The year is marked by a quadruple Franco-German anniversary : it is preceded by the sesquicentenary of the beginnings of the Franco-Prussian War and followed by the seventy second anniversary of the ending of the Second World War. Between the two, the centenary of the effectuation of the Versailles treaty β which, at the outcome of the war, was intended to reshape the relations between the two neighbouring countries, ideally enabling the avoidance of new conflicts β also takes place during , as well as the eightieth anniversary of the French defeat of May-June For the French and German people, defeat consists, then, of a shared experience.
It has profoundly affected, disrupted and rearranged French and German societies, before, during and after conflicts. Recent work has shown that the history of the years cannot be reduced to that of conflicts, defeats and revenge. For their contemporaries, war and defeat represent no less a horizon of possibilities and at times, a lived experience.
They are forced to cope with war, whether it is in order to prepare for it, adapt to it as it unfolds, or withstand and invoke it once over.
From this perspective, two prevalent options, not always exclusive of one another, consist of either taking revenge or overcoming the logic of confrontation. In a Franco-German framework, this symposium will therefore provide an opportunity to explore the diverse attitudes of civilian as well as military actors facing defeat, both their own and that of others, between and This involves grasping the relationship with the violence of defeat on an individual, intimate scale, as well as on that of military and non-military, local, national and imperial institutions, while remaining attentive to the interactions between these dimensions.
Furthermore, the recurrence of endured and inflicted defeats from to permits addressing the ways in which the experience of one conflict is introduced into the next, whether consciously or not. We add in conclusion that the period between and saw the European powers extend into other continents, and then the systems of colonial domination go into crisis. Military defeats upon European soil rapidly acquired a global dimension, and the colonised population concretely experienced the imperial restructuring provoked by these.
