Disarming hatred\u27 : French Catholics and the legacy of the Great War; Marc Sangnier, 1914-33

THESIS 7686This study focuses on the cultural legacy of the First World War in France in the period 1914-1933. Specifically, it examines the processes of cultural mobilization and cultural demobilization, key concepts that have emerged in the new cultural history of that conflict. The term \u27war culture\u27 is now widely used to identify the system of representations and beliefs that helped to sustain societies at war. However, what happened to this \u27war culture\u27 and to the phenomenon of \u27cultural mobilization\u27 after the armistice of 1918? Clearly, any \u27mobilized\u27 mindset which cast France\u27s enemy - Germany - as a barbaric and dehumanized foe would not disappear as soon as peace terms were concluded. This thesis examines the halting process of overcoming these hatreds in the 1920s from the perspective of French Catholics. Therefore, this is a study of \u27cultural demobilization\u27 and of the attempted \u27disarmament of hatred,\u27 to paraphrase my title. It was decided that the most fruitful methodological approach would be that of the biographical case-study. While not classic biography, such a case-study has the advantage of allowing the historian to humanize apparently amorphous and impersonal historical processes such as demobilizaton and measure their contemporary impact with reference to individuals and their ideological groups