This book provides a detailed account of the Third Republic in France between the outbreak and conduct of the First World War and the fall of Leon Blum's Front Populaire soon after Hitler's invasion and annexation of Austria in 1938. Following the trauma of war, France slipped into the "era of illusions" which despite the comparative prosperity of the 1920s led to the slump and the severe social and economic unrest of the 1930s. The short-lived experiment of Blum's Front Populaire gave way to more conservatively-based ministries, but by 1938 a new common enemy began to draw together the political opinion of the country.
An essential introduction to the major political problems, debates and conflicts which are central to the history of the Third Republic in France, from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 to the fall of France in June 1940.It provides original sources, detailed commentary and helpful chronologies and bibliographies on topics including:* the emergence of the regime and the Paris Commune of 1871* Franco-German relations* anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair* the role of women and the importance of the national birth-rate* the character of the French Right and of French fascism.
This book provides a detailed account of French history from the oripins of the Thrid Republic, born out of the collapse of Napoleon III's Second Empire, to the coming of the Great WAr in 1914. Part 1 begins with the fall of the "notables" and the victory of the republicans. Then follows a picture of the economy and society of late nineteenth-century France, and an examination of spiritual and cultural development under the increasing threat from nationalist and socialist forces. The moderates' brief ascendancy at the end of the century followed by the extreme sentiments unleashed at the time of the Dreyfus affair, brings the story in Part 2 to a more passionately political period, when the republic finallynbecame established as a bulwark of bourgeois prosperity, witnessing the rise of the banks and big business, and the dangerous revival of colonial expansion.
The National Book Award–winning historian’s “vivid and moving” eyewitness account of the fall of France to Hitler’s Third Reich at the outset of WWII (The New York Times). As an international war correspondent and radio commentator during World War II, William L. Shirer didn’t just research the fall of France. He was there. In just six weeks, he watched the Third Reich topple one of the world’s oldest military powers—and institute a rule of terror and paranoia. Based on in-person conversations with the leaders, diplomats, generals, and ordinary citizens who both shaped the events and lived through them, Shirer constructs a compelling account of historical events without losing sight of the human experience. From the heroic efforts of the Freedom Fighters to the tactical military misjudgments that caused the fall and the daily realities of life for French citizens under Nazi rule, this fascinating and exhaustively documented account brings this significant episode of history to life. “This is a companion effort to Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, also voluminous but very readable, reflecting once again both Shirer’s own experience and an enormous mass of historical material well digested and assimilated.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In January 1847, a grain convoy passed through Buzançais, an obscure village in a remote region of central France that was suffering from hunger, high prices, and widespread unemployment. Villagers intercepted the shipment, invaded granaries and mills, and forced resale of the grain at a just price set by the people. What started as a classic subsistence movement, however, triggered two days of rioting and class hostility punctuated by uncommon property damage and death. Disorder soon spread throughout the region. The Buzançais riot quickly became an evocative symbol of the rights of the people, and stories about the riot have survived into the twenty-first century. In Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture, Cynthia A. Bouton traces how the production and marketing of the Buzançais riot story served political commentators, publishers, authors, illustrators, and local enthusiasts, enabling them to draw upon key points from the 1847 uprising to negotiate issues relevant to their own times. Bouton argues that over time, especially from the 1970s, the persistent integration of stories of social protest into a widening variety of media has helped shape French political identity as one in which the politics of the street has become as customary as the politics of political assemblies. Bouton examines representations of the riot in newspapers, novels, illustrations, popular and scholarly historical narratives, cartoons, television, local spectacles, and on the Internet. She analyzes power relations embedded in texts and in images; the ways in which texts and images complement, complicate, and contradict each other; and the ways in which history, memory, and fiction intersect. Both in 1847 and subsequently, she shows, efforts to reorder the disorder at Buzançais have exposed aspects of French social and cultural attitudes and practices. She demonstrates that the particular media employed to tell the Buzançais story both constrained and empowered the messages conveyed by textual and visual narratives of it, perhaps as much as the ideological positions of authors, illustrators, or producers. By probing the relationship between medium and story in relation to the Buzançais riot, Interpreting Social Violence in French Culture offers a new interpretation of this defining moment in French history.
Challenging the standard narrative of Interwar International History, this account establishes the causal relationship between the global political and economic crises of the period, and offers a radically new look at the role of ideology, racism and the leading liberal powers in the events between the First and Second World Wars.
This book offers a reassessment of the international monetary problems that led to the global economic crisis of the 1930s. It explores the connections between the gold standard--the framework regulating international monetary affairs until 1931--and the Great Depression that broke out in 1929. Eichengreen shows how economic policies, in conjunction with the imbalances created by World War I, gave rise to the global crisis of the 1930s. He demonstrates that the gold standard fundamentally constrained the economic policies that were pursued and that it was largely responsible for creating the unstable economic environment on which those policies acted. The book also provides a valuable perspective on the economic policies of the post-World War II period and their consequences.
Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.
June 2016 represents a significant moment in British history. The decision to leave the European Union at the most critical period since its existence could bring unpredictable and far-reaching consequences both for the United Kingdom and the Union itself. June 1940 was also a turning point in British history. On the afternoon of 16 June, a few hours before the French Government opted for the capitulation, Churchill made, on behalf of the British Government, an offer of “indissoluble union.” When a sceptical Churchill put forward to the British Cabinet the text of the declaration drafted by Jean Monnet, Sir Arthur Salter, and Robert Vansittart, he was surprised at the amount of support it received. The Cabinet adopted the document with some minor amendments, and de Gaulle, who saw it as a means of keeping France in the war, telephoned Reynaud with the proposal for an “indissoluble union” with “joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies,” a common citizenship and a single War Cabinet. The proposal, however, never reached the table of the French Government. The spirit of capitulation, embodied in Weygand and Pétain prevailed, and France submitted herself to the German will, for the second time in seventy years. After the Munich crisis, Great Britain had to face the danger of another European war, with the inevitable loss of the Empire, and it was at this point that the country first began to favour the application of the federalist principle to Anglo-French relations. In this conversion to federalism, a fundamental role was played by the Federal Union, the first federalist movement organised on a popular basis. The contribution of Federal Union to the development of the federal idea in Great Britain and Europe was to express and organise the beginning of a new political militancy, and it represented the first step of a historical process: the overcoming of the nation State, the modern political formula which institutionalises the political division of mankind. This study principally examines the first eighteen months of the Federal Union, during which time it was able to raise itself to the attention of the general public, and the political class, as the heir of the League of Nations Union. The research is based on extensive unpublished archival material, found across the globe, from London, Oxford, Brighton, and Edinburgh to Washington, Paris, and Geneva.
