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The years 1914-18 engendered a "sudden and irrepressible boulimia" of letter-writing, a diluvian outpouring which defied all attempts at administrative control. The massive correspondence of French soldiers, analysed and quoted in the archives of the Commission de Contrôle Postal, has already been mined by war historians. They have normally used it to carry out a kind of historical opinion poll on the mood of the trenches. This article, however, focuses less on the content of soldiers' correspondence, and more on the nature and history of letter-writing itself. It examines letters as letters, their frequency, their destinations and all the unwritten codes to which they are subject. At a time of newly acquired mass literacy, the poilus experienced the urgent need to write. Their "laconic writing" raises important questions about historical sources, their transparency and their silences. It also offers a perspective on the much debated integration of the peasantry into national life and culture.

This article uses narrative analysis to understand how mental health professionals working in a pilot experiment in community psychiatry in France between 1960 and 1980 made sense of their work experiences. Based on a collection of essays written by these professionals as part of their training as well as on other archival materials, the article explores writing practices in post-war French psychiatry as ways of constructing and negotiating moral commitments to work. The first three sections of the article give some background on mental health nursing in France in the immediate post-war period. The subsequent three sections examine how the professionals elaborated on their experiences in their writings, focusing on three different levels: first, the narrative voice used in the essays; second, the learning processes described by trainees; and finally, the ways in which they negotiated discursively the requirement to do emotionally well at work.