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Review
| The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914–1940, by Mona L. Siegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 317 pages. $75.00, cloth.
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| The First World War and its aftermath continue to receive deserved scholarly attention as historians seek to understand the full consequences of this transformative twentieth-century conflict. Mona L. Siegel's The Moral Disarmament of France examines the legacy of the war in France in terms of its impact on primary education and educators. She convincingly shows how both the content of the wartime and interwar primary school curriculum and the actions of school teachers after the war helped reshape notions of patriotism and pacifism. Siegel's book thus also aims to complicate some of the received wisdom concerning France's defeat in 1940 during the Second World War, the contention being that France had been weakened by a generation of teachers that had failed to instill proper love of the nation and had instead pursued utopian visions of international peace. |
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The book begins with the war years themselves and with the struggles of teachers to fulfill their mission of educating France's children and insuring the well-being of the Republic despite the altered conditions of 1914–1918. While the majority of teachers found ways to incorporate loyalty to the nation in their lessons, a determined minority opposed the war and faced government prosecution. It is the transformation of the views of these "defeatist" teachers into the ideology of the majority of the profession in the interwar period that lies at the heart of Siegel's story. One of the virtues of Siegel's analysis is that it seeks to demonstrate the ways in which antimilitarism was not incompatible with patriotism. |
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Among the interwar legacies of the war for many teachers was a belief that it should be possible to exhibit patriotism and oppose war, that to paraphrase one of her sources, "to love France was to love all humanity." Further, teachers came to advocate that these dual emotions could be fostered in classrooms through the work of educators. Some of the most interesting aspects of the book examine how the story of the First World War itself was taught during the interwar era. Siegel analyzes dozens of textbooks to show how the lessons to be learned from the war changed over time. Initially, authors were quick to condemn Germany; but as the 1920s progressed, and in response to the pressure of teachers' groups, textbook authors came to emphasize the suffering experienced by all participants in the war. By 1926, the National Teacher's Union had created a list of textbooks it deemed too bellicose for the primary school curriculum. It favored books that illustrated the scourge of modern war above all. Combining evidence from interwar textbooks and national publications with three regional case studies—from the Dordogne, Seine, and Somme—Siegel is able to suggest how pedagogy changed in the interwar period and to situate it in a broader cultural debate over the meanings of patriotism. |
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By the close of the interwar period, new challenges emerged for a teaching profession that had tried to combine both patriotism and pacifism. Faced with the rise of fascism and Nazism and even more profoundly concerned with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, teachers had to determine how to confront militarist ideologies and the return of international conflict to European soil. Some teachers remained committed to their pacifist principles as late as 1939; for others, the war in Spain proved a "crucial turning point" (p. 193). While the National Union officially subscribed to a policy of nonintervention in this war, individual teachers, especially in the Dordogne in Southwest France, criticized this stance and offered support to the Spanish Republican cause and to refugees fleeing the war-torn nation. When World War Two broke out, the overwhelming majority of teachers willingly defended France. |
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This study would work well for those teaching graduate courses on the history of modern France and on the history and legacy of the First World War. However, its clearly-defined scope might render it a little too specialized for most undergraduate classes. Overall, it raises crucial questions for students about the nature of education and republicanism as well as pacifism and patriotism in France's Third Republic and about how the activities of teachers both inside and outside their classrooms helped transmit the lessons of the First World War. Its clarity of expression and grounding in both archival and textual evidence render it an informative as well as an enjoyable read. |
5
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| University of Mississippi |
Susan R. Graysel |
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