Four aspects of violence in interwar France (original) (raw)
Related papers
Political Violence in Interwar France
History Compass, 10 (2010)
Political violence in interwar France is largely considered a marginal phenomenon, the practice of fascist and communist groups alien to the democratic and Republican consensus. Save for the occasional outburst of mass violence, historians have dismissed the sharp political conflict of the interwar years as pretense and bluster confined to the pages of newspapers and thunderous speeches. This article argues that the routine occurrence of political violence in France deserves greater attention. It suggests that analysis of the mechanics of daily confrontation such as political symbols, the use of weapons and conduct at meetings may reveal deeper attitudes to acceptable behavior during aggressive political confrontation.
Elements of a Riot: Forms of Political Violence in Contemporary France
Working Paper, 2020
Unpublished working paper June 15, 2020-feel free to cite. The nature and causes of riots are widely misunderstood in the media and everyday discussions. This paper looks at the aftermath of riots in a suburban area of Paris to make a larger argument about what produces riots, the role of police violence, the activation of social boundaries, and the implied set of demands during and after riots. This profile uses the methods of visual sociology to show how youth often target symbols of the state to respond to state violence in an asymmetrical confrontation. It also presents original survey data about what non-riot participants think are the causes behind riots carried out by ethnic minorities and poor urban residents. It shows images from campaigns to ban the use of chokeholds in France, which recent protests have achieved.
French History, 2009
The Réveillon riots, the storming of the Bastille and the October days of 1789 are known largely for their violent excesses, and they have been used by historians such as François Furet, Simon Schama and Arno Mayer to help place violence at the centre of the French Revolutionary experience. However, detailed studies of the early stages of these journées show that each of the protests began as essentially non-violent political demonstrations, which only turned physically violent in the face of attempted repression. Based upon a wide reading of Parisian newspapers, pamphlets, correspondence and other contemporary sources, this article highlights conciliatory aspects of Revolutionary protest and posits the existence of more peaceful alternatives to physical violence. Set in a wider context, where the overwhelming majority of Parisian street protests during the Revolution did not resort to physical violence, full-scale insurrection appears to have been only a secondary strategy, often adopted reluctantly.
"Fascists for a Day: A Fresh Look at the 6 Février 1934 in Paris" A brief appendix
An appendix to my chapter entitled "Star Pupils: A Transnational, Comparative Approach to Comintern "army work" in France and Spain 1932-1936." In my forthcoming book: Red Tide Rising: The Comintern in Spain before the Civil War. Communist agitation and propaganda were deployed with significant success by the Comintern and its sections in Europe throughout the inter-war period. Driven by the old Leninist principle of "chem khuzhe, chem luchshe", the worse it is, the better it is, any instance of popular frustration and discontent was leveraged in order to "expose the contradictions of the capitalist bourgeois system" and lead the masses to a revolutionary exit. A good Bolshevik was to be, fundamentally, a good listener and interpreter of the sentiment of the masses and Comintern leaders did not hesitate to put forth examples of excellence in such a skill from the most unexpected sources. Addressing the ECCI in April 1932, 1 Dmitry Manuilsky shared with admiration the story of how the NSDAP´s brown-shirted militia, the Sturmabteilungen, had leveraged and exploited the indignation of the German masses at the Sklarek corruption scandal. In a very timely and emotionally compelling manner, a local S.A. leader demonstrated that the nazis had understood the gravity of the scandal and offered their party as the only truly revolutionary cure for German society´s ills. The trial of the three Sklarek brothers was costing the German taxpayer 17,000 marks daily, claimed the S.A. agitator as quoted by Manuilsky. If the nazis were in power they would put an end to such a bourgeois democratic process. What then should we do with the Sklarek brothers? "Shoot them!" responded the crowd. Manuilsky concludes admiringly: There is a vivid picture! The nazis had, the Comintern secretary reflected, understood and exploited the national socioeconomic moment and demonstrated they were men of timely, radical action. The French section of the Comintern would get their opportunity to apply this tactic in France, with spectacular success, less than two years later.
