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This book is a comparative study of the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, this book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of the Catholic literature.

This book compares the worldviews and factors that promoted or, indeed, opposed anti-semitism amongst Catholics in Germany and England after the First World War. As a prequel to books on Hitler, fascism and genocide, it turns towards ideas and attitudes that preceded and shaped the ideologies of the 1920s and 1940s. Apart from the long tradition of Catholic anti-Jewish prejudices, the book discusses new and old alternatives to European modernity offered by Catholics in Germany and England. Numerous events in the interwar years provoked anti-Jewish responses among Catholics: the revolutionary end of the war and financial scandals in Germany; Palestine and the Spanish Civil War in England. At the same time, the rise of fascism and National Socialism gave Catholics the opportunity to respond to the anti-democratic and anti-semitic waves these movements created in their wake. The book is a political history of ideas that introduces Catholic views of modern society, race, nation and the ‘Jewish question’. It shows to what extent these views were able to inform political and social activity.

Civilians into Soldiers is an examination of British Army life during the Second World War. Drawing on a wealth of official records and servicemen’s personal testimonies it explores the ways in which male civilians were turned into soldiers through the techniques by which they were inducted into military culture. The book demonstrates that the body was central to this process. Using strict physical regimes, the military authorities sorted men into bodily types that reflected their cultural assumptions and sought to transform them into figures that they imagined to be ideal. However, soldiers’ bodies were often far from ideal and served to frustrate these designs. While recruits were willing to engage in practices and routines that they found desirable they also resisted the army’s demands by creating subversive bodily cultures. The book follows the chronological experiences of army personnel, from their recruitment and training to their confrontations with wounding and death, tracing the significance of the body throughout. It analyses the extent to which the British Army organised compliance and relied on consent to achieve its objectives, the ways in which resistance was manifested and experienced, and what can be drawn from these instances by way of larger observations about wartime society in general. By examining soldiers’ embodied experiences it also illuminates broader issues of gender, class, national identity and emotional life. As such, it makes a major contribution to military history, medical history and the social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War.

The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after World War II. Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organized Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations. This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.

This study concerns the history of Gibraltar following its military conquest in 1704, after which sovereignty of the territory was transferred from Spain to Britain and it became a British fortress and colony. It focuses on the civilian population and shows how a substantial multi-ethnic Roman Catholic and Jewish population, derived mainly from the littorals and islands of the Mediterranean, became settled in British Gibraltar, much of it in defiance of British efforts to control entry and restrict residence. To explain why that population arrived and took root, the book also analyses the changing fortunes of the local economy over 300 years, the occupational opportunities presented and the variable living standards which resulted. Although for most of the period the British authorities primarily regarded Gibraltar as a fortress and governed it autocratically, they also began to incorporate civilians into administration, until it eventually, though still a British Overseas Territory, became internally a self-governing civilian democracy. The principal intention of the study is to show how the demographic, economic, administrative and political history of Gibraltar accounts for the construction, eventually and problematically, of a distinctive ‘Gibraltarian’ identity. With Gibraltar's political future still today contested, this is a matter of considerable political importance.

This is not a traditional international relations text that deals with war, trade or power politics. Instead, this book offers an analysis of the social, cultural and intellectual aspects of diplomatic life in the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The book illustrates several modes of Britain's engagement with Europe, whether political, artistic, scientific, literary or cultural. The book consults a wide range of sources for the study including the private and official papers of fifty men and women in the British diplomatic service. Attention is given to topics rarely covered in diplomatic history such as the work and experiences of women and issues of national, regional and European identity.

