The Moral Disarmament of France

The Moral Disarmament of France
Author: Mona L. Siegel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2004-12-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780521839006

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Peace on Our Terms

Peace on Our Terms
Author: Mona L. Siegel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231551185

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and revolutionary: enduring peace depended as much on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people—regardless of sex, race, class, or creed—as on respect for the sovereignty of independent states. Peace on Our Terms follows dozens of remarkable women from Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia as they crossed oceans and continents; commanded meeting halls in Paris, Zurich, and Washington; and marched in the streets of Cairo and Beijing. Mona L. Siegel’s sweeping global account of international organizing highlights how Egyptian and Chinese nationalists, Western and Japanese labor feminists, white Western suffragists, and African American civil rights advocates worked in tandem to advance women’s rights. Despite significant resistance, these pathbreaking women left their mark on emerging democratic constitutions and new institutions of global governance. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace on Our Terms is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of women’s activism to the Paris Peace Conference and the critical diplomatic events of 1919. Siegel tells the timely story of how female activists transformed women’s rights into a global rallying cry, laying a foundation for generations to come.

The Extreme Right in Interwar France

The Extreme Right in Interwar France
Author: Samuel Kalman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351889907

Historians of the French extreme right frequently denote the existence of a strong xenophobic and nationalist tradition dating from the 1880s, a perpetual anti-republicanism which pervaded twentieth-century political discourse. Much attention is habitually paid to the interwar era, deemed the zenith of this success, when the leagues attracted hundreds of thousands of members and enjoyed significant political acclaim. Most works on the subject speak of 'the French right' or 'French fascism', presenting compendia of figures and organizations, from the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s through the notorious Vichy regime, the authoritarian construct which emerged following the defeat to Nazi Germany in June 1940. However, historians rarely discuss the programmatic elements of extreme right-wing doctrine, which demanded the eradication of parliamentary democracy and the transformation of the nation and state according to group principles. Instead, most detail the organization and membership of various organizations, and often recount their quotidian activities as political actors within (and in opposition to) the Third Republic. This book offers a new interpretation of the extreme right in interwar French politics, focusing upon the largest and most influential such groups in 1920s and 1930s, the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu. It explores their designs for extensive political, economic, and social renewal, a project that commanded significant attention from the leadership and rank-and-file of both organizations, providing the overarching goal behind their aspiration to power. The book examines five components of these efforts: A renewal of politics and government, the establishment of a new economic order, a revaluation of gender and familial relations, the role of youth in the new socio-political construct, and the politics of exclusion inherent in every facet of Faisceau and CDF doctrine. In so doing it contributes to a historical understanding of the programmatic elements of the interwar extreme-right, while simultaneously situating its most prominent exponents within their broader historical context.

The Disarmament of Hatred

The Disarmament of Hatred
Author: G. Barry
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 023037333X

Documenting an audacious Franco-German movement for moral disarmament, instigated in 1921 by war veteran and French Catholic politician Marc Sangnier, in this transnational study Gearóid Barry examines the European resonance of Sangnier's Peace Congresses and their political and religious ecumenism within France in the era of two World Wars.

Strange Victory

Strange Victory
Author: Ernest R. May
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1466894288

Ernest R. May's Strange Victory presents a dramatic narrative-and reinterpretation-of Germany's six-week campaign that swept the Wehrmacht to Paris in spring 1940. Before the Nazis killed him for his work in the French Resistance, the great historian Marc Bloch wrote a famous short book, Strange Defeat, about the treatment of his nation at the hands of an enemy the French had believed they could easily dispose of. In Strange Victory, the distinguished American historian Ernest R. May asks the opposite question: How was it that Hitler and his generals managed this swift conquest, considering that France and its allies were superior in every measurable dimension and considering the Germans' own skepticism about their chances? Strange Victory is a riveting narrative of those six crucial weeks in the spring of 1940, weaving together the decisions made by the high commands with the welter of confused responses from exhausted and ill-informed, or ill-advised, officers in the field. Why did Hitler want to turn against France at just this moment, and why were his poor judgment and inadequate intelligence about the Allies nonetheless correct? Why didn't France take the offensive when it might have led to victory? What explains France's failure to detect and respond to Germany's attack plan? It is May's contention that in the future, nations might suffer strange defeats of their own if they do not learn from their predecessors' mistakes in judgment.

The French Historical Narrative and the Fall of France

The French Historical Narrative and the Fall of France
Author: Christine Ann Evans
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793646678

The fall of France in June 1940, La Débâcle, posed a challenge to France's understanding of itself. Could the existing “sacred” narrative of French history established by the Third Republic hold in the face of the defeat of France’s military and political systems, both built upon its foundations? The French Historical Narrative and the Fall of France: Simone Weil and her Contemporaries Face the Debacle focuses on assessments of the Debacle and places Simone Weil's writings of 1938 to 1943 within this continuum. This study recreates the debate in those fraught years to posit a “horizon of expectations” within which to place and better appreciate Simone Weil’s writing of the period, far reaching and bold but hardly “crazy” (as De Gaulle is said to have characterized her ideas).

Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939

Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939
Author: Rebecca Scales
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2016-02-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107108675

Explores how radio broadcasting and the emerging audio culture transformed the dynamics of French politics during the tumultuous interwar decades.

Women and the Politics of Education in Third Republic France

Women and the Politics of Education in Third Republic France
Author: Linda L. Clark
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2023
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0197632866

In Third Republic France (1870-1940), the directrice of a normal school (école normale) for training women teachers was the most important woman representative of public primary education in each department. Her role was central to the republican educational project designed to bolster the establishment of a stable democracy after the Franco-Prussian War. The laicization of public education figured prominently in republican efforts to combat the old alliance of "throne and altar" favoring monarchy and religious instruction in public schools. Although laymen taught most boys in public schools by 1870, many nuns staffed separate girls' public schools. Thus an 1879 law mandated new departmental normal schools to train lay women teachers. This study of 313 normal school directrices between 1879 and 1940, an important group of professional women not previously studied, explores the challenges they encountered and their responses. Often the target of political hostility, they defended republican schooling as they interacted with local notables and authorities. In an educational system divided by social class as well as by gender, they trained teachers for "children of the people" attending free primary schools, separate from the elite and less numerous secondary schools. Directrices were expected to be role models for women teachers and to emphasize women's duties as wives and mothers, yet their careers exemplified an alternative to domesticity at a time of much debate about women's appropriate roles. Eventually some pushed against the boundaries of prevailing gender norms as they also joined professional, philanthropic, and feminist associations and sometimes publicly supported women's suffrage. Women and the Politics of Education in Third Republic France deftly examines the history of these women and the nature of their contributions to French society.

Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals and Society
Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2012-03-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0465031102

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.