No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Gender and Politics in Interwar and Vichy France
Review products
JoanTumblety, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 257 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-969557-7.
GayleBrunelle and AnnetteFinley-Croswhite, Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 266 pages. ISBN 978-0-8071-3616-4.
SandrineSanos, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 369 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-7457-4.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2017
Extract
One of the defining paradoxes of interwar France was the coexistence of a deep-rooted belief in national decadence with the development of a wide range of innovative organisations, cumulatively mobilising millions of people, as a means of fighting this supposed decline. While women played a key role in perpetuating the belief that the Republic was deteriorating, created numerous politically-oriented groups and entered into the government as ministers for the first time, these facts have barely entered into scholarly analysis of the state of France's political culture. Beginning in the 1960s a narrative of stagnation tended to dominate scholars’ interpretations of the interwar years. Reflective of the times, gender was absent from such analyses, as scholars defined ‘politics’ in certain ways and assumed that political actors were men. The influential political scientist Stanley Hoffman, for example, insisted that this was a period of stalemate, essentially the consequence of a failure to modernise during the Third Republic (1870–1940). Hoffman argued that peasants, small business and the bourgeoisie coalesced to advocate for protectionist measures and resist social and economic reforms. This conservative agenda was facilitated by governments that sought to limit economic change, which contributed to ministerial instability: during the interwar period, the French government changed forty-seven times, compared to thirty in Poland and Romania, nine in Great Britain and an average of one per year in Weimar Germany, Belgium and Sweden. For Anglophone and Francophone proponents of the idea of a systemic crisis, the Third Republic appears fundamentally flawed, crippled by an intrinsic defect rather than a democratic government that opened spaces for dynamic groups and movements to effect real change.
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017
References
1 Hoffman, Stanley, ed., In Search of France (New York: Harper and Row, 1963)Google Scholar.
2 For a recent historiographical analysis of the ‘stalemate society’ and its implications, see Jenkins, Brian and Millington, Chris, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 18Google Scholar.
3 Jenkins and Millington, France and Fascism, 25 note 83.
4 For Francophone examples of scholarship on the Third Republic's supposed intrinsic flaws and inability to enact meaningful reforms see Winock, Michel, La fièvre hexagonale. Les grandes crises politiques de 1871 à 1968 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1986)Google Scholar; Charle, Christophe, La crise des sociétés impériales, Allemagne, France, Grande-Bretagne (1900–1940): Essai d'histoire sociale comparée (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Crozier, Michel La Société bloquée (Paris: Seuil, 1970)Google Scholar.
5 Passmore, Kevin, ‘The French Third Republic: Stalemate Society or Cradle of Fascism’, French History, 7, 4 (1993), 417–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Passmore, ‘The Construction of Crisis in Interwar France’, in Jenkins, Brian, ed., France in the Era of Fascism (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 151–99Google Scholar.
6 See especially Passmore, ‘“Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism”: Women's Social Action in the Croix de feu and Parti Social Français’, Journal of Modern History, 71, 4 (1999), 815–51.
7 Downs, Laura Lee, ‘“Each and every one of you must become a chef”: Toward a Social Politics of Working-Class Childhood on the Extreme Right in 1930s France’, Journal of Modern History, 81, 1 (2009), 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘“Nous plantions les trois couleurs”, Action sociale féminine et la recomposition des politiques de la droite française: Le mouvement Croix-de-Feu et le Parti social français, 1934–1947’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 58, 3 (2011), 118–63Google Scholar; Magali Della Sudda, ‘Socio-histoire des formes de politisation des femmes conservatrices avant le droit de suffrage en France et en Italie. La Ligue patriotique des Françaises (1902–1933) et l'Unione fra le donne cattoliche d'Italia (1909–1919)’ (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2007).
8 Nord, Phillip, France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
9 Conklin, Alice L., In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
10 Tartakowsky, Danielle, Le Front populaire: La vie est à nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)Google Scholar; Ory, Pascal, La Belle illusion: Culture et politique sous le signe du Front populaire, 1935–1938 (Paris: Plon, 1994)Google Scholar.
11 Campbell, Caroline, Political Belief in France, 1927–1945: Gender, Empire, and Fascism in the Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
12 Campbell, Political Belief in France, 1927–1945, 23, Chapters 4 and 5.
13 For nearly a decade, some historians have questioned the usefulness of the left/right dichotomy by urging scholars to move ‘beyond Left and Right’. See the 2008 issue of Historical Reflections, ‘Beyond Left and Right: New Perspectives on the Politics of the Third Republic’. Guest Editor William D. Irvine) 34, 2 (2008) and, more recently, Chabal, Emile, ed., France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)Google Scholar.
14 Tumblety, Joan, Remaking the Male Body: Masculinity and the Uses of Physical Culture in Interwar and Vichy France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, 207.
16 Brunelle, Gayle K. and Finley-Croswhite, Annette, Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 35Google Scholar.
