André Jeunet World War I photographs
Collection
Identifier: 2004_003-UA
This collection consists of 210 images of French soldier André Jeunet (1896-1979), fellow soldiers, and civilians during World War I. Most of the photographs were taken by Jeunet while he was serving in northeastern France (1915-1917) and the Balkans (1917-1918).
The André Jeunet World War I Negatives collection in the University of Louisville Photographic Archives is physically comprised of two accessions. The first (ULPA 2004.003) contains 205 flexible film negatives (1 5/8 x 2 ½ inches each) with images that Jeunet captured using a Kodak vest pocket camera and 127 film. The second accession (ULPA 2010.003) consists of scans of three photographic prints and three postcards which Jeunet saved from his military days. One is a formal portrait taken at "Grand Magasins du Louvre" in 1916. Another print (ULPA 2010.003.002) was made from a negative in the first collection (ULPA 2004.003.044) and inscribed by Jeunet. The exact origin of the other four photographs is not known, but three were taken during his initial military training and printed as postcards, presumably for mailing to loved ones.
Both accessions were donated to the University of Louisville by Cécile Jeunet Spalding so that they would be preserved for use by future students of history. Mrs. Spalding also provided the university with translated excerpts from both a diary that Jeunet kept during World War I and letters he sent to his family.
This collection is open to the public.
Copyright has been transferred to the University of Louisville; please consult a reference archivist for more information.
210 photographs (3 boxes)
André Jeunet was born in Bourg-la-Reine, a suburb south of Paris, on September 20, 1896. He was drafted into the French army when he was eighteen years old and served as a Simple Soldat from March 1915 to April 1919. Jeunet trained in Autun and, even though he was an avowed pacifist, fought in the trenches with the 139e Régiment d’Infanterie at Somme, Verdun, and Chaulnes in France, and later with the 34e Régiment d’Infanterie Coloniale near Monastir in the Balkans.
After World War I, Jeunet worked as an architect and married Aimée Révil-Signorat with whom he had one child, Cécile, born in 1924. When Cécile was a teenager, Jeunet was drafted back into the French army serving once again as a Simple Soldat, this time in World War II. Near the end of that war, Cécile met her future husband, Louisville, Kentucky native Richard Spalding, stationed at Aèrodrôme Farman near Versailles, servicing SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). The couple reunited in 1948 and married in Paris. In 1949, they moved to Louisville, where Spalding became a professor of music at the University of Louisville. André and Aimée Jeunet visited the Spaldings in Louisville in 1951 and officially immigrated to the United States in 1958. André continued his architectural career with several Louisville firms, including Joseph & Joseph. He died in Louisville on September 3, 1979, and his wife passed away in 1990.
Part of the University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections Repository