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The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme is a significant new volume from Norman Ingram, addressing the history of the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), an organisation founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair and which lay at the very centre of French Republican politics in the era of the two world wars. Ingram posits that the Ligue's inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War was what led to its decline
by 1937, well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940.
As well as developing our understanding of how the issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the LDH from 1914 down to the Second World War, this volume also explores the aetiology of French pacifism, expanding on the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism. It argues that from 1916 onwards, one can see a principled dissent from the Union sacrée war effort that occurred within mainstream French Republicanism and not on the syndicalist or anarchist fringes. Based on
substantial research in a large number of French archives, primarily in the papers of the LDH which were repatriated to France from the former Soviet Union in late 2001, but also on considerable new research in the German archives, the book proposes a new explanatory model to help us understand some of the
choices made in Vichy France, moving beyond the usual triptych of collaboration, resistance or accommodation.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1: Introduction
- Part I: The Great War and All That
- 2: War Origins: The Debate Begins
- 3: The Ramifications of the War Origins Debate: War Aims and Ending the War
- Part II: A la Recherche d'une guerre gagnée
- 4: The Wounds of War (1919-1924): Challenges to Orthodoxy on the War Guilt Question
- 5: Bridge over the Abyss? Talking to the Germans
- 6: Turning the Page? The War Guilt Problem in the Era of Locarno
- Part III: Les Fleurs du mal
- 7: In the Shadow of the Swastika
- 8: 1937, or the Aventine Secession
- 9: Once More with Feeling? The Ligue des droits de l'homme and the Slide into War
- 10: When all is said and done: en guise de conclusion
About the author
Norman Ingram is Professor of Modern French History at Concordia University in Montreal and has held Visiting Fellowships at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of St Andrews. He has served as Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies in the United States. Although he is principally known for his first book,
The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919-1939 (1991 and 2011), he has published widely in English and French in a wide number of international scholarly venues.
Summary
The papers of the world's first human rights organisation, the French Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), were seized by the Gestapo in June 1940. They were finally returned to France only in 2001 and now form the backbone of this volume which examines the conflicted links between the LDH and Germany from 1914 to 1944.
Additional text
The diversity of Ingram's nuanced argumentation demonstrates a stupendously wide reading which is expressed clearly in a metaphorically-rich style and with thesis-like increasing seriousness. That is admirable Now we know more about the entirely different but no less central meaning of the war guilt discussion in France and the politics surrounding it [This is] an outstandingly researched and stimulating book.
Report
It is impossible to summarize all of the richness of this essential study for understanding the evolution of the interwar period, on which we thought that everything was known. Maurice Vaïsse, Revue d'histoire diplomatique
