Contenu du sommaire : La beauté

We have given up believing in an objective criterion of beauty ; we know that we are now in an age of aesthetic relativism. How have we reached the point where we cannot justify our judgements by a common criterion? Is this new situation a cause for regret? Or should we instead recognize that this not only liberates the diversity of tastes but also gives greater freedom to artistic productions?

For more than two centuries, the symbolic thinking of the Saint-Cyr military school has been enriched by the creations of its officers-in-training, who continue to produce new traditions. Working their way around prohibitions and playing with the rational decisions of their commanders, they constantly fabricate items that inspire the mobilization and cohesion of the successive promotions of the school. Certain of these creations are marvels in themselves.

During the reign of Louis XIV, the role of ships and galleys was as much to radiate the image of the King as to carry out his ambitions of war, possibly even more so. At that time, shipbuilding was characterized by an exceptionally intricate interweaving of art, regal government and military power. The units of the fleet, especially the first-rate ships-of-the-line, were adorned with profuse and exuberant sculpted and painted decorations. However, the decorative aesthetics of this political imagery paid too little attention to the technical requirements of naval warships and weaponry. The King's Navy proclaimed the supremacy of the sovereign without being able to demonstrate this supremacy in the face of the enemy. From the end of the 17th century, the crisis in the combined “aesthetic” and political function of French warships was evident. Galleys were spared from this crisis, because their true mission was to remind common-law convicts and Protestants, by force, that the King was the source of justice and of the “true faith”.

Full armour, the costly defensive equipment of elite noble fighters, above all provided functional protection: it was closely forged to the measurements of its owner and was specially adapted to the high-level (and often fatal) sport of jousting. However, these accoutrements were as much dictated by aesthetic criteria as by defensive necessity, and they evolved with fashions or were blazoned with ornaments manifesting the opulence and taste of the members of the privileged caste that used them. This aspiration to beauty even led to the creation, around 1530, of armour exclusively dedicated to pageantry, transforming the warrior into a heroic figure, with a reputation enhanced by the talent of silversmiths.

The Galerie des Batailles (Gallery of Battles) was established at the wish of Louis-Philippe, who dedicated it in 1837 “to all the glories of France'. With the Romantic movement already in full swing, the Gallery continued to obey the visual and didactic canons of Beauty as theorized in France during the 17th century by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). However, its museographic concept seems to mark both the apotheosis and the final shot of a vision of history and associated aesthetics that was already out of date.

Barracks are not places where you would instinctively seek harmony and beauty. However, some of these buildings escape this rule. You only have to enter any of the quarters of the French Foreign Legion to be convinced. More broadly, military life and the quest for beauty appear in fact to be two mutually complementary human necessities. The place where soldiers live plays a fundamental role in their art of living. The ornaments and embellishments, which are often contributed by the soldiers themselves, represent symbols and myths that profoundly connect with the morale of the troops and even of a city, a region or country. The objects, insignia, words and names engraved on the monuments and walls are also a means of passing memory down through the generations. Finally, the beauty of a barracks building constitutes a part of the symbolism reflecting the solemn commitment of the military.

Chenu-Godefroy, an action photographer specializing in the armed forces and security forces, and author of a famous book on Operation Sentinelle, talks about her work and what, for her, constitutes a beautiful photo.

“You have to know the rotten, because only if you know the night can you appreciate the light,” wrote Ernst Jünger. Operation Sangaris, conducted in the Central African Republic by the French Army, testifies to this contrast between the darkness of violence and the still perceptible signs of a fragile beauty.

In French common parlance, the term “belle bataille”, which literally means beautiful battle, is used to denote confrontations in the political and social domains. This expression is rarely used by people in the military, since they are only too aware that it is an oxymoron. Instead, military professionals insist more on reason, which can give meaning to action and subsequently help to organize resources as a function of the circumstances, and on the simplicity of an idea that can be easily understood, adopted and adapted by all. This logical approach is in fact the means whereby the art of war can be discerned, and it is key to the rapid training and maturing of the army officers who will be called upon to put this art into practice.

In La Nostalgie du front (Nostalgia for the Front), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described the spiritual experience that he underwent as a stretcher-bearer during the Great War. This experience of “beauty” cannot be understood without an effort to imagine how the fighting, the proximity of death and the compassion for his brothers-in-arms only served to intensify and reinforce the mystical life of this man of faith.

Although Marcel Proust (1871–1922 did not fight in the Great War, he compiled a very precise documentation of operations from his copious reading of the press, taking a particularly passionate interest in strategy. In Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way], published in 1920, the hero of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu [translated as “In Search of Lost Time” or “Remembrance of Things Past”] is living in the fictive garrison town of Doncières, where Saint-Loup and his friends develop a theory of the beauty of strategic operations, which will have a strong influence on the literary future of the character, who is destined to become a writer.

Since 2008, Jean-Yves Jouannais, novelist and art critic, has been researching, copying and classifying quotations and all types of images relating to war, in order to constitute an Encyclopédie des Guerres [Encyclopaedia of Wars], which is constantly expanding and which he reads and comments on in public every month. Here, he gives us the entry under “Beauty”.

How do you render a victory beautiful? How do you express greatness and glory? The classical style, as manifested by France's great 17th century dramatists, Corneille and Racine, has specific qualities that are echoed in battlefield reports, all the way from that ‘Grand Siècle” [‘Great Century'], to Churchill. That classical style, which dates back to the famous Veni, Vidi, Vici of Julius Caesar, merits comparison with the style of our own period, which is now more marked by the seal of efficiency, to the detriment of the beautiful.

