Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme, 1914-1944
ISBN: 9780191866685
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Political History; Modern History (1700 to 1945) European History;

The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme is the first volume to examine the long history of the French Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), an organisation founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair and which lay at the very centre of French Republican politics in the era of the two world wars. Norman Ingram posits that by 1937 - well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940 - , the Ligue was essentially finished because of its inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War. The issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the organisation from 1914 until the outbreak of the Second World War.

This volume is based on substantial research in a large number of French archives, primarily in the papers of the LDH which were repatriated to France from the former Soviet Union in late 2001, but also on considerable research from German archives. Ingram uses these sources to deepen our understanding of the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism, and proposes a new explanatory model to help us understand some of the choices made in Vichy France, moving beyond the usual triptych of collaboration, resistance or, accommodation.