Poilu Léopold Jules Maréchal's Book of Hours of the Great War, Part I: The Manuscript

Le Journal des Tranchées 

Images in This Series Can Be Enlarged
by Clicking on Them

By John Anzalone

In 2010, I acquired at the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris a unique relic of the Great War.  Shown above, Le Journal des Tranchées recounts the war memoirs of a soldier who served on the Oise and the Somme fronts for 18 months (1914–1916). Subsequently, he was transferred to a cartography unit behind the lines, where he served until he was demobilized in early 1919.

In every particular, the journal is a deliberate pastiche of a medieval book of hours. Bound in illustrated, incised calf, the book consists of 46 pages of text in calligraphy, with rubricated letters, 38 facing page 5” x 7” watercolors, and as many cartouche drawings in grey wash. The color plates are bordered in gold leaf; all pages are framed in an elaborate barbed wire border.

Title Page

The manuscript gives little personal information about its author, identified only as L. Maréchal. The colophon, however, informs us that its design, calligraphy, layout and binding were completed on 31 December 1926. The painted title page portrays a ghostly figure emerging from thick black smoke as a banner studded with the names of epic battles of the war unfurls. Rising upward, it remains partly attached to the barbed wire that it has ripped loose from its moorings. 

The image can be read as the memorial acknowledgement of the many sacrifices each named battle represents. But it can also be read as a ghastly parody of victory when we notice the cannons hidden within the shroud and the field of crosses on the devastated, blackened battlefield over which that deathly wraith hovers. A similar ambiguity reappears in both the text and the illustrations, emphasizing that this is a less a work of celebration than of commemoration and somber reflection. The colophon on the final page reveals that the book was completed on 31 December 1926 and is wholly the work of a single individual who identifies himself only as “L. Maréchal, artisan.” It is accompanied by a medallion self-portrait. 

Maréchal's Self-Portrait

A Poilu Emerges from Anonymity

The book provides little personal information about the man but notably, the colophon indicates that more than ten years elapsed between the end of Maréchal’s duty on the front and his completion of this unusual record of it. Exactly who was Maréchal? When and why did he decide to collect in book form the writings and drawings he had made in the trenches? What prompted him to imitate the format and allure of an illuminated book of hours for a war journal? And what were the more salient aspects of his war experiences? 

Despite his authorial identification and the self-portrait, an enigmatic anonymity attaches to Maréchal. Except for his signature and the self-defining reference to him as an “artisan,” the manuscript gives almost no personal information about the man: no mention of any family; no references to his life before the war’s outbreak, and only occasional, brief anecdotes about the comrades in arms he made during their shared hard times. For anyone having a passing familiarity with autobiographical writing of Great War combatants, this near total absence of personal information comes as a surprise.

 What specifics he does provide can be quickly summarized: Maréchal was mobilized on 13 August, 1914 at Sens. With the Battle of the Marne underway, he was sent north with the 168th regiment. It was then divided into smaller units and he was reassigned to the 86th Infantry which was immediately sent due north of Compiègne to the Oise sector, which the Journal describes as “relatively quiet.”  Maréchal was to spend the near entirety of his 18 months of combat service there, billeted in the abandoned stone quarries in Montigny/Machemont. These limestone quarries had supplied stone for Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1860s and were now empty of useable stone. They were vast enough to sleep hundreds of soldiers and were at a very short distance from the front line trenches.  The manuscript provided precious details of what the quarries looked like as the French army invested them once the war went into the trenches.  The watercolor below dated October 15 (1914) shows Maréchal’s unit arriving at the quarries after a long uphill slog. 

Arrival

Illustrated World War One journals are not so rare as one might imagine. Others have come to light, such as Gaston Lavy’s Ma Grande Guerre, published in facsimile by Flammarion in 2004, but Maréchal’s is a unique example employing the form of an illuminated book of hours. Significantly, such depictions of individual war experiences by otherwise anonymous poilus link the pictorial war memoir to the long, distinguished history of the illustrated book in France that had thrived in the nineteenth century and received a new impetus with the coming of the war.  Thanks to new artistic tendencies, innovative printing technologies and the advance of aviation reconnaissance, the Great War stimulated a notable expansion of visual representation. In the quest to represent unprecedented aspects of industrialized warfare, image makers tapped into cubism, war camouflage, and sequential narratives influenced by the nascent cinema. They also injected new vitality into older, traditional forms like the single sheet broadside known as imagerie d’épinal.

But whether they were looking back on the traditions of their craft or forward to newer trends, illustrators were also participating in the historicizing of the war, relating the narratives of 1914-18 to earlier wars and to the history of war imagery itself. Attempts to connect the history of the Great War in real time to the history of French warfare and of France itself abound in WW I illustration.  They participate in the rhetoric of propaganda, of course, but they once again represent an attempt to make sense of  a present many found incomprehensible by reaching back to a seemingly more coherent past. It is this tradition Maréchal has tapped into. His is among the numerous works that allude in both form and substance to the chivalry and panache of the medieval and renaissance periods, and earlier victorious combats in order to assert a noble genealogy for the poilu. The great Books of Hours of the middle ages served Maréchal well, allowing his memorial to echo the solemn, even exalted history of France at its foundation. The choice of this format for his memoir hints as well at his unusual level of education and his cultural fluency, something that could only be confirmed once we had a better sense of his biography.

It took two years of archival digging for that more detailed picture of Maréchal’s life to emerge—and here I wish to acknowledge the collaboration of Bernard Lambot, a former police detective,  and the late Lucette Lambot, a professional archivist, whose dogged pursuit of this elusive man in recruiting station archives across the Ile de France is responsible for all that we are ever likely to know about him. 

On Observation Duty

Léopold Jules Maréchal was born on 21 November, 1882, an only child, who lost his father at the age of 14. In 1902 he had his first, brief experience of military service in the 37th then the 104th infantry regiments before being declared exempt from military service as the only child of a widowed mother. In 1909 he married a teacher named Eugénie Zeckel. His mother died in July of 1914 scant weeks before he was mobilized at the age of 32. A few months later, on 12 December, his wife succumbed to septicemia soon after giving birth to a daughter named Suzanne. This occurred while Maréchal is at the front at Machemont yet he makes no mention of the loss of his wife or the birth of his child in the manuscript. A few years after the end of the Great War, he remarried.  

He exercised the profession of illustrator/engraver throughout his professional life. The quality of his French and the sophistication of several other paintings that have turned up suggest that in some respects he must have received a classical education. Around 1950, the Maréchals retired and moved from Paris to Jouques in the Bouches du Rhône near Marseille. A few now quite elderly inhabitants there still remember the profile of a slightly built gentleman whom people called “le Parisien,” a self-effacing, discrete, even aloof man who spent his time drawing, painting and walking in the countryside. 

Léopold Maréchal died on Christmas day 1964; his wife ten years later on 11 December1974. Upon inheriting her parents’ estate Suzanne Maréchal, who was then living in Africa, entrusted the sale of its contents to a local brocanteur or second hand dealer. As far as we have been able to determine, Le Journal des tranchées disappeared from view with the dispersion of Maréchal’s estate in 1975. We lose track of it there and have no idea of its whereabouts before it came up for auction on Tuesday March 10, 2010. 

Next:  In Part II of this series, to be presented on 28 March 2025, Maréchal's war service with be examined.

About Our Contributor

John Anzalone is Professor of French and Media/Film Studies, Emeritus at the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs NY

Contact John at: janzalon@skidmore.edu