Opposing Exclusion: The Political Significance of the Riots in French Suburbs (2005-2007)
In 2005, following the deaths of two teenagers in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, France witnessed three weeks of widespread rioting. These events were mirrored, albeit on a smaller scale, in the nearby suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in 2007 when two local youths died in a collision involving police officers. Both during and after these respective events, many social and political commentators denounced the riots as a purely nihilistic expression of violence, a rejection of the Republic and of French society at large. However, this interpretation fails to fully consider the complexity of the situation. This essay will attempt to deconstruct the security-oriented interpretation of the violence and instead offer an analysis that views the riots of both 2005 and 2007 as a plea for access to French society on the part of those involved. Drawing on empirical fieldwork carried out in Villiers-le-Bel, the article will examine the case of Villiers-le-Bel in relation to the arguments put forward by a number of French sociologists, most notably Lapeyronnie and Kokoreff, which attributed political significance to the riots. The argument will explore the idea of the riots as a protopolitical event, that is, a primitive attempt by a socially excluded population to gain visibility in the public and political spheres. En 2005, suite à la mort de deux adolescents dans la banlieue parisienne de Clichy-sous-Bois, la France a vécu trois semaines d'émeutes d'une ampleur sans précédant. Ces événements se sont reproduits dans une certaine mesure en 2007 dans la banlieue voisine de Villiers-le-Bel quand deux jeunes ont trouvé la mort en percutant un véhicule de police. Pendant et après ces événements respectifs plusieurs commentateurs sociaux et politiques ont dénoncé les émeutes comme l'expression d'une violence nihiliste, un rejet de la République et de la société française. Cependant, cette interprétation ne prend pas en compte la complexité de la situation. Cet article cherche à dénouer l'interprétation sécuritaire et proposera une analyse qui considère les émeutes de 2005 et 2007 comme une demande d'accès à la société française de la part de ceux qui ont pris parti. En exploitant les résultats d'une étude empirique réalisée à Villiers-le-Bel, l'article examine le cas de cette banlieue par rapport aux analyses proposées par certains sociologues français, notamment Lapeyronnie et Kokoreff, qui attribuent une signification politique aux émeutes. L'analyse envisage les émeutes comme des événements protopolitiques, c'est-à-dire une tentative primitive de la part d'une population socialement exclue de devenir plus visible dans les domaines publics et politiques.
International Review of Social Psychology, 2016
On the 11 th of January 2015, France experienced its largest demonstration since World War Two, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Casher supermarket. Rapidly though the profiles and motivations of the participants to the rallies were questioned. Were they "good citizens" marching in defense of freedom of expression, tolerance and republican values? Or were they actually expressing their rejection of Islam and Muslims, as suggested by the demographer Emmanuel Todd (2015)? To answer these questions this article takes a social movement approach and draws from the data of a national opinion poll conducted two months after the attacks. First, the results show that the "Charlie" in the streets had the usual profile of demonstrators mobilized on post-materialist issues: They were overrepresented among young, urban, educated, leftwing, and tolerant citizens. Second, they highlight the importance of the religious factor: Muslims were less inclined to say they had participated to the rallies, and practicing Catholics to say they wished they had. Last, they show that terrorism does not automatically trigger an authoritarian dynamic, on the contrary. Its effects depend on how the issue is framed in social and political discourses.
