[The cassocks under fire: priests in the health service during the World War I, supports and criticism from witnesses and press at the time].
The anticlerical Third Republic posted priests and monks to stretcher-bearer groups linked either to a division or an Army Corps. The 1889 law is known as the "rucksack priest law" appointed priests in the Military Health Service. On the opposite, the 1905 law dispatched the youngest priests and monks in fighting units. As soon as October 1914, Frederic Masson had championed priests employed as male nurses and stretcher-bearers. Their role was not easy, especially in the evacuation or temporary hospitals. The Minister of Defence Alexandre Millernd was obliged to justify their role in November 1914. Gradually without official and consistent allocations the priests acquired an unavoidable role in the army as long as sufferings took a firm hold. Among the Red Cross organisations their role was important and since August 1914 Albert de Mun had instituted a bureau of priests inside the Red Cross offices. As the war lasted priests were more and more esteemed but attacked by a harsh anticlericalism in 1916 and 1917. Even if the priests and monks were suffering so many losses their appointments as male nurses or stretcher-bearers appeared as advantages for the anticlerical opinion. In February 1916, at the beginning of the Battle of Verdun, newspapers as the Socialist Journal l'Humanité or the extreme left wing journal La Lanterne denounced priests supposedly shielded in the Military Health Service. In November 1916, the anticlerical and radical Deputy Sixte-Quenin proposed a bill to allocate every priest as a fighter according to republican equality. However, their role in such a bloody conflict was so significant that a Military Chaplainry was created and was not challenged after the war.
Marc
Bernard
B
D002977:Clergy; D005602:France; D049673:History, 20th Century; D008887:Military Medicine; D014857:Warfare
Les soutanes sous la mitraille. Les prêtres dans le service de santé pendant la première guerre mondiale. Soutiens et critiques selon les témoins et la presse de l'époque.