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Based on around a hundred personal and intimate texts, this book offers a fresh look at the Franco-German conflict of 1870-1871, from the perspective of the civilian witnesses who lived through it. This rich corpus of material, some of which has never been published before (letters, personal or intimate diaries, memoirs), makes it possible to construct a history of the 1870 war on an individual level, offering a unique vision of a conflict that profoundly challenged French national identity. Drawing on geographical, social and gender variables, this work examines the role of self-writing in the ability to analyse one's own emotions, to cope with the absence of loved ones and concerns about their fate, but also to give an account of the pain of uncertainty in defeat and the transformations wrought in the everyday world, from the home to the nation. The historical survey conducted here goes beyond the strict timeframe of the war and the German occupations (1870-1873) and extends right up to 1914, in order to better grasp the traumatic and post-traumatic nature of these experiences over a long period of time, and to understand how these texts also reveal a moral and identity crisis in France born of the defeat of 1871.

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