Bernhardt, Sarah

By Emmanuelle Loubat

1914-1918 Online

Internal Encyclopedia of the First World War

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence

(Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

- 1 During World War One

- 2 At the Front

- 3 In the United States

- Notes

- Selected Bibliography

- Citation

During World War One

In 1914, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was a world-famous actress who had performed in public and private theatres in Paris, managed several of them and toured extensively. Her “golden voice”[1], as Victor Hugo (1802-1885) termed it, still served her but, at the age of seventy, she was in poor health (she eventually died of kidney failure) and gangrene had developed in one of her legs (it was amputated in 1915).

After spending the first part of the war resting at her property in Belle-Isle, she resumed acting. In Mères françaises - directed by Louis Mercanton (1879-1932), released in 1917- she played a mother who lost her son in the trenches. The movie was filmed at the front and endorsed by the Ministry of War. She also premiered two plays with a patriotic content: Les cathédrales (1915) and Du théâtre au champ d’honneur (1916).

At the Front

As proof of her commitment to the patriotic cause, not only did Bernhardt appear in artistic productions that celebrated French heroism but she performed for soldiers at the front in 1916. Although witnesses attested to the rousing power of her voice, a fundamental disconnect between the actress and her public remained. She once declared after a performance with the Théâtre aux Armées, “I would have wanted to die there, among them, so fraternal, so heroic, so gay, so joyous, so simply French!” but soldiers were dismissive of the moral lessons dispensed by the rear and mocked the vaunted courage of civilian actors.[2]

In the United States

Between September 1916 and November 1918, Bernhardt toured the United States. Her motivations for this trip were not just financial: she was campaigning to convince the United States to enter the war.

Bernhardt maintained her activity after the war. Despite her declining popularity and deteriorating health, she continued to perform, gave public lectures and wrote novels.

Emmanuelle Loubat, Cardiff University

Section Editor : Emmanuelle Cronier

Notes

1. ↑ Taranow, Gerda: Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend, Princeton 1972, p. 25.

2. ↑ Winograd, Annabelle: Ten Minutes of Anthrax!: Some Notes on French Combatant Trench Scripts of the First World War, in: Theater 31/1 (2001), pp. 61-62.

Citation

Loubat, Emmanuelle: Bernhardt, Sarah , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10582.

License

This text is licensed under Creative Commmons Licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany-CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

During World War One

At the Front

In the United States

Selected Bibliography

Citation

Content