Conference Agenda

A box of ministerial papers at the French Archives Nationales, labelled “Political agitation in the guise of religion,” contains press cuttings—surveillance—on 1890s processions and other outdoor ceremonies held across France in honour of Joan of Arc. French Catholic processions had long triggered protest and were sometimes prohibited en bloc. However, while legislation of 1802 aimed to accommodate the sensibilities of Jewish or Protestant communities living alongside a majority of Catholics, in practice, religious tensions were outweighed by political ones.

A common form of political protest was to drown out Catholic processional singing by retaliating in kind. Historians Paul d’Hollander and Sudhir Hazareesingh have documented instances of these musical conflicts, but despite their work or that of Alain Corbin on bells, Jacques Cheyronnaud on cantiques, or Julie Deramond on music inspired by Joan of Arc, the specifically sonic aspects of French Catholic soundscapes have yet to receive close scrutiny. Notably, the high sensitivity of contemporary listeners to clashing musical semiotics remains underappreciated. This paper uses close reading of archival, iconographical and press documentation to analyse the complex dynamics of Catholic soundscapes, Republican musical representation, and urban geography, across two French régimes.

I discuss how anticlerical periods (the 1830s; c.1880-1910) were especially fraught, with sonic street battles of psalms and hymns (cantiques) against revolutionary songs. Liturgical processions such as Corpus Christi (the Fête-Dieu) were always tense, but paraliturgical parades such as for Joan of Arc in Orléans show a countervailing determination to blend civic and Catholic, creating symbolic sonic overlap at the very heart of the celebrations. Here, I explore how reconciliation attempts risked failure because of changing religious and political landscapes c.1900: Joan’s trajectory towards sainthood, the Separation of Churches and State (1905), and the emergence of a right-wing youth movement weaponizing Catholic street song—explicitly as "political agitation."

I consider two battles on the frontlines of Hungary during the Thirteen Years’ war: the siege of Eger (1596), won by the Ottomans, and the battle of Raab (1598), won by the Habsburgs. Adopting a comparative frame and drawing on fatwas, mandates, songs, visual art, chronicles and Jesuit records, reveals that European and Ottoman adversaries wielded similar sonic strategies in tempore belli.

In the Habsburg–Ottoman battlefields, the stabilizing physical structures and social networks of cities dissolved. Within the reconfigured spaces of war, the role of sound was not only heightened as part of nuanced communication strategies to facilitate survival (Daughtry 2015), but also leveraged to project authority and to harness and channel emotions. In battle encampments on both sides, songs were sung to energize the weary, console the vulnerable, or inspire the timorous. Gunfire and cannon shots, the deafening sounds of Ottoman mehter bands, and the blasting of European trumpets and drums, terrified soldiers in both camps. Prayers and cries of supplication sought divine intervention from God and Allah.

In the aftermath of battle, the nexus of sound and power enabled the conquerors to infuse the terrain with their sonic identity, boosting certain aural practices and silencing others. Ottomans dismantled bells and belfries and replaced them with minarets, gave hutba (sermons) and recited adhān (calls to prayer) in the sultan’s name. Europeans sang the Te Deum laudamus, psalms and songs; they shouted JESUS, pealed bells and fired jubilant artillery salvos. In negotiating surrender, the spoils and booty of war offered a further means of silencing the vanquished. Asserting an oppressive ownership of the enemies’ sound makers—musical instruments, guns, and cannons, be they Ottoman or Habsburg—went hand-in-hand with the sonic imposition of bells or calls to prayer.

This work considers Ottoman and Habsburg sonic strategies within an enlarged early modern Eurasian space (Şahin 2018) and acknowledges the value in “recognizing the sameness of sonic and textual practices across cultures as well as the difference that is more conventionally emphasized.” (Olley 2023)

After experiencing military defeat, being imprisoned, and watching their country fall to enemy occupation in summer 1940, many among the 1.5 million French prisoners of war (POWs) in German captivity did not wish to submit to German authority so easily. For some POWs, music became a way to secretly stand up to their Nazi captors with minimal risk of retribution. Composers like Jean Martinon (1910-1976) wrote coded anti-Nazi and anti-German messages into their compositions, sometimes subtly, other times with shocking brazenness. Music performance, especially the efforts of prisoner-musician Émile Goué (1904-1946), also allowed prisoners to defy their captors by retaining their French culture and pride in the face of a crushing military defeat. Meanwhile, the so-called Vichy government that presided over unoccupied France adopted a policy of collaboration with Germany. Nazi and Vichy oversight organizations controlled the flow of information out of the POW camps, allowing them to promote the idea that the prisoners were relatively happy and well-treated. Vichy propaganda manipulated the public’s view of the prisoner experience through rhetoric that equally presented the POW camps as a sort of summer vacation, suggested that prisoners—detached from their worldly belongings and concerns—achieved enlightenment while imprisoned, and depicted the prisoners as martyrs who suffered for the sins of pre-war Republican France. In occupied Paris, “prisoner concerts,” or performances of music by POW composers, often with participation or financial support from Vichy officials, and the press surrounding them reinforced these contradictory imaginings of POWs. Drawing examples from prisoners’ compositions, letters and other records of life in captivity, and wartime French newspapers, such as L'Information musicale, this paper reveals the paradox of prisoner of war musicians: they both defied Nazi authority through music composition and performance and, by participating (whether willingly or unwillingly) in the collaborationist Vichy government’s propaganda, inadvertently collaborated with the very enemy they tried to resist.