ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the collaborations of Paul Groussac (1848-1929) in Le Courrier de la Plata, the main newspaper of the French community in Argentina, during the years of the Great War. In this new incursion into the French ethnic press, Groussac published more than sixty articles dedicated to several topics that, together with his mailing and other materials from his personal and institutional archive, constitute the main sources of this work. Because of his double status as a French citizen nationalized Argentine but also as a civil servant of a neutral State in the war, the articles of Groussac in Le Courrier de la Plata are marked by a tension between the duties of neutrality and his open commitment to the cause of France. However, when they dialogue with the intellectual and journalistic itinerary of the president of the National Library, these interventions in the ethnic press reveal not only an active reception of the French “culture of war” in the River Plate but also the updating of a series of idiosyncratic themes of Groussac’s production, such as the question of alien status and anti-Americanism.
Keywords
Paul Groussac; Great War; French press; Le Courrier de la Plata; Buenos Aires