ABSTRACT
The four years of the Great War were closely linked, as far as mentalités are concerned, with the prewar period; and yet they are also distinct from it in that the conflict gave rise to a specific ‘wartime culture’. From 1914, therefore, the world became a quite different place. This peculiarity of the subject in hand has its advantages-it allows certain hypotheses concerning the prewar period to be tested, and some of the answers already formulated to be elaborated. War constitutes a test of the truth: it illuminates, sometimes very starkly, various phenomena of opinion that may be difficult to discern in peace time. But one point for which it is particularly helpful to use the prism provided by the war (and more particularly that of soldiers at war) is that of the degree to which French opinion was saturated by the concept of nationalism during the years preceding the conflict.
