Studies in Modern European History – Serie

How does a state effectively mobilize its citizens for armed conflict? Why do citizens allow themselves to be placed in harm’s way? The military relationship between the state and its citizens, in terms of rights and obligations, remains as important today as it did when Europe first moved from under the shadow of the Ancien Régime. Reform in Revolutionary Times explores the evolution of the civil-military relationship during one of the more unique periods of modern European history. Born through revolution during the First World War, the Soviet state was plunged immediately into a civil war which included foreign intervention by American, British, French, Japanese, and Czech soldiers. The fires had not yet been extinguished when conflict with Poland further threatened its existence. Pragmatism vied with ideology, as the Soviets mobilized the population to unheard of levels through fundamental reforms, simply to survive these early years of revolution and war.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a judicial case involving the custody of two Jewish orphans mushroomed into a major crisis of Jewish-Christian relations in France. A New York Times journalist called this affair «the worst religious storm of post-war France». The Finaly Affair (1945-1953), which is best understood in the context of post-Vichy anti-Semitism, came about when Catholic fundamentalist beliefs came into conflict with France’s republican principles. This affair polarized the French nation and was transformed into a national crisis by the explosive power of the French press. It had lasting consequences for interfaith relations in France and for the French Jewish community. In the Shadow of Vichy captures this astonishing story of how the Church’s kidnapping of two Jewish children just after World War II helped to hasten the revolutionary changes of Vatican II.

French Urban Planning 1940-1968 explores the creation and progressive dismantling of France’s centralized, authoritarian system of urban and architectural planning. Established in the wake of World War II to facilitate the reconstruction and expansion of cities, this planning program led to the evolution of large suburban housing estates plagued by inter/intra family conflict, juvenile delinquency, and other social difficulties, which sociologists connected to poor planning and design. Critics began calling for the democratization of planning to remedy design problems, and the government of Charles de Gaulle started reforming planning procedures in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This book moves beyond technical and political issues to explore forces of religion, gender, and class that affected planning practices. Key critics and state officials emerged from the Catholic Left. Some were women from working-class backgrounds, and they manipulated gender stereotypes to insert working- and middle-class women into the design process. Sometimes in opposition, but often together, these reformers initiated the most significant change of architectural and urban planning until the introduction of François Mitterrand’s decentralization reforms in the 1980s. French Urban Planning 1940-1968 will appeal to scholars and students interested in architectural, urban, and social trends in twentieth-century France.

When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Moscow officials expected the British Navy to appear on the shore of Leningrad, fulfilling the Bolshevik nightmare of a concerted Capitalist plot. Instead, Prime Minister Winston Churchill reached out to promise support to the Kremlin and collaborate with Britain’s former archenemy. Fighting the Nazi menace together became the new priority, leading to unprecedented levels of cooperation between the two governments. In order to defeat the Nazis, Britain and the USSR shared intelligence and revealed operative secrets to each other, including those of the secretive security services. They helped with the dispatch of agents and even ran agents together, attempting to foil German counter-intelligence strategies. For much of the Cold War, crucial facts of this collaboration remained top secret. Based on recently declassified files, Dealing with the Devil explores this little known chapter of the Second World War. This study underscores the willingness of the USSR and Britain to join forces and disclose many of their closely guarded secrets. The book uses personnel files and other historical sources to reveal for the first time the activities of officers and agents on this «invisible front», recounting the actions of many brave men and women who risked their lives to defeat the Nazis.

This book is a history of the initiative, its projects and actors, notably the architect and planner Ernst May, and its achievements, set within the turbulent context of the Weimar decade. It chronicles its many accomplishments: the construction of housing settlements, innovations in construction and materials, the parks and garden colonies program, innovations in school, medical facility and church design, reforms in woman’s sphere, and a crafting of New Life culture. It examines the New Frankfurt am Main in light of the social and political debates that shaped it and the works it produced, and describes the relationship of work and theory to contemporary reform movements. Finally, the narrative underscores the gulf between the idyll of modernity and the political and social realities of life in a Germany on the brink of collapse.

