Fighting for France: Violence in Interwar French Politics(British Academy Monographs)

Fighting for France is a ground-breaking examination of violence in French politics in the interwar period. During these years, a range of groups at the political extremes employed physical aggression against their enemies and threatened to bring about the violent demise of the democratic regime. Until now, historians have denied and downplayed the frequency and seriousness of French political violence in favour of an interpretation that emphasises France's weddedness to democracy. Fighting for France demonstrates that the democratic culture of the late Third Republic co-existed with a culture of violence in which the physical punishment of rivals and opponents was considered acceptable. Drawing on the narratives constructed around outbreaks of violence, the book reconstructs the lived experience of fighting and the sense that contemporaries made of conflict. It examines violence in a variety of settings, from the street to the factory floor. A range of actors come under investigation, including fascists, communists, and the police. Fighting for France transforms our understandings of the course of interwar France and Europe.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Violence and Democracy in Interwar France 1: The Battle for the Street 2: Duelling in the Meeting Hall 3: The Mob and the Mass: Demonstrations, Parades and Riots 4: Brutes and Bludgeoners: The Police 5: Fighting for the Factory Floor 6: Conclusion Appendix

About the Author :
Dr Chris Millington is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History at Swansea University. He has worked at Birkbeck, University of London, and Cardiff University where he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. He is author of From Victory to Vichy: Veterans in Inter-war France (2012) and, with Brian Jenkins, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis (2015).

Review :
Fighting or France is sure to be of interest to specialists in French twentieth-century politics and political culture, as well as to those with an interest in the comparative study of democracies' responses to political extremism in the era of fascism. It could serve as a readable and engaging supplementary text for an undergraduate course on Europe in the era of the World Wars, and could also be used to provoke productive discussion about the similarities and differences between political violence in interwar Europe and in our own time.