Although I have largely put the chapters on Emile Benveniste in my Indo-European thought project aside for the moment, I am still thinking a bit about what remains an unanswered question – what did Benveniste do between the time he was called up in September 1939 and his capture by German forces in June 1940? In the biographical accounts I’ve seen, it’s really just a blank. Georges Redard says the following:

He no doubt enlisted right at the start, but we do not know his whereabouts during the ‘Phoney War’ nor when the Western front is pushed back from the Somme to the Aisne (5–9 June 1940). Combat with Germany ended on 22 June. From the 20^th, Benveniste was a prisoner in Frontstalag 190, in the Ardennes (in Benveniste, Last Lectures, 135).

There are some indications in his military record in the Collège de France archives, partly gathered by Redard, but these just give the companies he was in, training and then capture. Until May-June 1940 he was probably sitting around doing not much. For that period there is certainly nothing like the extensive account we have from Jean-Paul Sartre, whose War Diaries have been published. Even the most extensive Benveniste correspondence I’ve seen has a gap from September 1939 to late 1944. It’s not clear if he actually was in battle at all – some French troops surrendered after Marshall Pétain’s call for an armistice without firing a shot.

So I went looking for accounts of the battle of France which I thought might be helpful to get a general sense, and, perhaps, even give details of what the units Benveniste was with actually did. I knew that as a second-class soldier, it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to get a specific indication. 

Why was Benveniste a lowly soldier rather than an officer, as might have been expected given his education? Many other French academics served as regular soldiers having refused to do the officer training between the wars, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. Georges Canguilhem reportedly dropped a machine-gun tripod on an officer’s foot to get out of his service. Pacifism was important in this period, and a reason for some of these refusals. I don’t know for sure in Benveniste’s case. We do know that while he had publicly opposed the Rif war he did his military service in Morocco in 1926-27.

In the accounts I’ve seen so far I have not found the right level of detail. There are accounts of the French army in the war in more general studies of the infantry, like my former colleague Anthony King’s The Combat Soldier. There are broader studies of the French war, such as Douglas Porch’s two-volume study, which I’ve mentioned here before, of which the first volume Defeat and Division: France at War 1939-1942 has some good high-level discussion. There are older works on French military planning, like Eugenia C. Kiesling, Arming Against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military Planning, and military history of a key battle in Robert A. Doughty, The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940. Julian Jackson and Robert Paxton have several useful studies on the broader context. On the wider intellectual setting, there are several good accounts, but I’ve particularly appreciated Gisèle Sapiro’s The French Writers’ War, 1940-1953.

The closest I have found to what I’m looking for as a day-to-day account is Guy Chapman, Why France Collapsed, but it’s over fifty years old, and was written before archives were opened up or the completion of Les grandes unités françaises. I still have to follow up on another reference – Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940, which was also published in the late 1960s. Something like these, but making use of the new sources would be really valuable.

Benveniste’s time as a prisoner is another big gap in the record, and there is certainly nothing like Louis Althusser’s Journal de captivité Stalag XA 1940-1945. I know a bit about the camp Benveniste was in, but his prisoner record is missing from the Archives nationales – or at least, it’s not in the sequence where I expected it. Benveniste’s escape to Switzerland is better documented, with a lot of relevant material in Paris, though there are still archives I want to look at in Switzerland. Alessandro Chidichimo and Irène Fenoglio have done some useful work on this, and alerted me to useful sources, and there are older accounts by Redard and Françoise Bader.

If Benveniste had been an officer, then it might be worth doing a bit of digging at the military archives at the Château de Vincennes, including the unfortunately acronymized SHAT (Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre). It’s not that I’m adverse to the archival hard work, just I know that once I start I often don’t know when or where to stop. But for a simple infantryman I’m not sure where I would even begin, and it feels like a rather large rabbit-hole which might well lead nowhere. 

I know more about this time period than any published source I’ve seen, which definitely feels like progress. But I still feel there is more to be uncovered.