This volume asserts that there was tacit cooperation in the Nazi extermination of the Jewish population of Europe by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Second World War. Although the Allies publicly recognized the Nazi massacre of the Jews in the London Declaration of December 17, 1942, the policies they pursued allowed the genocide to continue. They did so, the author claims, in three ways: (1) refusal to publicly and personally speak about and against the Nazi extermination of the Jews; (2) refusal to commit even one soldier, one plane, or one warship to any forcible opposition to the «Final Solution» throughout the Second World War; and (3) obstruction of Jewish escape from Hitler’s Europe. This book explores the motivation for the policies Churchill and Roosevelt pursued.

Army of the Sky addresses the development of military aviation from 1904 to 1914 in order to explore the relationship of modernization and Russian Imperial officer culture. Utilizing archival material, army reports, the military and popular press, published tracts, and comparative literature, this book explores the response to aviation within the tsarist military in the realm of hopes and fears, institutional adaptations, projects drafted to tap the power of the airplane, the politics of command, policies of recruitment and training to build a cadre of aviators, and the rituals that paid homage to this revolutionary new weapon. In contrast to a historiography which generally portrays aviation as incompatible with an extremely conservative, even backward, military culture, this study paints a far more complex and dynamic picture. Numerous tsarist officers recognized that the airplane presented both a serious challenge and a real opportunity: it exposed the limitations of Russia’s economic, technological, and infrastructural development while simultaneously offering a way to overcome them and a means to assert Russia’s development, pride, and place as a great European power despite heightening fears of failure. Army of the Sky illustrates further how disparate responses to this situation influenced tsarist officer culture. Although the concept of «modernization» remained framed around familiar binaries, aviation recast and infused with new meaning juxtapositions of Russia and the West, imitation and contamination, and the imperatives of progress and the legacies of backwardness. Aviation helped to remold prevailing paradigms of hierarchy, authority, deference, and duty. This volume concludes that the tsarist officer community ultimately offered unique opportunities to cultivate a culture of military aviation and thereby to master the challenge of modernization in a uniquely Russian, an Imperial Russian, manner. This book will be of great interest to historians of both the military and late Imperial Russia as well as aviation enthusiasts.

Through the last century, Catholic fraternity alumni have served as German chancellors, presidents, federal ministers, state executives, and leading voices in Germany’s parliament. They have played leading roles in the Catholic press, in Catholic youth groups, in Catholic civic associations, and in the German Catholic hierarchy. After World War II, Catholic fraternity alumni played founding roles in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU), the two parties that led West Germany’s transition from its catastrophic defeat («zero hour») to the economic miracle (1949–1969). This book considers the ideas that many of these Catholic leaders encountered as college students or as active alumni in their fraternities in the fifteen years before Adolf Hitler came to power.

Gustave Hervé (1871–1944) seemed to have traditional Breton roots and a typical republican education. As a young socialist journalist and professor, he gained notoriety following a 1901 article which appeared to plant the tricolor in a dung pile. When French socialists unified in 1905, the Hervéistes were an influential minority. The antimilitarist movement called Hervéism gradually emerged as a quixotic crusade to unite revolutionaries against war and for socialism. Hervé soon founded a weekly newspaper, La Guerre Sociale. Over the next six years, press campaigns, trials, prison, demonstrations, strikes, and conspiratorial organizations maintained Hervé’s profile and sold newspapers. Ironically, Hervé advertised conspiracies, which suggests revolutionary theater more than practical politics. Among Hervé’s rivals, such theatrics often generated resentment. While Hervé’s movement succeeded as a media experience, his leftist competitors became jealous and skeptical. As revolutionary theater Hervéism might have been entertaining, but the actors and some of the audience often confused revolutionary art with political reality. By 1911 the ingenuous Hervé felt betrayed. His failure to unite revolutionaries began an evolution toward the nation and its traditional Catholic faith. Besides the international situation, one crucial determinant in Hervé’s evolution toward French national socialism sympathetic to fascism involved ongoing rivalries within the French Left. Hervé’s marginal interwar national socialist parties sought to employ patriotism and religion to solve French problems. By 1935 he attempted to draft Pétain to lead an authoritarian republic. Gradually losing hope in Pétain after the fall of France, the aging Hervé put his faith in Christian socialism.