Male Cannon Fodder ot the Agony of Eros
by Daniel Borrillo
Law Professor at Université Paris Nanterre
Photographs by Gerardo Vizmanos
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Since time immemorial, men have been psychologically trained to give their lives for the homeland. As sacrifices to Ares, hundreds of millions of young men have been offered on the altar of heroism. In the Greek world, citizenship was equated with military status. For the Romans, Romulus—the mythical founder of their city and the personification of the ideal citizen—was the son of Mars, the god of war. Throughout the Middle Ages, war was dominated by the figure of the knight and the masculine values associated with it. The Crusades from the year 1000, as well as the Hundred Years’ War and the numerous dynastic and religious conflicts in Europe, provided the recurring backdrop for the sacrifice of millions of men to the nation. The French Revolution, and later all European nations, became entangled in countless armed conflicts. The following centuries were no less dramatic: forty million men gave their lives in the wars of the 20th century, and the 21st century promises to be just as bloody. From Darfur to Syria, from Afghanistan to Guinea, from Mali to the Sahel, wars have never ceased—and neither has the systematic immolation of young men.
Heirs to centuries of armed conflict, men have been shaped according to military needs and have internalized the sacrificial idea of dying for the nation. The patriarchal model—that of the protective father, the citizen-soldier, and the heroic warrior—still demands that boys develop a masculine identity inclined to accept the unacceptable: the confiscation of bodies for war.
In 2022, Zelensky decreed a general military mobilization in response to the Russian invasion that began that very day: since then, Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty have been prohibited from leaving the country. Likewise, Putin announced that same year the forced mobilization of 300,000 reservists (out of a potential 25 million who could be drafted). Military service is mandatory in both Russia and Ukraine for all boys starting at the age of eighteen. This reality is far from unprecedented: in 1914, during the First World War, and in 1939, during the Second, several European countries declared general mobilization, sending hundreds of thousands of young men to the front. Nearly 10 million men lost their lives during the Great War. One and a half million of them were young infantry soldiers. I imagine that among the dead were some of the models painted by Henry Scott Tuke. These adolescent boys, torn from the eternal beauty promised by the British painter, became pitiful scraps of humanity, as attested by the paintings of Otto Dix. During the Second World War, 18 million men died on the battlefield. Boris Vian paid them a moving tribute:
To all the boys
who left with their backpacks
on a misty April morning
I would like to build a monument
to all the boys
who cried with their backpacks
eyes lowered to their sorrows
I would like to build a monument…
The return to a more “classical” form of war highlights the perpetual exposure of male bodies to death. Most of these bodies do not come from the professional army, but from civilians forcibly recruited. Thus, we witness the indecent triumph of Thanatos, God of the underworld, over Eros, the most beautiful of the immortals.
Farewell, love, farewell life, farewell pleasure, farewell desire and seduction… war kills the life drive and the erotic impulse to which all these boys, without exception, should have a right.