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This article discusses the impact of World War I, also known as the Great War, from 1914-1918 on French society and politics. The author comments on the comparisons made between World War I and the French Revolution and describes the psychological research into WWI veterans. The literary production during and after the war, particularly by French veterans, is also examined.

The article discusses the development of a French-language historiography of World War I in Québec and Canada since the 2000s. The author retraces the development of an English-language historiography of the Great War in Canada starting in 1914, mentions the book "A Military History of Canada" (1985) by Desmond Morton, and notes the development of the social and economic history during the 1970s and 1980s. Québécois historians such as Jean-Pierre Gagnon becoming more interested in the involvement of French-Canadian soldiers during the First World War during the 1990s and the publication of diaries and letters from French-Canadian World War I soldiers such as the book "Journal de guerre (1915-1918). Thomas-Louis Tremblay" (2006) by Marcelle Cinq-Mars are also mentioned.

Over the two past decades, a new approach to the Great War has progressively developed. Shifting their focus of inquiry to the social and the cultural, away from the economic and the political, the historians of the Great War are particularly attached to the study of the legacy of the war on the cultural and social structures of European societies. The study of war's memory has therefore been placed at the heart of historical research in most of the countries that took part in the war. In France, the mnemonic turn of the cultural historiography of the Great War is thus seen in several works which, through the various forms of commemoration such as the war memorials or the cult of the Unknown Soldier, examine the relationship between memory and identity as well as between remembrance and mourning at both the public and individual levels. This article about Armistice Day in France explores the difficulties of the transmission of memory in the aftermath of war. It questions the persistence and the abandonment of war values and culture in the years that succeeded the Great War. It aims to demonstrate the interaction between memory, trauma, and the creation of symbolic narratives. It also argues that the celebration of Armistice Day should be seen as a public sphere of discussion where two different conceptions about the past, the present, and the future, of the national community are confronted. It finally claims that the mnemonic practices should consequently be treated as a network of cross-perspectives among the expectations of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]