An adolescent girl is mocked when she takes a bath with her peers, because her genitals look like those of a boy. A couple visits a doctor asking to ‘create more space’ in the woman for intercourse. A doctor finds testicular tissue in a woman with appendicitis, and decides to keep his findings quiet. These are just a few of the three hundred European case histories of people whose sex was doubted during the long nineteenth century that this book draws upon. The book offers a refreshingly new perspective on the relation between physical sex and identity over the long nineteenth century. Rather than taking sex, sexuality and gender identity as a starting point for discussing their mutual relations, it historicizes these very categories. Based on a wealth of previously unused source material, the book asks how sex was doubted in practice—whether by lay people, by hermaphrodites themselves, or by physicians; how this doubt was dealt with; what tacit logics directed the practices by which a person was assigned a sex, and how these logics changed over time. The book highlights three different rationales behind practices of doubting and (re)assigning sex: inscription, body and self. Sex as inscription refers to a lifelong inscription of a person in the social body as male or female, marked by the person's appearance. This logic made way for logics in which the truth of inner anatomy and inner self were more significant.

This book addresses the unprecedented and overwhelming refugee crisis that the First World War unleashed in Europe. As the war came to an end a senior Red Cross official wrote ‘there were refugees everywhere: it was as if the entire world had to move or was waiting to move’. At least 14 million people were directly affected during the war. Europe on the move is the first attempt to understand their experiences and to establish the political, social and cultural significance of the crisis and its post-war legacy. Part of the explanation for the scale and severity of the refugee crisis was that non-combatants caught up in the conflict sought to escape to a place of relative safety. However, mass civilian displacement was also a deliberate outcome of wartime mobilisation. The unexpected presence of millions of refugees posed challenging questions about the forms and extent of assistance. How far did governments assume responsibility for emergency relief, or conversely did they devolve responsibility on to non-state agencies? What impact did the presence of large numbers of refugees have on host communities? In what ways did refugees respond to their predicament? As the war came to an end, questions arose as to whether refugees would return to their homes and how and by whom that process might be managed. How did contemporaries interpret these unsettling issues? Europe on the move is the first attempt to understand their experiences as a whole and to establish the political, social and cultural significance and ramifications of the wartime refugee crisis.

The guerrilla war waged between the IRA and the crown forces from 1919 to 1921 was a pivotal episode in the modern history of Ireland. This book addresses the War of Independence from a new perspective by focusing on the attitude of a powerful social elite: the Catholic clergy. The close relationship between Irish nationalism and Catholicism was put to the test when a pugnacious new republicanism emerged after the 1916 Easter rising. When the IRA and the crown forces became involved in a guerrilla war from 1919 onwards, priests had to define their position anew. Using a wealth of source material, much of it new, this book assesses the clergy’s response to political violence. It describes how the image of shared victimhood at the hands of the British helped to contain tensions between the clergy and the republican movement, and shows how the links between Catholicism and Irish nationalism were sustained.

French rule in Algeria ended in 1962 following almost eight years of intensely violent conflict, producing one of the largest migratory waves of the post-1945 era. Almost a million French settlers - pieds-noirs - and tens of thousands of harkis - native auxiliaries who had fought with the French army - felt compelled to leave their homeland and cross the Mediterranean to France. Tracing the history of these two communities, From Empire to Exile explores the legacies of the Algerian War of Independence in France. It uses the long-standing grassroots collective mobilisation and memory activism undertaken by both groups to challenge the idea that this was a ‘forgotten’ war that only returned to public attention in the 1990s. Revealing the rich and dynamic interactions produced as pieds-noirs,harkis and other groups engaged with each other and with state-sanctioned narratives, this study demonstrates the fundamental ways in which postcolonial minorities have shaped the landscapes of French politics, society and culture since 1962. It also helps place the current ‘memory wars’ deemed to be sweeping France in their wider historical context, proving that the current competition for control over the representation of the past in the public sphere is not a recent development, but the culmination of long-running processes. By reconceptualising the ways in which the Algerian War has been debated, evaluated and commemorated in the five decades since it ended, this book makes an original contribution to important discussions surrounding the contentious issues of memory, migration and empire in contemporary France.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language study of its kind, From victory to Vichy explores the political mobilisation of the two largest French veterans’ associations during the interwar years, the Union fédérale (UF) and the Union nationale des combattants (UNC). Drawing on extensive research into the associations’ organisation, policies and tactics, this study argues that French veterans were more of a threat to democracy than previous scholarship has allowed. As France descended into crisis, the UF and the UNC sought to extend their influence into the non-veteran milieu through public demonstrations, propaganda campaigns and the foundation of auxiliary groups. Despite shifting policies and independent initiatives, by the end of the 1930s the UF and the UNC had come together in a campaign for authoritarian political reform, leaving them perfectly placed to become the ‘eyes and ears’ of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime.

