Synopses & Reviews
Mona L. Siegel challenges assumptions that French schoolteachers undermined national morale in the era between the wars.
Synopsis
While French schoolteachers of the late nineteenth century have been widely celebrated for converting 'peasants into Frenchmen', their interwar counterparts have enjoyed little such acclaim. Both contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have condemned French pacifist schoolteachers of the interwar decades for cultivating antipatriotism and facilitating the defeat of 1940. Mona L. Siegel challenges such equations of teachers' pacifism with national betrayal. Siegel argues that interwar schoolteachers ultimately solidified French citizens' patriotic loyalties in an era when economic hardship and political extremism threatened to undermine those very ideals.
About the Author
Mona L. Siegel is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. She has published in The Journal of Modern History and in French Historical Studies.
Table of Contents
Introduction; 1. 'Raise Their Hearts to the Fatherland' - Patriotism, pacifism, and primary school education during the First World War; 2. 'Little French Children, Do Not Forget!' - Immediate postwar lessons and French collective memory of the Great War; 3. 'There are Only False Victories and Great Miseries' - Socialist internationalism, feminist pacifism, and the forging of a new ideological consensus; 4. 'War is Atrocious for All Fatherlands' - Pacifist scholastic narratives of the Great War; 5. 'To Love France is to Love All Humanity' - Patriotic education between the wars; 6. 'We Do Not Want War!' - Schoolteachers confront fascism and international conflict, 1933 to 1940.