The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940

While French schoolteachers of the late nineteenth century have been widely celebrated for converting 'peasants into Frenchmen', their interwar counterparts have enjoyed little such acclaim. Both contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have condemned French pacifist schoolteachers of the interwar decades for cultivating antipatriotism and facilitating the defeat of 1940. In this book, Mona L. Siegel challenges such equations of teachers' pacifism with national betrayal. Drawn to pacifi...