“War is the most important collective experience that an individual can go through”, dialogue between Dorothée Olliéric and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau

A year of war seems like a long time to us. Is it based on your knowledge and experience of war?

Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau Contrary to popular belief, historians do not deal with the past, but with the time. I am very struck by the way in which we apprehend the time of this conflict, I mean the time lived, experienced, “affected”, charged with our affects. If the denial of war was lifted on February 24, 2022, there was, I believe, a second line of denial, that of the long war. Look at the hopes we placed in a quick ceasefire, for example. As if, in history, we had often seen a battle corps on the offensive stop suddenly! We have done and continue to do like the contemporaries of the Great War: we refuse to consider the long war. We live as if the war could end in two months. And it is a way of accepting its extension. Remember that in August 1914 we were sure we would be done by Christmas. If we had told the decision-makers that we were leaving for four and a half years of war, they would have recoiled in horror.

The era of war: where is the Ukrainian conflict heading?

Dorothée Ollieric Today, many Ukrainians have accepted the idea of ​​a long war, which was indeed not at all the case at the start. I experienced the denial of the war on the spot, in kyiv, where I had arrived before its outbreak. Until the last moment, people continued to live normally. In