ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to examine the connection between war and the sacred in the modern world within a methodological framework informed by both anthropology and history. In the hope to understand how war is lived and perceived by homo religiosus, I will put aside its strategic, political, economic or technological dimensions. As an experience of the limits of humanity, war contains a dimension which is at the same time intense, fascinating and terrible, and therefore contains a sacred or numinous element. The French historian René Rémond observed that war can never be fully accounted in rational terms only, since nothing can possibly justify why an individual would accept the loss of his life. 1 In the modern world, it is the sacrifice for the nation that is often invested with a religious significance, a point I will try to illustrate with the example of the unprecedented mass mobilization in favor of the war that occurred during the Russian-Ottoman conflict of 1876–1878.