France Between The Wars

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

During the interwar years France experienced severe political polarization. At the time many observers, particularly on the left, feared that the French right had embraced fascism, generating a fierce debate that has engaged scholars for decades, but has also obscured critical changes in French society and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of essays shifts the focus away from long-standing controversies in order to examine various elements of the French right, from writers to politicians, social workers to street fighters, in their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. It offers a wide-ranging reassessment of the structures, mentalities, and significance of various conservative and extremist organizations, deepening our understanding of French and European history in a troubled yet fascinating era.

The French empire between the wars is the first study of the French colonial empire at its height in the twenty years following the First World War. Based on extensive archival research, it addresses current debates about French methods of rule and their impact on colonial peoples, the origins of decolonisation, and the role of popular imperialism in French society and culture. By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation. The author analyses colonial decision-making in Paris and the renewed threat of global war, as well as colonial economic conditions and forms of discrimination in the empire to illustrate the process of French imperial decline.

This collection examines relations between France and Britain, in particular their conflicting memories of key episodes in their recent past.

"Brilliant... highly original in its approach and meticulously cautious, concise and convincing in its judgments." --Sidney B. Fay, The Yale Review

France experienced four major conflicts in the fifty years between 1914 and 1964: two world wars, and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. In each the role of myth was intricately bound up with memory, hope, belief, and ideas of nation. This is the first book to explore how individual myths were created, sustained, and used for purposes of propaganda, examining in detail not just the press, radio, photographs, posters, films, and songs that gave credence to an imagined event or attributed mythical status to an individual, but also the cultural processes by which such artifacts were disseminated and took effect. Reliance on myth, so the authors argue, is shown to be one of the most significant and durable features of 20th century warfare propaganda, used by both sides in all the conflicts covered in this book. However, its effective and useful role in time of war notwithstanding, it does distort a population's perception of reality and therefore often results in defeat: the myth-making that began as a means of sustaining belief in France's supremacy, and later her will and ability to resist, ultimately proved counterproductive in the process of decolonization.

Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, xenophobia, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art-historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in, painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naifs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918.