Contemporary sensibility prevents any possibility of an aesthetic of the phenomenon of war. However, the epic scale of battlefields has its own beauty, which has been felt by military practitioners, artists and writers. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of war can lead people hideously astray, because any glorification of war seems inevitably to bring with it the risk of justifying war's horrors and excesses. To solve this quandary, it would seem that we should not recognize a beauty of war but a beauty in war, as a source of both efficiency and ethics.

By founding the futurist movement in 1909, the writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti aimed to create a new avant-garde culture, as the crowning achievement of Italian Unification [the Risorgimento]. His project was to liberate Italy once and for all from the heritage of Greco-Latin culture and the ideals of the classical world. Convinced that war is a force for rejuvenation and much more powerful than revolutionary movements, he celebrated war in his ‘words in liberty'. He also urged futurist artists to introduce the theme of war in their paintings, and, through his activism, he promoted the entrance of Italy into the First World War. In his futurist manifestos, he celebrated the beauty of war and the aesthetics of battles and bombardments. He considered war to be the most beautiful multi-sensory happening enjoyable by the human mind. During the establishment of the fascist regime, he attempted to reach a compromise between the futurist movement and the new political authority. But he was rejected and marginalized. In stubbornly attaching himself to keeping his futurist movement alive, he then found himself obliged to support the Italian colonialist wars.

It is now generally accepted that National Socialism obtained the adherence and support of the German population through a mixture of seduction and conviction. In terms of seduction, the Nazis deployed a gigantic apparatus for artistic production. For them, art played a major political role. But what was their artistic and aesthetic ideal? What did beauty mean for them?

Man has a reticence to kill. However, this reticence can be reduced or even abolished if the adversary is no longer considered to be a fellow human but ‘the other'. And, if this other can be further reduced to the level of a beast or object, even the most brutal acts become possible. This was the case for the indigenous troops during the Great War

‘God is beautiful, and He loves beauty' This famous aphorism by the Prophet of Islam has always inspired an aesthetic inclination deep in the heart of the metaphysical concerns of Islamic thinkers, philosophers and theologians throughout history. When the believers, together with their political and social leaders, meditated and interiorized this teaching in Islamic contexts, their caliphs and princes built an imperial civilization with palatial architecture. Consequently, the moral decrepitude witnessed in Salafist rigorism and islamist fanaticism represent a tragic reversal of the course of this civilization and of the cultures underpinning it. So, the way out of this crisis will pass via the salvific dimension of ‘beauty regained'. Beauty will mark the way to a living and uplifting spirituality. It will reconnect Islam with humanism and the flourishing of the human subject.

‘The man of science does not study nature because it is useful but because he enjoys it, and he enjoys it because it is beautiful. […] I am not speaking here of the beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances ; not that I do not care for them, far from it, but they have nothing to do with science; what I am referring to is the more intimate beauty that comes from the harmonious ordering of the parts in the whole, which, when perceived and understood, offers deep satisfaction to a pure intelligence.' That is how mathematicians, often considered to be cold and calculating, generally speak of their work in terms of aesthetics, vaunting the beauty of a theorem or the elegance of a proof.

Given that the armed forces are seen mainly as ‘war machines' focused on operational performance, the notion that they can embody a certain form of beauty seems somewhat incongruous. However, in the case of the French Army, the fact that it is steeped—now more than ever—in an ethic founded on scrupulous care for human life and the dignity of man gives it a kind of extra dimension of soul, which, perceptible behind its military power, causes it to radiate an ineffable inner beauty.

Although the underground music scene in the countries of central Europe under Soviet domination initially rejected any political engagement, repression rapidly drove it closer to dissident circles. This music scene undoubtedly played a liberating role in the protest movements of the 1960s and in the period of the final years of communism. To the point that it largely accompanied the liberation movement of 1989.

The introduction of hybrid war, asymmetrical conflicts and the reappearance of ‘high-intensity' warfare remind us that the forms of battle are constantly evolving. However, the common perception of the ‘battlefield', the place where this conflict occurs, seems to have remained entirely unchanged. It oscillates between a glorified image of the field of Mars, with its sacred aura of myths, and total rejection. The idea of a big decisive battle, together with the cardinal figures of heroes, amply contribute to maintaining the first approach. The second approach, with the advent of mass conflicts, industry, the more recent arrival of sentimentalism and, now, today, robotics, has rejected the man of battle. However, these two visions are not mutually exclusive. This article proposes to study how and to what extent these two perceptions of the battlefield have been reproduced in literature.

We have given up believing in an objective criterion of beauty; we know that we are now in an age of aesthetic relativism. How have we reached the point where we cannot justify our judgements by a common criterion? Is this new situation a cause for regret? Or should we instead recognize that this not only liberates the diversity of tastes but also gives greater freedom to artistic productions?

Contemporary sensibility prevents any possibility of an aesthetic of the phenomenon of war. However, the epic scale of battlefields has its own beauty, which has been felt by military practitioners, artists and writers. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of war can lead people hideously astray, because any glorification of war seems inevitably to bring with it the risk of justifying war's horrors and excesses. To solve this quandary, it would seem that we should not recognize a beauty of war but a beauty in war, as a source of both efficiency and ethics.