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Pacifism In France Between Ww1 And Ww2
This article considers the attitude of French teachers and the French education system to war during the First world war and immediately after, how did that attitude changed in the 1920s and why.The term moral disarmament A pacifist yet a patriot` and how far this phrase how far this phrase represented the attitude of French society in the 1930s
Date : 11/01/2016
Case study - France and
pacifism in the 1920’s and 1930’s During
the four years of World War, the vast majority of schoolteachers were loyal
supporters of the national war effort. From 1914 to 1918 teachers mobilized
their students to aid their nation in war and to embrace the values and
assumptions of the war culture that engulfed them. For several years after the
armistice school lessons continued to resound with nationalistic and
militaristic assumptions. “Little French Children, Do Not Forget!” admonished
one typical post-war textbook, encouraging young students to associate their
own wartime memories with narratives of German barbarism and French valour. In
the 1920s, a complex blend of socialist internationalism and republican
humanism, promoted by a new and powerful national teachers’ union, the Syndicat
national des institutrices et des instituteurs de la France et des colonies
(National Teachers’ un ion [SN]), played a role in shaping teachers’ emerging
critique of militaristic education. So too did feminist and feminine pacifism,
both of which exerted a strong influence over the predominantly female teaching
profession. Increasingly, teachers around the country called upon children to
remember the war, not to exult in national triumph, as their textbooks
insisted, but to mourn the fallen and share in the nation’s bereavement. By the mid-1920s, scores of French
primary schoolteachers began readily identifying themselves as pacifists, and
they sketched out a new mission for the
nation’s schools: the moral disarmament of France. “Désarmement moral”
was a term just gaining cultural currency in the mid-1920s, as hopeful
internationalists across Europe began to lay
the cornerstones for a more peaceful world order. Proponents of moral
disarmament insisted that no amount of international arbitration or economic
cooperation would effectively prevent the return of war unless the peoples of
the world first abandoned their national prejudices and embraced cross-national
understanding as the keystone of global stability. Such a project of “cultural
internationalism,” was largely driven by European cultural elites who, in the
1920`s and 1930`s, actively sought to promote intellectual cooperation across
national boundaries. At the same time, however, the project had an important
populist component, as evidenced by the recommendations of the Committee on
Moral Disarmament, which met as part of the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. There
committee members recommended using the new mass media of radio and cinema to
advance the cause of mutual understanding, but they also maintained that the
most important work of moral disarmament would have to be conducted in the
schools. Education, the committee concluded, was “the key to all other
measures.” French
teachers focused on purging classroom lessons of the images, symbols,
narratives, and values that had led their generation to accept war without
question in 1914, in particular those that dehumanized Germans, applauded
military heroism, and romanticized war. To such ends, the SN launched a vast
campaign against “bellicose” textbooks, and by the late 1920`s, it already bore
fruit. In revised textbooks, once-epic narratives of the Great War were recast
as tragedies. A new moral message of the events of 1914 to 1918 began to
emerge, “War is atrocious for all fatherlands.” France’s
republican schoolteachers never repudiated patriotism between the wars.
Interwar French teachers, like their predecessors, rooted their ideological
beliefs in the revolutionary tradition of 1789, and they taught students to
equate love of country with democratic progress. They continued to teach that
the French nation was endowed with a unique civilizing mission, a belief that
led most teachers to celebrate the French empire with their students even as
they presented France
as a beacon of peace in an unruly world. Pacifist teachers recognized that
peace-loving nations had gone to war in the past. France’s own revolutionaries – the
famed volunteers of 1792 – did not hesitate to take up arms when they perceived
that their fatherland was threatened. While a fringe of teachers on the
conservative right accused the pacifist majority of denigrating the army and
preaching outright defeatism in the event of war, in fact, only a small group
of teachers on the far left ever questioned whether France should defend itself
if attacked. As convinced pacifists, most teachers worked hard to foster
international solidarity, to cultivate support for the League of Nations, and
to teach their students to work for peace, but as devoted republicans, they
also made certain children appreciated that when all else failed they, like all
French citizens, should be prepared to lay down their lives for their country. For much of the interwar era, loyal devotion
to the France
and a fervent hatred of war were not incompatible. By the late 1930`s, however,
with fascist powers on the rise in Europe,
circumstances had changed. Throughout most of the 1930`s, teachers’ union
leaders remained firmly attached to their pacifist principles, arguing against
military intervention in the Spanish Civil War and celebrating the conclusion
of the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler. Yet with each mounting crisis,
dissension grew and by early 1939, by which point most French teachers had resigned
themselves to the necessity of war. While in a few notable cases pacifism led
to defeatism and eventually collaboration, nearly all teachers proved willing
to support a war against the Nazis, and a large number joined the Resistance.
Contrary to what others have claimed, this patriotism did not exist despite
the efforts of pacifist schoolteachers in the 1920`s and 1930`s it existed, in
no small part, because of them. For nearly two decades, in classrooms
across the country, schoolteachers sought to inculcate the values of
patriotism, republicanism, and pacifism, and, in doing so, helped to mold the
complex political culture that characterized interwar France.
Q4. In your view did French attitudes to war seriously weaken the nation’s ability to resist in 1940 or were other factors more important. Give reasons for your answer
Q4. In your view did French attitudes to war seriously weaken the nation’s ability to resist in 1940 or were other factors more important. Give reasons for your answer
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