17 Sanos, Sandrine, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2013), 4.Google Scholar
18 For examples of such social history, Sanos cites Kennedy, Sean, Reconciling France Against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Kalman, Samuel, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: the Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (Ashgate: Aldershot, England; Burlington, Vermont, 2008)Google Scholar; Passmore, Kevin, From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In using psychoanalytic methods to explore the intersections between psychology, the unconscious and health, Sanos favours in particular the work of Dean, Carolyn, The Self and its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar and The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
19 Sanos seeks to use the concept of the ‘abject’ to build upon the work on the Jeune Droite by literary scholars and cultural historians. The literary scholars include Kaplan, Alice, Reproduction of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)Google Scholar and Carroll, David, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. The historians include Mazgaj, Paul, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007)Google Scholar, Antliff, Mark, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Kessler, Nicolas, Histoire politique de la Jeune Droite (1929–1942): Une révolution conservatrice à la française (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001)Google Scholar.
20 See especially Dobry, Michel, ‘La thèse immunitaire face aux fascismes. Pour une critique de la logique classificatoire’. In Dobry, Michel, ed., Le mythe de l'allergie française au fascisme (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003)Google Scholar; Passmore, Kevin, ‘L'Historiographie du fascisme en France’, French Historical Studies, 37, 3 (2014), 469–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Read, Republic of Men, 63.
22 Passmore, ‘“Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism”’, 815–51; Downs, ‘“Each and every one of you must become a chef”’, 1–44, and ‘“Nous plantions les trois couleurs”’, 118–63.
23 Read, Republic of Men, 211.
24 Passmore, ‘L'Historiographie du fascisme en France’, 469–99.
25 One of the first and most influential critiques of how the ‘classificatory logic’ impeded scholarship on French politics was political scientist Dobry, Michel’s ‘Février 1934 et la découverte de l'allergie de la société française à la Révolution fasciste’, Revue française de sociologie, 30, 3/4 (1989), 511–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Downs, Laura Lee, Histoire des colonies de vacances (Paris: Perrin, 2009)Google Scholar; Wardhaugh, Jessica, In Pursuit of the People: Political Culture in France, 1934–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitney, Susan, Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Linda and Irvine, William D., eds., ‘Beyond Left and Right: New Perspectives on the Politics of the Third Republic’, Historical Reflections, 34, 2 (2008), 1–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Sanos, Aesthetics of Hate, 5.
28 Brunelle and Finley-Croswhite, Murder in the Metro, 119.
29 Read, Republic of Men, 113; see also 14.
30 On cultural racism in France, see also Reynaud-Paligot, Carole, La République raciale. Paradigme raciale et idéologie républicaine, 1860–1930 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006)Google Scholar; Paligot, Reynaud, Races, racisme et antiracisme dans les années 1930 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007)Google Scholar.
31 Tumblety, Remaking the Male Body, 7.
32 Reynaud-Paligot, La République raciale, 2006.
33 Conklin, In the Museum of Man, 173.
34 Ibid., 174.
35 Ibid., 308, 316, 315.
36 For similar statements critiquing the lack of gender history in studies of the right and far right, see also 9 and 254–5.
37 For a recent survey of books on French feminism see Pedersen, Jean, ‘French Feminisms’, French Historical Studies, 37, 4 (2014), 663–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On social Catholicism see especially Cova, Anne, ‘ Au Service de l’église, de la patrie et de la famille’: Femmes catholiques et maternité sous la IIIe République (Paris: l'Harmattan, 2001)Google Scholar; Della Sudda, ‘Socio-histoire des formes de politisation des femmes conservatrices avant le droit de suffrage en France et en Italie, 2007; Bruno Dumons, ‘L'Action française au féminine; Réseaux et figures de militantes au début du XXe siècle’, in Leymarie, Michel and Prévotat, Jacques, eds., L'Action française: Culture, société, politique (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2008)Google Scholar.
38 Thomas, Jean-Paul, ‘Les Effectifs du Parti Social Français’, Vigntième Siècle, 62 (1999), 61–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Passmore, Kevin, The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
39 Read, Republic of Men, 173; see also 217.
40 Read, Republic of Men, 51; see also 61, and 63; Kennedy, Sean, Reconciling France Against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and Parti Social Français, 1927–1945 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Kalman, Samuel, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (Aldershot, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008)Google Scholar.
41 Passmore, ‘“Planting the Tricolor in the Citadels of Communism”’, 815–51; Downs, ‘“Each and every one of you must become a chef”’, 1–44, and ‘“Nous plantions les trois couleurs”’, Action sociale féminine et la recomposition des politiques de la droite française: Le mouvement Croix-de-Feu et le Parti social français, 1934–1947”’, 118–63.
42 Archives nationales (AN), Paris, 451AP 155, Maire Presentation, ‘Biologie elémentaire: Différenciation des sexes’, n.d.; AN 451AP 153, Med. A. Bleu and Maire, ‘SPES education physique féminine technique et programme’, n.d.; Campbell, Political Belief in France, 1927–1945, 107–8, 118–9.