Kriegsjournalismus aus der Provinz: Colettes Heures longues

Abstract

Focusing on Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's Les Heures longues (1917), this paper investigates how the role of the province and the metropolis changed in French journalism during the First World War. Colette’s volume detaches a selection of her earlier wartime articles from their original journalistic context, reconfiguring the serial pieces as a work that captures the challenges women face writing war journalism. Her short texts document the new peripherality of the capital, which is no longer the primary setting of the major news items as the armed conflict takes place far from Paris. They also describe the increasing centrality of provincial areas, which gain new importance as civilians leave the capital to replace rural workers departing for the front. Colette’s volume develops a new poetics that express the deceleration of everyday life at the periphery of the war, and juxtaposes divergent experiences through a weaving of different perspectives.