Léonce Perret directed several pratriotic films for Gaumont, among them La Voix de la France (1914), Françaises Veillez! (1915), Une page de gloire (1915), Marraines de France, Les Poilus de la revanche and Debout les morts (all in 1916). Laurent Véray remarked that the director often put female figures at the center, women “that do not ressemble the heroines of popular melodrama nor the intrepid adventuresses like athletic Josette Andriot or sensual Musidora. They are ordinary women, usually of the lower classes, and war has disrupted their lives”. The Marraines (godmothers) de France knit socks and write letters to the soldiers, and the mother in Une Page de gloire saves the flag of the regiment and wraps it around her baby, but there is a limit to what patriotisme can accomplish, and Perret shows it in L’Angélus de Victoire. The boy is drafted and dies in the war, the girl goes out of her mind.

Mariann Lewinsky