"Wartime Europe through the eyes of Argentine war correspondents"

MARÍA INÉS TATO

París

Conferencia; Colloque International Altérités en guerre. La Grande Guerre comme moment interculturel ? / International Conference Encountering the Other in Wartime: The Great War as an intercultural moment?; 2013

International Society for First World War Studies

The First World War represented a civilizatory crisis that called into question the values and certitudes of the European society of the belle époque. Its impact highly exceeded the setting of the Old Continent, and also reached to the Latin American states, which since their independence had built their national identity on the base of the appropriation and resignification of European cultural models, different to the Spanish one. The Latin American intellectual field was deeply shaken by the crisis originated in the Great War, and several of its exponents started to keep a critical distance from the European culture -judging that it had finished its cycle of glory to enter its phase of decadence-, and looking for new cultural alternatives.                   This paper intends to analyse some understandings of the wartime crisis and to assess the effects of the war on the image of European civilization dominant among Argentine cultural elites. We will consider the war correspondents as cultural mediators, due to their condition of privileged witnesses of the experiences of the battlefields and the internal front efforts, and for the key role that they played in the interpretation of the conflict and in its circulation in Argentine public opinion as a whole. The relatively new figure of the war correspondent was adopted on a massive scale during the First World War. Argentine newspapers and magazines of great distribution throughout the country had several war correspondents. Even when the periodical publications often included contributions of European journalists who wrote for different newspapers, they also sent Argentinian correspondents to Europe, who covered the military events from a local analytical stance. We will consider here the articles published by the intellectuals Roberto J. Payró and Juan José de Soiza Reilly.