The Gift that Keeps on Taking
The Liberation in French and American Memory of the Second World War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7150845 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paula L Schwartz (0000-0003-4617-6135, Middlebury College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 311-332 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary European History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0960-7773 • E-ISSN: 1469-2171 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0960777324000420 |
| OpenAlex | W4406848610 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
On 7 March 1966, when President Charles de Gaulle announced France's withdrawal from the military, leadership of NATO, he also called for the removal of American troops from French soil. To this the American Secretary of State retorted, ‘and those in French cemeteries as well?’ The United States saw de Gaulle's action as an insulting and traitorous rebuff of Allied commitments forged during and after the war. For the French, however, the move was considered a justifiable assertion of national sovereignty, having little to do with the Allied ‘Liberation’ of France some twenty years earlier. In this article, I explore French and American perceptions of the Liberation using French anthropologist Marcel Mauss's pathbreaking 1923 work, The Gift . How can applying Mauss's ideas at the transnational level make sense of the meanings, (mis)interpretations, and implications of the Liberation for state actors on both sides of the Atlantic
Liberation · Political science · Chemistry · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |