Academic literature on the topic 'World War, 1914-1918 – Press coverage – France'

Fathers, families, and the state in France, 1914–1945. By Kristen Stromberg Childers. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. 261. ISBN 0-8014-4122-6. £23.95.Origins of the French welfare state: the struggle for social reform in France, 1914–1947. By Paul V. Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 251. ISBN 0-521-81334-4. £49.99.Britain, France, and the financing of the First World War. By Martin Horn. Montreal and Kingston: McGill – Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. 249. ISBN 0-7735-2293-X. £65.00.The gold standard illusion: France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard, 1914–1939. By Kenneth Mouré. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 297. ISBN 0-19-924904-0. £40.00.Workers' participation in post-Liberation France. By Adam Steinhouse. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001. Pp. 245. ISBN 0-7391-0282-6. $70.00 (hb). ISBN 0-7391-0283-4. $24.95 (pbk).In the traditional historiography of twentieth-century France the period after the Second World War is usually contrasted favourably with that after 1918. After 1945, new men with new ideas, born out of the shock of defeat in 1940 and resistance to Nazi occupation, laid the basis for an economic and social democracy. The welfare state was created, women were given full voting rights, and French security, in both economic and territorial respects, was partially guaranteed by integrating West Germany into a new supranational institutional structure in Western Europe. 1945 was to mark the beginning of the ‘30 glorious years’ of peace and prosperity enjoyed by an expanding population in France. In sharp contrast, the years after 1918 are characterized as a period dominated by France's failed attempts to restore its status as a great power. Policies based on making the German taxpayer finance France's restoration are blamed for contributing to the great depression after 1929 and the rise of Hitler. However, as more research is carried out into the social and economic reconstruction of France after both world wars, it is becoming clear that the basis of what was to become the welfare state after 1945 was laid in the aftermath of the First World War. On the other hand, new reforms adopted in 1945 which did not build on interwar policies, such as those designed to give workers a voice in decision-making at the workplace, proved to be short-lived.

In my last editorial I was contemplating living the new and unexpected experience of life with Covid 19. Six months ago, was a time for contemplation. We were all entering into an event of major historical significance. The world has experienced epidemics before, and we had only to turn to the works of writers such as Camus to realise how recurrent human behaviour is. We tend so often to be caught by surprise despite the lessons that are so readily available to us through reference to history. The Spanish ‘flu epidemic of 1919 was the obvious benchmark to which we could turn. Following hot on the heels of the Great War of 1914-1918 it was responsible for more casualties than occurred in the war to end all wars (50 million). It infected 500 million people worldwide. After just over ten months we are a long, long way from those sorts of figures. As of 12th November, 51,975,458 case of infection have been reported. Deaths attributed to the virus number 1,281,309 worldwide. Of course, what makes Covid 19 so significant is not simply that it should have happened, but that it is the first pandemic in this era of globalisation which we have entered only comparatively recently. Some might remember the SARS epidemic which affected mainly people in Asia. As indicated by its name, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2), it was very similar initially in its effects. Yet, after first emerging in 2002, it was eradicated less than two years later. It seems that this was achieved largely by what has been called simple public health measures. This involved “testing people with symptoms (fever and respiratory problems), isolating and quarantining suspected cases, and restricting travel.” These same measures of course have been implemented in most countries following the virus’ spread to Italy early in 2020. However, the fact that different nations have responded differently and also experienced very different outcomes should be of considerable interest as we consider the whole concept of a global threat and global responses. The ten worst affected countries currently are in order: Contry; Confirmed Cases; Deaths United States; 10,460,302; 244,421 India; 8,684,039; 128,165 Brazil; 5,749,007; 163,406 France; 1,865,538; 42,535 Russia; 1,836,960; 31,593 Spain; 1,417,709; 40,105 Argentina; 1,273,343; 34,531 United Kingdom; 1,256,725; 50,365 Colombia; 1,165,326; 33,312 Italy; 1,028,424; 42,953 They are dominated by the advanced economies of the northern hemisphere. The countries who have previously experienced the SARS epidemic in Asia have fared comparatively lightly. Bearing in mind that statistics of this nature may not be strictly comparable given variation in the criteria used and the methods of sourcing and collecting this information, it is still interesting to hypothesise why outcomes can differ so much. Explanations might include reference to the environments in which people live – physical space, climate and availability of sophisticated health care systems to name a few – or they might dwell on the culture of those involved, their willingness to follow instructions imposed upon them, the importance of competing objectives that might make prioritising health and physical wellness less of a priority. Whatever the case, satisfactory explanations are more likely to involve some interactions involving measures of both the individuals and the environments within which they live. Any attempt to explain or understand human behaviour needs to consider a variety of factors and knowing how to take account of them is an important part of the skill base that scholars of international and comparative studies bring with them. Such skills and knowledge are more important in a globalised world than they have ever been. Yet such skills may be becoming harder to achieve, precisely because of some of the effects of processes associated with globalisation. I would recommend to you a recent documentary produced by Netflix and widely available on YouTube. “The Social Dilemma” is an examination of the use of social media and in particular focuses on the relationship between the growing addiction amongst young people to the use of smartphones and, specifically their social media programmes, and the rising levels of concern about deteriorating mental health and wellbeing among the world’s youth. It draws a relationship between the psychological disorder of narcissism and the failure of phone obsessed young people to experience real human to human interaction, with a related increase in aggressive bullying and dysfunctional behaviour. Thus, the results of experiencing interactions and personal validation through the proxy world of social media, rather than face to face, is a dehumanisation of the individual and leads to a distorted experience of the world in simple dichotomies of a single view, right or wrong. So, whatever the continuing effects of the pandemic, as these continue to unfold, it will be important that we continue to build our understanding of other people in their own worlds. We need to avoid the trap of believing that our own world is the only world and the right world. However smart artificial intelligence becomes, a screen is only two dimensional and it is the extra dimensions that enable us to grow as humans and cope with the complexity and challenges of our own unique worlds. One of the less helpful trends of our globalised digitised world, has been the pursuit and glorification of the cult of celebrity. One of the difficulties of that celebrity status is it is frequently awarded on the basis of undeserving and irrelevant characteristics such as, acting ability, physical beauty or sporting reputation. Yet many seem to feel that this status entitles them to pontificate or attempt to influence others in areas that have nothing to do with their expertise. Ricky Gervais, in his chairing of the 2020 golden globes award, brought a refreshing dose of reality in advising the celebrities who were to receive awards: You are in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up accept your little award. Thank your agent and your God and **** off. OK? It is in that spirit of willingness to learn from the work of a range of colleagues working in a range of places and professional situations around the world, I commend to you the contributions to be found in the following pages. To start the ball rolling, we have a report from Hairui Liu, Wei Shen and Peter Hastie on the application of a curriculum model which was developed in the US and has since gained some popularity in a number of settings around the world. The origins of sport education came from a realisation that, in too many situations, physical education had failed to excite the same degree of enthusiasm among school pupils as could often be observed when they involved themselves in sport. The model thus extends the skill/technique focus which is found in many traditional physical education settings, to include more of the dimensions of sport – formal competition, affiliation, festivity experienced over a season. They concluded that, within this Chinese university context, the students achieved a higher level of performance and more enthusiastic engagement when the model was adopted as a basis for their learning. Our second article moves from an education setting to a contemporary sport science framework, the world of professional sport and one of the higher levels of competition in the world – the English Championship. Rhys Carr, Rich Mullen and Morgan Williams monitored the running intensity of players throughout a season. In particular they questioned the demands for high intensity running when playing in a 4-4-2 formation and implementing a high press strategy, such as adopted by Liverpool in their highly successful 2019 English Premiership season. They concluded that, for players in the centre forward and wide midfield positions, the demands created were impossible to maintain for an entire match. They were then able to draw out some practical and tactical implications for managers and their support staff, relating to substitution strategy and the physical match preparation of players in these positions and with these strategic responsibilities. Our third article involves an exploration of the perpetual discomfort many of us feel as educators when we compare the practice of sport against the ideals we hold for it. As professionals in the field, many of us are driven by our belief in what sport can offer. Yet the modern commodification of sport, coupled with the excessive need to win as a motive that exceeds all others, consistently produces behaviours and outcomes which we seek to disassociate from our professional practices. The article by Irantzu Ibanez, Ana Zuazagoitia, Ibon Echeazarra, Luis Maria Zulaika and Iker Ros is set in the context of the Basque region of Spain and explores the values held by students in their pre-service training with regard to the practice of extracurricular sport. The students show an awareness of the mismatch between their ideals of extracurricular sport as an educational experience and the influence on current practices that comes from the way in which sport is conducted in the society at large. The authors conclude with a plea for greater alignment between the practice of sport in schools and teh educational values that should guide it. Our final contribution is from South Africa where Lesego Phetlhe, Heather Morris- Eyton and Alliance Kubayi report on the concerns of football (soccer) coaches in Guateng province. It is clear that these coaches, in common with others around the world, suffer a degree of stress in their chosen occupation. The sources of this stress are to be found in the nature of the complex tasks they are expected to manage, as well as in the always challenging job of managing the players for whom they are responsible. To this can be added the difficult environmental conditions they are faced with, as well as the inevitable concern with having to produce results for the players and their team. Their research has produced some useful guidelines for administrators that can facilitate the jobs of the coaches and lead to benefits in enhanced performances and results. Finally, in our book review, Luiz Uehara evaluates Jorge Knijnik’s thoughtful analysis of the impact of the 2014 world cup on Brazil. From both author and reviewer, it is possible to feel the pride and passion in their nation of birth and its special contribution to the world’s most popular game. It is my privilege to recommend the work of these international scholars to you. I leave you the reader with the hope that in introducing our next volume, I will be able to celebrate with you more positive news about the progress of the pandemic and its implications for international and comparative sport and physical education. John Saunders Brisbane, November 2020

Defence date: 10 December 2007
Examining Board: Prof. Regina Schulte, EUI (Supervisor) ; Prof. Annette Becker, Université de Paris X-Nanterre (External Supervisor) ; Prof. Christian Delporte, Université de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines ; Prof. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, EUI.
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wollongong, 2003.
Title from PDF title page (viewed on Aug. 13, 2005). Ill., maps, and facsims. in print version are lacking in electronic version. Includes bibliographical references.

AbstractIn general, historians of science and historians of ideas do not focus on critical appraisals of scientific ideas such as vitalism and materialism from Catholic intellectuals in eastern and southeastern Europe, nor is there much comparative work available on how significant European ideas in the life sciences such as materialism and vitalism were understood and received outside of France, Germany, Italy and the UK. Insofar as such treatments are available, they focus on the contributions of nineteenth century vitalism and materialism to later twentieth ideologies, as well as trace the interactions of vitalism and various intersections with the development of genetics and evolutionary biology see Mosse (The culture of Western Europe: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Westview Press, Boulder, 1988, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. Howard Fertig Publisher, New York, 1978; Turda et al., Crafting humans: from genesis to eugenics and beyond. V&R Unipress, Goettingen, 2013). English and American eugenicists (such as William Caleb Saleeby), and scores of others underscored the importance of vitalism to the future science of “eugenics” (Saleeby, The progress of eugenics. Cassell, New York, 1914). Little has been written on materialism qua materialism or vitalism qua vitalism in eastern Europe.The Czech and Slovene cases are interesting for comparison insofar as both had national awakenings in the middle of the nineteenth century which were linguistic and scientific, while also being religious in nature (on the Czech case see David, Realism, tolerance, and liberalism in the Czech National awakening: legacies of the Bohemian reformation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2010; on the Slovene case see Kann and David, Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918. University of Washington Press, Washington, 2010). In the case of many Catholic writers writing in Moravia, there are not only slight noticeable differences in word-choice and construction but a greater influence of scholastic Latin, all the more so in the works of nineteenth century Czech priests and bishops.In this case, German, Latin and literary Czech coexisted in the same texts. Thus, the presence of these three languages throws caution on the work on the work of Michael Gordin, who argues that scientific language went from Latin to German to vernacular. In Czech, Slovenian and Croatian cases, all three coexisted quite happily until the First World War, with the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s being particularly suited to linguistic flexibility, where oftentimes writers would put in parentheses a Latin or German word to make the meaning clear to the audience. Note however that these multiple paraphrases were often polemical in the case of discussions of materialism and vitalism.In Slovenia Čas (Time or The Times) ran from 1907 to 1942, running under the muscular editorship of Fr. Aleš Ušeničnik (1868–1952) devoted hundreds of pages often penned by Ušeničnik himself or his close collaborators to wide-ranging discussions of vitalism, materialism and its implied social and societal consequences. Like their Czech counterparts Fr. Matěj Procházka (1811–1889) and Fr. Antonín LenzMaterialismMechanismDynamism (1829–1901), materialism was often conjoined with "pantheism" and immorality. In both the Czech and the Slovene cases, materialism was viewed as a deep theological problem, as it made the Catholic account of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrifice into the real presence untenable. In the Czech case, materialism was often conjoined with “bestiality” (bestialnost) and radical politics, especially agrarianism, while in the case of Ušeničnik and Slovene writers, materialism was conjoined with “parliamentarianism” and “democracy.” There is too an unexamined dialogue on vitalism, materialism and pan-Slavism which needs to be explored.Writing in 1914 in a review of O bistvu življenja (Concerning the essence of life) by the controversial Croatian biologist Boris Zarnik) Ušeničnik underscored that vitalism was an speculative outlook because it left the field of positive science and entered the speculative realm of philosophy. Ušeničnik writes that it was “Too bad” that Zarnik “tackles” the question of vitalism, as his zoological opinions are interesting but his philosophy was not “successful”. Ušeničnik concluded that vitalism was a rather old idea, which belonged more to the realm of philosophy and Thomistic theology then biology. It nonetheless seemed to provide a solution for the particular characteristics of life, especially its individuality. It was certainly preferable to all the dangers that materialism presented. Likewise in the Czech case, Emmanuel Radl (1873–1942) spent much of his life extolling the virtues of vitalism, up until his death in home confinement during the Nazi Protectorate. Vitalism too became bound up in the late nineteenth century rediscovery of early modern philosophy, which became an essential part of the development of new scientific consciousness and linguistic awareness right before the First World War in the Czech lands. Thus, by comparing the reception of these ideas together in two countries separated by ‘nationality’ but bounded by religion and active engagement with French and German ideas (especially Driesch), we can reconstruct not only receptions of vitalism and materialism, but articulate their political and theological valances.