The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940.

Hill, John S.

The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940, by Mona L. Siegel. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiv, 317 pp. $80.00 US (cloth).

The human and material costs of the First World War were so high, its positive achievements of any sort so meagre, that a revulsion against the very idea of war swept over the belligerent countries after 1918. Decent people everywhere and of all political stripes sought the means to avert any future plunge into bloodshed. Military alliances were blamed for helping to create the avalanche of 1914, so most people looked elsewhere for a guarantee of peace. Some people argued for a revision of the Versailles Treaty to make it more acceptable to the discontented Germans. Some found their solution in the organization of peace through the new League of Nations. Many rested their hopes in the general disarmament mentioned in the Versailles Treaty. Spanning these groups and extending beyond. them were pacifists. They rejected war for themselves, under most circumstances, and hoped to implant their values in young people. All these hopes had proved vain by 1939. The Germans were reconciled neither by revision of the reparations clauses of the Versailles Treaty, nor by admission to the League of Nations, nor by the toleration of German rearmament in violation of the peace treaty, nor by the redrawing of frontiers with Austria and Czechoslovakia. Disarmament foundered on nations' quest for some measure of military security. The League of Nations failed to prevent wars when countries actually desired to fight one. Pacifism failed to appeal to enough people or to the right people, or to provide solutions to the problem of armed aggression.

When the Second World War brought disaster, the search for explanations began. Nowhere was this more true than in France. Immediately after the defeat of 1940 both Philippe Petain and Marc Bloch complained of the harmful role played in public life by the schoolteachers of interwar France, in contrast to their much admired predecessors of the early Third Republic. Petain complained that the teachers had fostered defeatism in the reservists who made up the bulk of the officers and men of the French Army. Bloch blamed pacifists, many of them schoolteachers, for having fostered a "race of cowards" which had yielded to base instincts well before the war itself. Taking this critique as her starting point, Mona Siegel crafts a useful study that poses important questions about the schoolteachers of the later Third Republic. In the end she acquits them of Petain's charge, but is much less effective in disputing Bloch.

Flanked by a substantial introduction and a brief summary conclusion, Siegel's chapters consider the highly nationalistic primary education provided during the First World War, trace the schools' contribution to shaping a collective memory after the war, delineate the reactive forging of a new ideological consensus--rooted in socialist internationalism and feminist pacifism--during the twenties, turn a critical eye on the pacifist scholastic narratives of the Great War, untangle the strands of patriotic education between the wars, and limn the teachers' confrontation with fascism and international conflict from 1933 to 1940.

Siegel demonstrates that the teachers came to equate patriotism with pacifism for most of the inter-war period, that they taught this message to their students in pursuit of "moral disarmament," and that their success in this enterprise exerted a profound impact on France's political culture. From enthusiastic, uncritical support of the national effort--amounting to propaganda-in-the-classroom--during the First World War, teachers moved towards mourning the war's terrible human cost in the Twenties. Bemoaning one previous disaster, the teachers resolved to prevent any future disaster through the adoption of pacifism. French schoolteachers, while simultaneously organizing a powerful new union they hoped would address their economic grievances, eagerly embraced the new program of "moral disarmament." By this term, teachers meant using "their authority in the classroom to destroy the mental arsenal of concepts and beliefs that made war imaginable and, ultimately, acceptable. They focused on purging classroom lessons of the images, symbols, narratives, and values that had led their generation to accept war without question in 1914, in particular those that dehumanized Germans, applauded military heroism, and romanticized war" (p. 3). Teachers emphasized international solidarity, placed great hopes in the new League of Nations, and encouraged students to work for peace, but did acknowledge the civic obligation of defend the country with arms as a last resort. While emphasizing the tragic results of the Great War for all peoples, the teachers nevertheless centred their accounts on the particular sufferings of the French, enhancing young students' sense of national identity. The great majority of teachers maintained these intellectual positions even as they were tested by the international political crises of the later thirties. When early faith in general disarmament and the efficacy of the League of Nations began to fail, the teachers fervently espoused the cause of appeasement. In late 1939 they abandoned one cherished ideal, pacifism, in order to defend another, republican France, when it became plain that the two ideals were incompatible.

In pursuit of her quarry, Siegel has read through more than a hundred textbooks of the time for an understanding of their message to students, examined the professional journals and newsletters in which teachers discussed their calling, and, for three departments (Somme, Seine, Dordogne), searched the archival holdings of teachers' lessons and students' essays for insight into the actual classroom experience. From these diverse sources she both constructs a coherent chronology and draws out the engaging voices of participants. Readers can only admire the attentiveness and tenacity of Siegel's research.

Furthermore, Siegel's book contains food for thought. She is particularly shrewd in discussing the problematic nature of "memory construction" when individual memories obstruct efforts to create a collective memory and when the absence of any memories at all of the events hindered the communication of significance. She also does an excellent job showing how the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point. French teachers identified with anti-clerical and prodemocracy teachers of the Spanish Republic. Spanish teachers fighting in the trenches against fascism compelled many of them to begin to question their own beliefs. "For the first time since World War I, unionized teachers began to speak openly of courage and heroism in combat, of the criminal behavior of a recognizable enemy, and of a war fought for higher principles" (p. 205). These were the very language and concepts pacifist teachers had tried to root out of their students.

At the same time readers may feel that some of Sigel's subjects are missing in action. The concept of "moral disarmament" is repeatedly invoked, but Siegel does little to explain its origins, development, or implications. The impact of schoolteachers' pacifism on political culture is asserted much more than it is demonstrated. Her discussion of the Second World War up to June 1940 focuses almost entirely on the male teachers of military age dutifully reporting to the barracks and not on the demoralization once alleged to have prevailed among their former students, which formed the heart of the charges against them. Siegel shows that, in practice, teachers portrayed all modern war as futile and atrocious, , but does not inquire very deeply into what impact this may have had on attitudes toward national defense before the war or military effectiveness during it.

Finally, to a degree Siegel lacks critical distance from her subjects as she often adopts their viewpoint. For example, early on Siegel quotes a civics lesson from 1921: "For France to live in peace, it is not sufficient that she be impassioned by liberty and justice or that she detest war. She must also be strong and well armed in order to be able to defend herself against the brutal stampede of her dangerous neighbour, Germany, for whom force is the law" (p. 69). Twenty years later this text--which Siegel lumps with the "chauvinistic, militaristic, and romanticized" accounts produced during and immediately after the First World War--must have seemed to be more nearly correct than those offered to students during the intervening years.

John S. Hill

Immaculata University