The American and Canadian wartime godmothers of Belgian soldiers. Joseph de Dorlodot’s Correspondence and Documentation Office (1915-1919)

ABSTRACT

Lieutenant Joseph de Dorlodot (1871–1941), a Belgian aristocrat and philanthropist, was the Director of the Belgian Correspondence and Documentation Office in Folkestone, England. This article uses the ‘Joseph de Dorlodot’ archive collection (Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique, Bruxelles) to investigate the emotional support provided by the Correspondence Office during the First World War. Throughout the conflict, its mission was to facilitate the sending of mail between Belgians, to provide them with legal advice and to offer humanitarian assistance to those who were in material and emotional distress. This was particularly the case of soldiers at the front. In the spring of 1916, the Office set up a mail system between Belgian soldiers and wartime godmothers – ‘marraines’ – from Canada and the USA. Lieutenant de Dorlodot imposed a precise moral and political framework for correspondence, where an intimate space was created in order to strengthen patriotic sentiment on the one hand, and control masculinities and femininities on the other. Through their letter exchanges with soldiers, godmothers participated in the war effort by bringing emotional reinforcement to the front line, from their homes, through a type of caring work often ignored or at least disconnected from any notion of work in the history of the Great War.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender history
• history of emotions
• humanitarian relief
• marraines de guerre
• Belgium
• Bureau de Correspondance et de Documentation

Acknowledgments

The Mimosa Funds of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva greatly contributed to this article by financing my stay in Belgium for my doctoral research. I am extremely grateful to Pierre-Alain Tallier, who kindly allowed me to consult the “Joseph de Dorlodot” collection in the Archives Générales du Royaume de Belgique during August 2019. I am also thankful to all of the staff and especially Naima Ferrouj for her kindness. I would also like to show my gratitude to Dolores Martín-Moruno for her insight and expertise that greatly assisted this research. Many thanks to Bryony White for her translation and great professionalism. Thanks to the two peer reviewers, for their valuable theoretical advice, reading tips, as well as their many questions that will enrich my research over the long term. I would also like to thank here the Institute for Ethics, History and Humanities and the Institute for Gender Studies (University of Geneva, Switzerland) for their support. Finally, I became a godmother myself while writing this article – Lucile this paper is for you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This Office, in French ‘le Bureau de Correspondance et de Documentation’, would be known by several names throughout the war. Pierre-Alain Tallier has created an inventory of a certain number of these names: ‘Service de correspondance et de documentation de l’Armée belge’ (The Belgian Army Correspondence and Documentation Service); ‘Services de correspondance et de documentation de l’Armée belge à Folkestone’ (The Belgian Army Correspondence and Documentation Service in Folkestone); ‘Service de renseignements et de documentation’ (Information and Documentation Service); ‘Service de correspondance et de renseignement’ (Correspondence and Information Service); ‘Service de documentation et de correspondance militaire belge’ (The Belgian Military Documentation and Correspondence Service); ‘Bureau de censure et de correspondance’ (Censorship and Correspondence Office); ‘Bureau de correspondance belge’ (Belgian Correspondence Office); ‘Bureau de correspondance et de documentation’ (Correspondence and Documentation Office) (2018, 61).

2. Most of the archives mentioned in this article are from the de Dorlodot collection and were consulted at the Archives Générales du Royaume, in Brussels, Belgium in August 2019. This collection is still being inventoried and consists of correspondence related to the Belgian Correspondence and Documentation Office of which Joseph de Dorlodot was the director. The archives from this collection are mostly written in French. The quotations used for this article have been translated from French into English by Bryony White (as well as the rest of the article). A footnote will be used to indicate where archives are in English, as in the case of this newspaper article.

3. Wartime godmothers are better known in French as ‘marraines de guerre’. For the sake of clarity in this article and since they are indiscriminately called either godmother, or ‘marraine’ in the de Dorlodot archives, we will use the English denomination ‘godmother’ here.

4. For the study of the emotions of humanitarian actors during the Great War, refer to Cédric Cotter (2016), « ‘Il faudrait avoir un cœur de pierre pour ne pas souffrir avec ceux qui souffrent’: émotions et action humanitaire en Suisse pendant la Grande Guerre », in Revue Suisse d’Histoire, vol. 66, n°1, April 2016, p. 1–18.

5. Quotation originally in English.

6. The oldest godmother that I could localize was 86 years old and the youngest just six-years-old!

7. Quotation originally in English.

8. Quotation originally in English.

9. Quotation originally in English.

10. Believe me my friends, a godmother is strength and sweetness. And I will not surprise her I hope, if I confess that in my heart blooms, A feeling as tender as it is sincere which will tell her: ‘My Queen’ in two words.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie Leyder

Marie Leyder is a Doctoral Candidate at iEH2/Institut des Etudes Genre, Université de Genève. She holds a Master in Modern Languages and Literatures from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and an Erasmus Mundus Master in Gender Studies from the Universities of Hull and Granada. Since March 2018, she is part of Dolores Martin-Moruno’s FNS project, ‘“Those Women who performed Humanitarian Action: a Gendered History of Compassion from the Franco-Prussian War to WWII”’. Her PhD project focuses on examining women humanitarians’ experiences during WWI on the Yser front through an analysis of different sources such as diaries, letters and photographs. In particular, she explores the emotional work carried out by Red Cross nurses and ‘marraines de guerre’ (wartime godmothers).