self-Taught Man recalls that he enlisted when the war began without understanding why. He spent two years at the front, where, as he tells Antoine Roquentin, there was little time for reflection. Captured at the end of 1917, he became a prisoner of war. He says that imprisonment did not restore religious belief: science had persuaded him that God did not exist, but the camp led him to believe in people.

His most formative memory is not a battle but the crowded wooden shed where about two hundred prisoners were shut in during rainy weather. In the darkness and crush, he first feared he would suffocate; then he felt an overwhelming joy and love for the men around him. The same feeling returned whenever he was confined there. His account locates fellowship in a shared, involuntary circumstance rather than in a formal political or religious doctrine.

He also remembers Sunday Mass in the camp. Though he had never been a believer, the one-armed French chaplain, the harmonium, and the gathered prisoners gave him a sense of communion with those present. The memory endured after the war: he sometimes still went to church on Sunday mornings, drawn to the organist at Sainte-Cecile-de-la-Mer.

Aftermath and a New Vocation

The Self-Taught Man describes the months after his liberation in 1919 as miserable. Unsure what to do, he felt himself wasting away and sought out groups of men wherever he saw them; once, in despair, he followed a stranger’s funeral procession. He also burned his stamp collection. These episodes show the difficulty of returning to solitary civilian life after the shared experience of the camp.

He eventually found a vocation and tells Antoine Roquentin that he is a Socialist. The novel does not claim that the war alone explains his politics, but his account connects his belief in people to wartime fellowship and his postwar search for belonging.

Memory, Evidence, and Narrative

For Antoine Roquentin, the war belongs to a wider problem: the past cannot simply be entered again. His attempts to recall travel in Meknes produce fragments, indistinct images, or place-names without the experiences that once gave them substance. A faded photograph marked “Anny, Portsmouth, April 7, '27” does not restore the person or moment to him. He recognizes that he constructs memories from his present self and cannot escape the present in order to rejoin the past.

The same distrust of reconstruction shapes his historical work on the Marquis de Rollebon. Although he has letters, memoir fragments, secret reports, and police records, he finds them too inconsistent to establish a coherent account. He sees his hypotheses as arrangements imposed by the researcher rather than knowledge supplied by the dead. The episode is not itself a history of World War I, but it clarifies the novel’s treatment of historical knowledge: documents and recollection may preserve traces without making the past fully present.

Together, the gallery’s civic account, the Self-Taught Man’s testimony, and Roquentin’s reflections offer distinct ways of narrating history. Public commemoration turns wartime service into a settled story; the former prisoner’s memories preserve fellowship alongside the difficulty of returning to ordinary life; and Roquentin’s present-bound consciousness exposes the distance between surviving evidence and lived experience. World War I therefore appears both as a shared historical rupture and as a past whose meaning depends on who remembers it and how.