3

In the work of Nietzsche, one can find definitions of “culture” that shed light on the notion of a “culture of war” employed by some historians. New values were necessarily born on the front, and some soldiers took away from their terrible and traumatising experience a “truth” that was difficult to transmit afterward to their compatriots: they continued to see in the sacrifice of their comrades a reflection of “the ascetic ideal”. For his part, Nietzsche forcefully condemns the ascetic ideal; he seeks to reveal a harmfulness that, in his eyes, endangered the “becoming”. Relying particularly upon the writings of Georges Bernanos, Ernst Jünger, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we see that this was not the case, and that the opposite was in fact true.