What role did France really play in the First World War?
From April 24 to 27, Concordia and the Université du Québec à Montréal are co-hosting the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies. The theme of this year’s conference is War and Peace in French History, with Special Reference to the Centenary of the Beginning of World War I.
The subject is an especially timely subject now, as July 28, 2014 marks the 100-year anniversary of the start of the First World War. Norman Ingram is a professor in the Department of History and one of the conference’s organizers.
Why remember the Great War? The answer lies in the momentous and world-changing nature of the event.
It is truly what some French historians would call an événement dateur — a caesura in European history, the dividing line between the long 19th century and the 20th; other historians would argue that it brought about a “paradigmatic shift” in world affairs. All of these statements are correct.
My entire research career has revolved around the question of war and peace. My first book, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1991), addressed a surprising lacuna in French historiography, namely the complete lack of any systematic analysis of interwar French pacifism.
Already, in the 1980s, there was a burgeoning literature on pacifism in Great Britain, the United States and even in Germany. German historians had founded something called the Arbeitskreis Historischer Friedensforschung (Working Group on Historical Peace Research), and in America, the 1960s had seen the creation of the Conference on Peace Research in History, later known as the Peace History Society.
In France, there was nothing. The French seemed allergic to any discussion of pacifism as a topic worthy of historical interest, to the point where I wondered if there had even been such a thing as interwar French pacifism. In fact, there was a vast array of archival sources that had been virtually untouched, and it was on the basis of these that I wrote my PhD thesis, which subsequently became my first book.
History professor Norman Ingram’s first book, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919-1939, addressed an interwar gap in French history.
My analysis looked at the evolution of pacifism — by which I mean a primary, consistent and overriding commitment to the achievement of peace — over time. In this sense, the interwar period is critical.
By the end of the 1920s, what I call “old-style French pacifism” — essentially a liberal, juridical, internationalist peace sentiment — had evolved into something new, which I have called pacifisme nouveau style. This idea was integral or absolute and rejected all international wars, no matter the pretext.
This principled and consistent rejection of war was something quite different from the ephemeral and changing peace sentiments that waxed and waned according to the political seasons. And what is interesting about the appearance of this new-style pacifism in France is that it emerged from both a fear of the future and, at the same time, a dissenting view of the past.
The fear of the future was incarnated by the belief of pacifists, from about 1929 onwards, that any future war would spell the end of civilization and life on Earth because of the threat of poison gas delivered by the “bombing aeroplane.” This was the equivalent of the threat of nuclear annihilation in our own time.
The dissenting view of the past brings us back to the Great War. The new-style pacifists of the late '20s and '30s were convinced that the war which had cost France more blood as a proportion of its population than any other European nation had been fought under false pretences. They were certain that France bore some of the responsibility for the hecatomb, notably through its alliance with Tsarist Russia.
The origins of the Great War were of primordial importance to these men and women; they rejected totally the “truth” enshrined in Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which laid the blame for the bloodletting at Germany’s door. Interwar French pacifism was thus, in many ways, the child of debates about the Great War.
For much of the 20th century, French historians preferred to examine the experience of the Great War, rather than its fons et origo. The debate about origins was relegated to other national historiographies.
In 2014, as we commemorate the centenary of the beginning of the Great War, the question is beginning to be asked again: what was France’s role in the origins of the war?
The 60th Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies takes place from Thursday, April 24, to Sunday, April 27. To register for the conference, you must be a member of the Society for French Historical Studies.
Learn more about the 60th Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies.