The Selling of the Great War

Abstract

Nothing more clearly reveals a nation's character than a crisis. A striking example of this truism is revealed in the way in which the various combatant nations used propaganda in the first World War. Germany tended to see propaganda as a branch of military intelligence. France tended to see it as an arm of the Quai D'Orsay; Great Britain, perhaps reflecting the contemporary prestige of the writer, tended to make it a literary enterprise. As Paul Fussell has observed in The Great War and Modern Memory, the war occurred at a time when the appeal of popular education was at its peak, and when the educative power of classical and English literature was very strong: "The intersection of these two forces, the one 'aristocratic,' the other 'democratic,' established an atmosphere of public respect for literature unique in modern times."1 When the United States entered the war, propaganda was seen in terms of a huge advertising campaign.