51

During the First World War, the millions of letters exchanged between mobilized French soldiers and their spouses enable us to observe at close quarters their conjugal relations: in the circumstances of the time, relationships within couples might be created, transformed, or come to an end. These letters are key primary sources for investigating the role of emotions in the forging of new relationships maintained at a distance. This article explores the gender of the feelings expressed in these distant relationships, and is guided by three principal aims: to enquire whether men’s and women’s emotions were expressed similarly or differently; to estimate the degree to which the war – a challenge to the love between separated couples – perturbed the expression of feelings or on the contrary reinvented them; and lastly to understand how feelings, whether expressed or silenced in epistolary relationships, contributed to the redistribution of the gender roles imposed from the very beginning of the war.