The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1914–1944

In The War Guilt Problem, Norman Ingram builds upon his previous assessment of French pacifism. To resume his previous argument, Ingram noted that the interwar peace movement in France should be understood as a more internally divided movement than Anglo-American movements and witnessed a dialectic of old (legalist) and new (absolutist or ‘integral’) pacifism. In this new work, Ingram focuses upon the Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), the organization created to protect civil liberties in 1898 during France’s most notorious case of injustice that polarized the nation and stirred a storm of anti-Semitic violence: the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906). The affair profoundly challenged French republican institutions and values prefiguring future existential threats of 1914 and 1940. Ingram’s book explores the entangled relationship between the latter two of these defining moments of early twentieth-century French republicanism. This impressive monograph rests on original research using the papers of the LDH. Despite the widespread assumption that these materials had been destroyed, they were repatriated to France from Russia in 2001. Moreover, German archives concerning the LDH’s fraternal interlocutors east of the Rhine supplements Ingram’s evidence. This adds a really novel dimension setting the context of the dialogue with the German sister organization the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte.

Argument (complex analysis) · Context (archaeology) · Dialectic · German · Humanities · Indignation · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

• “Intellectual demobilisation” in the Franco-German relations of the 1920s

  I E Magadeev•INTELLIGENTSIA AND THE WORLD•2023

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