Central European History, 2011
This updated translation of Dirk Schumann's Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918-1933 (Klartext, 2001) represents an estimable contribution to the scholarly literature on the Weimar Republic. Well researched and rich in detail, the work attempts to open a new perspective on a perennial topic in the scholarship: the role of political violence, in this case, in the important Prussian province of Saxony. Schumann aims to disprove a) that political violence in interwar Germany was an inevitable product of the Bolshevik revolution, and b) that it was primarily the result of the infusion of wartime violence into postwar civilian life. The former contention, a right-wing canard, hardly seems to need disproving given the well-known centrality of violence to the right-wing nationalist and fascist projects. The latter line of interpretation, similarly, is made to bear too much weight; to be sure, as Schumann points out, there was in most cases no direct line of continuity (in terms of personnel) from the violence of the trenches to the street battles of Weimar, but as many scholars (e.g., Richard Bessel) have shown, the war experience was continually recapitulated and recast so as to retain its destructive and habituating power. There would, moreover, have been no Wehrverbände without the war, no matter how much organizations such as the Stahlhelm cast back to the public militarism of the Kaiserreich. Schumann's contention that political violence did not threaten the political order-because it was "controllable," if only authorities had had the will to control it (p. xiii)-likewise seems questionable, unless we consider Schumann's deeper, important point: that the importance of violence lay not in its "military" efficacy, but in its discursive effect; that is, that violence-both rhetorical and actual-helped to stoke "fear[s] of civil war" that were successfully instrumentalized by the radical right to the detriment of the republic. This emphasis on the meaning ascribed to violence (both actual and rhetorical, as opposed to the concrete effects of violence, is one of the work's two main strengths. The other is the nuance and detail with which Schumann considers well-known episodes of political violence. The study is organized chronologically, with sections covering the "circumscribed civil war" of 1919-1921 (which included the Communist "March Actions" of 1921); the political murders of 1921-23; the founding of the right-and left-wing "combat leagues" in the period 1924-1929; and the period of escalating violence from 1929 through the end of the republic. This organization generally works, although the aphorisistic chapter titles and BOOK REVIEWS
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large parts of the world witnessed a continuous wave of strikes. The mobilization of the working classes, as well as the resulting dread and moral panic, were confronted by State forces and by a mobilization of the so-called sectors of order and propertied classes. Independent trade unionists, private security forces, and strikebreaker organizations took part in the social clash. This was a common occurrence throughout the Western world. Historiography has mainly focused on the United States and some European countries. Examples could be the Technische Nothilfe in Germany or the Pinkerton Agency in the United States. However, despite studies on the management of strikes by French police forces, neither the methods of the Yellow movement (only the doctrines of that counter-revolutionary trade union have been studied), nor the existence of strikebreaking organizations following that experience have been examined. The emergence of strikebreaker groups throughout France after the dissolution in 1906 of the Yellow movement, their use of violence, and their interactions with police forces are instead the topics of this paper. These organizations were legal, armed and capable of violently opposing strikers. They could adapt to police techniques, inducing the police to use the protection of ‘work freedom’ as justification for their intervention in support of strikebreakers. This paper will follow their history up until 1918. All of this will involve examining the interaction between violent, legal, armed groups and State Forces in Third Republic France, a country frequently cited as an example of tight State control over violence. The paper's emphasis will be on the historical formation of French statehood in its interaction with social fears, violence by private actors, arms circulation and the governmental claim to rule territory.
Festival and Revolution: the Popular Front in France and the press coverage of the strikes of 1936
Art History, 2000
Couples dance; people gather to listen to the sound of a violin and an accordion; laughing men wave from factory gates at passers-by in the street (plates 56 and 57). These are scenes of the strikes of 1936 which greeted the first Popular Front government in France; strikes which have most often been portrayed as a series of festivals. The striking workers refused to leave the factories, preferring to occupy them to prevent employers hiring an alternative labour force, and commentators have noted how these occupations afforded the workers the opportunity to make music and dance. Such scenes served to inaugurate a folklore for the Popular Front. So much so that later accounts of these events frequently cite contemporary photographs as a special form of evidence. 1 For example, when the historian Julian Jackson discusses the`prevalent atmosphere of``joy''' during the strikes, he cites the`vivid photographic images which have come down to us from 1936', images of`improvised dances' and`makeshift orchestras'. 2 However, it is problematic to assume that such photographs allow unmediated access to the strikes. This is not simply because photographs cannot be treated as transparent records, but also because the imagery of the strikes emerged and circulated in a particular fashion. To ignore this is to ignore the function of the photographs. In this essay I want to argue that allowing the festive photographs to define the strikes is only to reproduce one specific account of the disputes, an account moreover which played a central role in shaping the struggles in 1936. I shall argue that the imagery of the strikes was constituted by the evolving relationship between the strikers and the workers' organizations, and demonstrate that the imagery of the joyous strikers emerged only as these organizations progressively gained control of the strike movement and attempted to curb it. 3 The curtailing of the strike movement involved a redefinition of the aims of the strike itself: the goals of increased pay and the reduction of hours replaced a challenge to the prevailing social relations of production. The imagery of the joyous strikes operated within this suppression of militancy, for the figuring of relations between workers served to obscure the other relations defining the strike. Thus it will be argued that ultimately the iconography of the joyous strike was turned against the strikers. Yet it should be stressed that an argument drawn from the press coverage of the strikes will offer only one view of the strikers' festivities and will not provide access to the strikers' own perception of their activities. The workers may have experienced the festivities as a precondition for other levels of organized