During the final decade of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), young citizens found themselves at the heart of a rigorous programme of socialist patriotic education, yet following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emphasis of official state rhetoric, textbooks and youth activities changed beyond recognition. For the young generation growing up during this period, ‘normality’ was turned on its head, leaving a sense of insecurity and inner turmoil. Using a combination of archival research, interviews, educational materials and government reports, this book examines the relationship between young people and their two successive states in East(ern) Germany between 1979 and 2002. This time-span straddles the 1989/1990 caesura which often delimits historical studies, and thus enables not only a detailed examination of GDR socialisation, but, crucially, its influence in unified Germany. Exploring the extent to which a young generation's loyalties can be officially regulated in the face of cultural and historical traditions, changing material conditions and shifting social circumstances, the book finds GDR socialisation to be influential to post-unification loyalties through its impact on the personal sphere, rather than through the official sphere of ideological propaganda. This study not only provides insight into the functioning of the GDR state and its longer-term impact, but also advances our broader understanding of the ways in which collective loyalties are formed.

In pursuit of politics offers a new interpretation of debates over education and politics in the early years of the French Revolution. Following these debates from the 1760s to the early years of the Republic (1792-94), and putting well-known works in dialogue with previously-neglected sources, it situates education at the center of revolutionary contests over citizenship, participatory politics, and representative government.Education was central to how people thought about what was possible, desirable, and achievable in eighteenth-century France. With that in mind, In pursuit of politics uses the debates over education as a window onto one of history’s most dramatic periods of political uncertainty and upheaval, anxiety and ambition. It weaves together debates taking place among Enlightenment writers, philosophes, royal and institutional administrators and, later, among revolutionary legislators, private citizens, political clubs, and provincial schoolmasters. This book explores the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, highlights the emergence of “public instruction” as a revolutionary pedagogy, and allows us to think in new ways about how the citizens and statesmen of eighteenth-century France tried to navigate modern politics at their tumultuous start.

Châteaux and landed estates, family portraits, names, titles and coats of arms are symbols of aristocratic identity and integral to the collective memory of nobility. In this study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage Elizabeth Macknight explains the significance of nobles’ conservationist traditions for public engagement with the history of France. During the French Revolution nobles’ property was seized, destroyed, or sold off by the nation. State intervention during the nineteenth century meant historic monuments became protected under law in the public interest. The Journées du Patrimoine, created in 1984 by the French Ministry for Culture, became a Europe-wide calendar event in 1991. Each year millions of French and international visitors enter residences and museums to admire France’s aristocratic cultural heritage. Drawing on archival evidence from across the country, Macknight presents a compelling account of power, interest and emotion in family dynamics and nobles’ relations with rural and urban communities.

This book is about the ideas and policies that characterized the rightward trajectory of Austrofascism in the 1930s, providing a fresh perspective on the debate over whether Austria was an authoritarian or fascist state. It is designed to introduce a range of issues confronting Austrian policy and opinion makers in the years prior to the Anschluss with Nazi Germany. The author argues that Austrofascism (not National Socialism) was the political heir of pan-Germanism in the Habsburg Monarchy. The book contributes to studies of inter-war Austria by introducing several case studies, including press and propaganda, minority politics, regionalism, immigration and refugees, as the issues that shaped Austria's political culture in the 1930s. Case studies of the German-nationalist press reveal the relationship between ideas and policy in the Austrofascist period. The book argues for a transnational approach to fascism in Austria, and situates the case studies within a broader context of Italian and German fascism. Placing the Austrian case against this backdrop of nationalism and fascism in Europe, it makes the discovery that Austrofascism was the product of larger European processes and events in the inter-war period.

