The Moral Disarmament of France
Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940

Mona L. Siegel challenges assumptions that French schoolteachers undermined national morale in the era between the wars.

Mona L. Siegel (Author)

9780521839006, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 December 2004

334 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.66 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Using a rich variety of unpublished papers by elementary school teachers and their pupils, Mona L. Siegel traces the extraordinary trajectory of patriotic ideology in France from the outbreak of the Great War to the eve of the unwanted, feared Second World War.' Political ReviewNet

While French schoolteachers of the late nineteenth century have been widely celebrated for converting 'peasants into Frenchmen', their interwar counterparts have enjoyed little such acclaim. Both contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have condemned French pacifist schoolteachers of the interwar decades for cultivating antipatriotism and facilitating the defeat of 1940. In this book, Mona L. Siegel challenges such equations of teachers' pacifism with national betrayal. Drawn to pacifist ideals in the aftermath of World War I, schoolteachers sought to 'morally disarm' the nation by purging their classrooms of the militaristic images, symbols, narratives, and values that had led their generation to accept war without question in 1914. At the same time, however, their teaching remained rooted in longstanding patriotic and republican traditions. Siegel argues that interwar schoolteachers ultimately solidified French citizens' patriotic loyalties in an era when economic hardship and political extremism threatened to undermine those very ideals.

List of illustrations
List of tables
Acknowledgments
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. 'Raise their hearts to the Fatherland': patriotism, pacifism, and primary school education during the First World War
2. 'Little French children, do not forget!' - immediate postwar lessons and French collective memory of the Great War
3. 'There are only false victories and great miseries' - socialist internationalism, feminist pacifism, and the forging of a new ideological consensus
4. 'War is atrocious for all fatherlands' - pacifist scholastic narratives of the Great War
5. 'To love France is to love all humanity' - patriotic education between the wars
6. 'We do not want war!' - schoolteachers confront fascism and international conflict, 1933 to 1940
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]