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The impact of war on French and German political cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Antoine Prost
Antoine Prost
Affiliation:
University of Paris I
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Extract

I would like to discuss George Mosse's excellent and stimulating book, Fallen soldiers, mainly from a French point of view, and to comment upon some issues about the political and moral consequences of the First World War upon French and German societies.

The core of the question is Mosse's assumption of a strong relationship between the war experience and the emergence of nazism in Germany. Hence, I shall examine first the reasons why, in Mosse's argument, Hitlerism appears as a consequence of the war. Then I ask why such an evolution did not happen in France, although the war experience was quite similar in the two countries.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 209 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Mosse, George L., Fallen soldiers, reshaping the memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

2 Or in some pacifist organizations such as those studied by Ingram, Norman, The politics of dissent. Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Renouvier, Charles, Manuel républicain de l'homme et du citoyen, 1848 présenté par Maurice Agulhon (Paris, 1981), p. 77.Google Scholar

4 This professor was Désiré Nisard, member of the Académie française (1850). During the discussion of his own thesis, Victor Duruy opposed in 1853 the two-ethics stand of Nisard. In 1855, incidents became so frequent during Nisard's lectures that the police put some of the audience under arrest. Fifteen students were sentenced by the court in 1856 in this case. Next year, Nisard was appointed director of the Ecole Normale Superieure. He was dismissed by Duruy, then minister, in 1867.

5 Hence the opposition stressed by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, between France and Germany. From this anthropological point of view, German people are ‘holists’. Cf. Dumont, Louis, ‘Are cultures living beings? German identity in interaction’, Man (N.S.), 21, 587–604CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Essais sur Vindividualism (Paris, 1983).Google Scholar

6 Let me refer to my book, In the wake of war, ‘Les Anciens Combattants–1939’ (Providence/Oxford, 1992), pp. 798ff.Google Scholar

7 Quoted by Jean-Paul Martin, La Ligue de l'enseignement et la République des origines à 1914, Thèse de doctorat, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, 1992. There are many examples of this political and moral attitude in Jacques and Mona OzouFs historical work. See for instance their article ‘Le theme du patriotisme dans les manuels primaires’, Le Mouvement social, XLIX, octobre–décembre 1964, 5–31Google Scholar and their last book, La Re'publique des instituteurs (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar especially ch. 5, on the content of the political culture of the schoolteachers, pp. 103ff.

8 Quoted by Maingueneau, Dominique, Les limes d'ecole de la Re'publique, 1870–1914 (Paris, 1979), pp. 70–1.Google Scholar

9 Prost, , In the wake of war, pp. 100ff.Google Scholar

10 Ibid. p. 101, Ernest Pezet's address to the 1923 national conference of the UNC (Helen Mac Phail translation).

11 Cahiers de I'UF, 15 août 1936. ‘II m'est arrivé […] è moi qui n'ai jamais appliqué un coup de poing à quiconque […] de prendre plaisir à tuer. Lorsque, au cours d'un coup de main, nous rampions vers l'ennemi […] la peur nous tenait aux entrailles, et cependant une force inéluctable nous poussait en avant. Surprendre l'ennemi dans sa tranchée, sauter sur lui, jouir de l'effarement de l'homme qui ne croit pas au diable et qui pourtant le voit tout à coup tomber sur ses épaules! Cette minute barbare, cette minute atroce avait pour nous une saveur unique, un attrait morbide…!

12 La Voix du combattant, 13 Aug. 1932.