In Year 2 of the Revolution (1794) Robespierre, seeking to establish a new deist national morality created the Festival of the Supreme Being celebrated on 20 Prairial Year 2 (8 June 1794). This book begins by tracing the progress in the development of Robespierre’s thinking on the importance of the problem which the lack of any acceptable national moral system through the early years of the Revolution had created, his vision of a new attitude towards religion and morality, and why he chose a Revolutionary Festival to launch his idea. It focusses on the importance of the Festival by showing that it was not only a major event in Paris, with a huge man-made mountain on the Champ de Mars; it was also celebrated in great depth in almost every city, town and village throughout France. It seeks to redefine the importance of the Festival in the history of the Revolution, not, as historians have traditionally dismissed it, merely as the performance of a sterile and compulsory political duty, but on the contrary, as a massively popular national event. The author uses source material from national and local archives describing the celebrations as well as the reaction to the event and its importance by contemporary commentators. This is the first book since the 1980s and the only work in English to focus on this Festival and to redefine its importance in the development of the Revolution.

As they trudged over the Pyrenees, the Spanish republicans became one of the most iconoclastic groups of refugees to have sought refuge in twentieth-century France. This book explores the array of opportunities, constraints, choices and motivations that characterised their lives. Using a wide range of empirical material, it presents a compelling case for rethinking exile in relation to refugees’ lived experiences and memory activities. The major historical events of the period are covered: the development of refugees’ rights and the ‘concentration’ camps of the Third Republic, the para-military labour formations of the Second World War, the dynamics shaping resistance activities, and the role of memory in the campaign to return to Spain. This study additionally analyses how these experiences have shaped homes and France's memorial landscape thereby offering an unparalleled exploration of the long-term effects of exile from the mass exodus of 1939 through to the seventieth-anniversary commemorations in 2009.

First published in Spanish in 2001, this book is a study of the development of Spanish national identity (‘the idea of Spain’) from the end of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It breaks away from an academic obsession with the sub-nationalism of Catalonia and the Basque Country to examine the predominant form of national consciousness, against which they reacted. The book traces the emergence and evolution of an initial collective identity within the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the end of the ancien regime based on the Catholic religion, loyalty to the Crown and Empire. The adaptation of this identity to the modern era, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars and the liberal revolutions, forms the crux of this study. None the less, the book also embraces the highly contested evolution of the national identity in the twentieth century, including both the Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. It ranges widely over diverse subjects such as representations of the past in Spain, the role of the arts and sciences in creating national consciousness, the impact of religion and Catholic ideas, the use of cultural symbolism, and the significance of contemporary events and political movements.

The stadium century traces the history of stadia and mass spectatorship in modern France from the vélodromes of the late nineteenth century to the construction of the Stade de France before the 1998 soccer World Cup, and argues that stadia played a privileged role in shaping mass society in twentieth-century France. Drawing off a wide range of archival and published sources, Robert W. Lewis links the histories of French urbanism, mass politics and sport through the history of the stadium in an innovative and original work that will appeal to historians, students of French history and the history of sport, and general readers alike. As The stadium century demonstrates, the stadium was at the centre of long-running debates about public health, national prestige and urban development in twentieth-century France. The stadium also functioned as a key space for mobilizing and transforming the urban crowd, in the twin contexts of mass politics and mass spectator sport. In the process, the stadium became a site for confronting tensions over political allegiance, class, gender, and place-based identity, and for forging particular kinds of cultural practices related to mass consumption and leisure. As stadia and the narratives surrounding them changed dramatically in the years after 1945, the transformed French stadium not only reflected and constituted part of the process of postwar modernisation, but also was increasingly implicated in global transformations to the spaces and practices of sport that connected France even more closely to the rest of the world.