The war guilt problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme, 1914-1944 / Norman Ingram.

New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

©2019.

vii, 294 pages ; 24 cm.

In this text, Norman Ingram addresses the history of the 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. Ingram posits that the Ligue's inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War was what led to its decline by 1937, well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940. As well as developing our understanding of how the issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the LDH from 1914 down to the Second World War, this volume also explores the aetiology of French pacifism, expanding on the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism. It argues that from 1916 onwards, one can see a principled dissent from the Union sacrě war effort that occurred within mainstream French Republicanism and not on the syndicalist or anarchist fringes.

English

May 21, 2019

Includes bibliographical references (pages 269-284) and index.