Conscription, Family, and the Modern State
A Comparative Study of France and the United States

This book compares how the American draft system and the French conscription system came to be.

Dorit Geva (Author)

9781107024984, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 August 2013

280 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

'Dorit Geva's penetrating new study, Conscription, Family and the Modern State: A Comparative Study of France and the United States, makes clear the enduring significance of military conscription for understanding social and political life today. A work of painstaking historical sociology, Geva's book effectively relates the convoluted regulatory policy of conscription in France and the United States, persuasively arguing that seemingly arcane conscription rules carry profound and long lasting social and political significance. In her book, historical sociologists, political scientists, and scholars of gender and family alike will find much of value for their own fields of research and indeed may find fertile new ways to connect across fields.' Thomas Crosbie, American Journal of Sociology

The development of modern military conscription systems is usually seen as a response to countries' security needs, and as reflection of national political ideologies like civic republicanism or democratic egalitarianism. This study of conscription politics in France and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century challenges such common sense interpretations. Instead, it shows how despite institutional and ideological differences, both countries implemented conscription systems shaped by political and military leaders' concerns about how taking ordinary family men for military service would affect men's presumed positions as heads of families, especially as breadwinners and figures of paternal authority. The first of its kind, this carefully researched book combines an ambitious range of scholarly traditions and offers an original comparison of how protection of men's household authority affected one of the paradigmatic institutions of modern states.

Part I. Conscription, Familial Authority, and State Modernity in Modern France: 1. Nationalized coercion, familial authority, and the père de famille in nineteenth-century France
2. Conscription, pronatalism, and decline of familial sovereignty in the early Third Republic
3. The famille nombreuse versus the security state in interwar France
Part II. The Draft, Familial Authority, and State Modernity in the United States: 4. Breadwinning, selective service, and the First World War draft
5. The father draft crisis and the Second World War
6. Conclusion: familial authority and state modernity past and present.

Subject Areas: Military tactics [JWKT], Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology: family & relationships [JHBK], Gender studies: men [JFSJ2]