Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance
Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance

Author: Donald Reid

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443807222

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Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Lucie Aubrac, and Raymond Aubrac were among a small number of French men and women who made the decision to resist early in the Occupation. In the summer of 1940, Marc Bloch analyzed the society in which he lived in order to identify and affirm allegiance to a France truly at odds with that which was taking shape in Vichy. Bloch died in the Resistance, but his life would take on new meanings in the collective memories of postwar France. Confrontation with the Aubracs’ account of their refusal to accept the unacceptable became another important way the French engaged with the Resistance and its legacy. The acts Tillion took during the French-Algerian War and de Gaulle Anthonioz took when confronted with poverty in the France of the trentes glorieuses, were of a piece with the radical nature of their earlier decision to resist. Evocation of the Resistance provided a basis for France to reconstitute itself with honor after the war. Yet memory of the Resistance could also pose difficult issues for future generations. Those who came of age in 1968 grappled with the memory of the intrepid resisters of the first years of the war, whose decision to resist stood as an inspiration and a challenge. Historians, with the imperative to take the mandate to narrate the past from historical actors, to make resisters figures of history, developed complex relationships with those who had resisted. The essays in this collection address how resisters made sense of the wartime and postwar world in terms of their resistance, and how others made sense of the Resistance itself and its legacy by engaging with resisters and their histories.

Women Fight, Women Write
Women Fight, Women Write

Author: Mildred Mortimer

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2018-11-29

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0813942063

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Today, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one’s own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women’s individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades—from Assia Djebar’s 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif’s 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter— Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women’s writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women’s political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria’s patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country’s dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France
Human Rights Struggles in Twentieth-century France

Author: Max Likin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-10-07

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 303105198X

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This book provides an introduction to human rights controversies in twentieth-century France, from the Dreyfus Affair at the beginning of the century, to the arguments over women and immigrants’ rights at its end. Using the Ligue des Droits de L’Homme (LDH) - or the League of the Rights of Man - as a narrative thread for this chronological study, the book tracks the gradual expansion of human rights in France in the wake of the two world wars, the Algerian quagmire and decolonisation more generally. Examining the capital role of the LDH whilst also highlighting the role of individuals and key activists, the book helps us to contextualise the quandaries faced by unseen minorities, particularly colonial subjects and women. The analysis also demonstrates the influence of French human rights activism on key international documents of human rights law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The LDH occupies a central place in French justice debates and is therefore an ideal template to analyse the rising influence of humanitarianism and crimes against humanity in French causes célèbres from the 1970s onwards. However, the author goes further to look beyond the LDH and even France itself, offering wide-ranging surveys of dominant rights issues across Europe at any given period. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key members of the LDH, this book provides an accessible overview of human rights struggles in twentieth-century France.

France Since 1945
France Since 1945

Author: Robert Gildea

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0192192469

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The last fifty years have seen immense challenges for the French: constructing a new European order, building a modern economy, searching for a stable political system. It has also been a time of anxiety and doubt. The French have had to come to terms with the legacy of the German Occupation, the political and social implications of the influx of foreign immigrants, the destruction of traditional rural life, and the threat of Anglo American culture to French language and civilization. Robert Gildea's account examines French politics, society, and culture as well as France's role in the world from 1945 to 1995. He looks at France's attempt to recover national greatness after the Second World War; its attempt to deal with the fear of German resurgence by building the European Community; the Algerian war; and the later development of a neo-colonialism to preserve its influence in Africa and the Pacific. He traces the career of General de Gaulle, the revolution of 1968, and the trend towards both political consensus and political disillusionment. He also examines the rise and fall of the French intellectual, the changing cultural policy of the state, and the threat of feminism, regionalism, and multiculturalism to the ideal of the 'One and Indivisible Republic'.

The Reparative in Narratives
The Reparative in Narratives

Author: Mireille Rosello

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1846312213

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The authors studied in this volume represent a Francophone archipelago unfamiliar to any mapmaker, but drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors, then, Mireille D. Rosello argues, repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes—and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim’s range of possibilities. Rosello contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.

The Tyranny of Guilt
The Tyranny of Guilt

Author: Pascal Bruckner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-04-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0691154309

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Why the West must overcome its guilty conscience to foster a better global future Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism—the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one of France's leading writers and public intellectuals, argues that obsessive guilt has obscured important realities. The West has no monopoly on evil, and has destroyed monsters as well as created them—leading in the abolition of slavery, renouncing colonialism, building peaceful and prosperous communities, and establishing rules and institutions that are models for the world. The West should be proud—and ready to defend itself and its values. In this, Europeans should learn from Americans, who still have sufficient self-esteem to act decisively in a world of chaos and violence. Lamenting the vice of anti-Americanism that grips so many European intellectuals, Bruckner urges a renewed transatlantic alliance, and advises Americans not to let recent foreign-policy misadventures sap their own confidence. This is a searing, provocative, and psychologically penetrating account of the crude thought and bad politics that arise from excessive bad conscience.

Mixed Messages
Mixed Messages

Author: Chris Tinker

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9783039119059

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While popular music and the mass media in France are firmly established areas of enquiry, there have been relatively few academic studies of the youth and popular music press. This book focuses on Salut les copains (Hi Buddies/Mates) (1962-76), which achieved a circulation of a million copies within its first year, at its peak sold around twice as many magazines as its nearest competitors, and has now become synonymous with the development of youth culture in 1960s France. In the few existing accounts of Salut les copains cultural commentators have tended to view the magazine as a neutral, apolitical vehicle for French yé-yé pop stars. However, this full-length study reveals how written texts in Salut les copains (editorial, letters and advertising) both supported and challenged dominant ideologies concerning culture, the nation, youth and gender during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.

Giving Ground
Giving Ground

Author: Joan Copjec

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1999-06-17

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 9781859841341

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This volume seeks to address a number of broad questions, including: what is the role and limit of urban space in the expression of group and individual rights and desires?; do democratic social relations require spatial propinquity?; and what are the characteristics of