Dear Colleague,

This is the second in a series of LSS Newsletters in which I will provide extracts from Richard Koenigsberg's online publications--to stimulate your own thinking about the issues he discusses. 

This issue presents a passage from AZTEC WARRIORS/WESTERN SOLDIERS: The Body Politic Feeds Upon Human Bodies.

Please click the link above to read the entire paper. Please read the passage below for the essence of Koenigsberg's hypothesis.

Thanks very much,
Mary Helen Guider Shaw

The body politic feeds upon human bodies

Based on analysis of the letters of French soldiers who fought in the First World War, historian John Horne (in Coetze and Shevin-Coetze, 1995) found that the central theme running through them was the idea of national sacrifice as a source of redemption and renewal.

Shortly before his death, Robert Dubarle wrote of the glorious privilege of “sacrificing oneself, voluntarily.” Looking at the warriors who had fallen around him, French soldier J. Saleilles wondered whether the “gift of their blood” was not the supernatural source of the “renewal of life that must be given to our country.”

F. Belmont—moved by attending a field mass with 500 soldiers—wrote that the war, like all great sacrifices “at least has a purifying role.” It was by virtue of sacrifice and suffering that regeneration occurred. A Catholic priest serving as an ambulance man on the Western Front expressed a similar vision: “We await the decisive all-out assault. So many sacrifices! May they help bring the resurrection of a greater, more beautiful and truly Christian France.”

Whence came the conviction that dead soldiers constituted the source of the renewal of the life of France? Why would the sacrifice and suffering of French soldiers bring about the regeneration of France?

Perhaps the metaphor of the soldier’s death as a “gift of love” provides a clue. This metaphor conveys the idea of death in battle as a transfusion—the moment at which blood contained within the body of the soldier passes or flows into the body politic—functioning to energize the latter and keep it alive.

Best regards,

Mary Helen (MHGS)