The Poppy: a Cultural History from Ancient Egypt to Flanders Fields to Afghanistan by Nicholas J. Saunders

Author:Nicholas J. Saunders [Saunders, Nicholas J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Flanders Fields, Ancient Egypt, The Opium Wars, First World War, Remembrance Day, Royal British Legion, American Civil War, Afghanistan, Iconic flowers
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Anna Guérin and her French war widows sold millions of Remembrance Poppies around the world during the early 1920s. The money raised transformed the lives of families and orphans in the devastated battlefields. Yet, for all Guérin’s success, the French did not embrace the poppy as the singular symbol of the war dead. The reason was simple. In France, luxuriant garlands of colourful, sweet-scented blooms had ‌long been displayed at funerals.64 These were unlikely to be displaced by the flimsy, odourless and weed-like corn poppy. And if any single flower in French culture is associated with death, tombs and remembrance, it is the chrysanthemum, the ‘golden flower’, which blossoms in the autumn, the time when death, in nature, is near. Each year, chrysanthemums adorn French cemeteries on ‌All Saints’ Day, 1 November65 – and very few of the war dead would not be considered to be among our most hallowed souls.

The association of the chrysanthemum with the dead is seen across Catholic Europe, from France ‌to Italy to southern Germany.66 These nations’ Protestant neighbours did not share such deathly associations with the autumnal flower, not least because the tradition of laying cut flowers on graves emerged in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, ‌after the Church had divided.67 While flowers were displayed at their funerals, the English, despite the Victorian ‘language of flowers’, did not have a specific bloom tied to spirituality and the dead; the cypress tree held that honour. Thus, the poppy was perfectly placed to fill this void in Britain. For the Catholic French, however, the religious connotations of flowers were so deeply embedded in the national psyche that even the trauma of the First World War could not dislodge them.

While the poppy has no sentimental attachments and is devoid of any spiritual feelings for the French people, it has become a highly visible badge of remembrance for British and Commonwealth visitors to the Somme, and a commercially valuable logo for the local tourist economy. This may have influenced Pascal Truffaut’s idea of a poppy-sown commemorative corridor from Calais to the battlefields, which was described in the first pages of this book.

The French possess their own distinctive flower to commemorate their war dead, the blue cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), which was adopted unofficially during the Great War as its colour matched the spotless uniforms of raw recruits newly arrived at the front. Those already in the trenches had long since seen their clothing stained by mud and filth, and so the young soldiers soon became known as les Bleuets (‘the blues’). During and after the war, two women working at the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris organised a workshop where disabled French soldiers could make cloth versions of the cornflower to commemorate the dead and help support themselves financially. The cornflower became the official French ‌flower of remembrance in 1920.68

In 2008, the towns and villages of northern France celebrated the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War with a profusion of floral displays. The ‘Campaign

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