| Summary: | Journalists and novelists of the interwar period often compared the
outskirts of Paris, in particular the “zone”, to the battlefields of the
Great War. For literary flâneurs, it was the zone’s topographical or
social elements that were most suggestive of the Front. For avant-
garde writers, the zone confirmed the existence of an unconscious
death drive, originally posited by Freud in an attempt to understand
the blood-letting of 1914-1918. The revolutionary Left was more
concerned with renewing the zone’s pre-war political vocation to
condemn bourgeois militarism and capitalism while energising
the working classes. For a variety of reasons, the zone thus
became a significant site of counter-memory at odds with official
commemorations of the war that tended to glorify the sacrifice of
French soldiers while ignoring their lived experience.
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