In order to contribute to the duty of remembrance for the eightieth anniversary of France’s Liberation, FoReLLIS, MIMMOC, and Criham, research centres at the University of Poitiers, are organising, in partnership with Archives Départementales de la Vienne, CultureLLe, VRID-le Musée, M&V, Espace Mendès-France and Maison de la Poésie, a week of events around the Second World War from 7 to 11 October 2024. An international, multidisciplinary conference will be held from October 10 to October 11.

The term vulnerability is now used to define any kind of fragility, whether it is related to human-caused calamities, natural disasters or sociocultural factors. It has become a catch-all word which blinds us to a multiplicity of cases. While the Latin vulnus, meaning wound, broadly refers to potential physical or moral attacks, the intensity and forms of vulnerability vary according to the specific characteristics of individuals, such as age, gender, and physical condition, and according to relational, socio-economic, political or historical contexts and their contingencies. Vulnerability, moreover, belongs to the domain of possibility and presupposes both risk and a form of "reversibility": it may be acted upon (Dolino-Brodiez, 2015).

The 80th anniversary of France’s Liberation marks an excellent opportunity to reflect on the new intensity, forms and figures of vulnerability and on the process of vulnerabilisation during the Second World War, and how they were readjusted, navigated and resisted. Vulnerability reached new heights and took on new forms during the war years because of the "Final solution", experiments and torture in Nazi camps, new forms of warfare, such as the Blitz or the atomic bomb, occupation, repression, various deprivations, and the unprecedented resistance and resilience that arose in response. Furthermore, while "in their actions, human institutions will protect some individuals and expose others to wrongs or rough doings" (Cahier du Genre, 2015), the Second World War made these phenomena of protection and exposure more problematic. Laws, constitutions and societies were deeply marked by the conflict and subsequently had to reinvent themselves. Before and during the war, for instance, racial laws institutionalised segregation and persecutions, the German occupation changed collective behaviour in France and other European countries (Laborie & Marcot, 2015). After the end of hostilities, the Nuremberg Trial led to the instauration of the crime against humanity. The French Fourth Republic was inspired by the political agenda of the Conseil National de la Résistance (notably with the creation of the welfare state).

This conference is anchored in the cultural, interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspectives adopted by the historiography and literary criticism of the Second World War which have renewed debates about trauma and the experiences of violence during the war years and their long-term impact, as well as the concepts of vulnerability and resistance (Leese & Kivimaki, 2022). It aims to interrogate the new types of vulnerability and their representations in all forms of discourse, whether during the war—as stigmatisation started earlier—or in the aftermath—distant testimonies after long traumatic silence; memorial acts; history (re)writing.

What are the processes of vulnerabilisation engendered by the projects of "national regeneration", by the new forms of destruction, by social and State pressure, by geopolitical upheavals, by the new media and their manipulation? Who are "the vulnerable" and how do they react? How do, as Peter Leese would have it, "silence, stigma and resilience" come into a "complex interplay" (ibid.)? How do political or journalistic discourse, as well as personal testimonies, literature, plastic and visual arts represent vulnerability and resistance? What do they have to say about these subjects? Are authors or artists vulnerable, too, as they may have been subjected to censorship and thus acted in a clandestine way, or because their memory may be traumatised or failing, or because they may have been prejudiced or have succumbed to the lack of originality denounced by George Orwell (Fussell 1990; Rawlingson 2000; McKay 2007)? Does fiction impinge on reality or shed light on it? To what extent are smaller history and big History related? What are the risks associated with the different processes of (re)writing history and memorialisation? 

Papers will explore these questions within a global perspective. Beyond Vichy France and Europe under Nazi domination, they may address all the countries that were involved in the conflict, either on military fronts or as occupied territories, or again as colonies forcedly involved—considering notably forms of vulnerability within colonised populations. Social divisions such as gender, age, race (as a social construct) may also be considered. The chronological scope includes the war years as well as postwar memorialisation, without excluding earlier warning-sign events, as it is now evident that the war cannot be studied as a parenthetical moment in history.

The call is open to contributions from all disciplines of humanities studies and social sciences: literature, history, military history, art history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, musicology, linguistic studies, etc. 

Proposals in French or English are to be sent with a short bio-bibliographical notice to:

Marius Hentea (marius.mihai.hentea@univ-poitiers.fr), 

Laurence Montel (laurence.montel@univ-poitiers.fr), 

Stéphanie Noirard (stephanie.noirard@univ-poitiers.fr) 

Hanene Zoghlami (hanene.zoghlami@univ-poitiers.fr) by May 20.

A selection of papers is then to be published.

Keynote speakers include Lyndsey Stonebridge (Birmingham), John Bak (Nancy), Patrick Brown (Amsterdam), Patrick Deer (New York).

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Dolino Brodiez Axelle, « La vulnérabilité, nouvelle catégorie de l’action publique », informations sociales, vol.2, n°188, p.10-18

Laborie Pierre, Marcot François (dir), Les comportements collectifs en France et dans l’Europe allemande 1940-1945. Historiographie, normes, Prismes, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015 

Peter Leese, Ville Kivimaki, Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II, Londres, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2022

Fussel Paul, Wartime : Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990 ; Rawlinson Mark, British Writing of the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 ; Mackay Marina, Modernism and World War II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007