Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal have co-edited a volume entitled France and Britain in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. In today's blog post, they discuss the recent controversies surrounding interpretations of Britain's role in the First World War.
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Michael Gove’s historical interventions always provoke controversy and his recent attack on a supposedly dominant “left-wing” interpretation of the First World War was no exception. Whatever one thinks of his forays into history – and, on this occasion, he directly mentioned two contributors to our recent book, William Philpott and Gary Sheffield – they at least have the benefit of focusing popular attention on issues of major importance.
So, before dismissing the war of words between the Education Secretary and his detractors as nothing more than an exercise in ideological point-scoring, it is worth thinking about the wider implications of Gove’s critique. For his desire to rehabilitate the First World War and rescue it from the condescension of British comedy conceals a crucial point: namely, just how much the memories of war remain confined within national borders and how easy it is, still now, to forget that Britain did not fight alone.
This is one of the main lessons of our book, which brought together a wide range of historians to discuss the tangled memories of the two world wars in Britain and France. In their own ways, each contributor urged the historical profession and members of the public to consider the complexity of twentieth-century conflicts from a comparative and transnational perspective. Even crossing the Channel and seeing the First World War from French soil yields interesting – and surprising – insights.
For instance, the Blackadder-esque satire that sometimes surrounds the First World War in Britain has few parallels in France, where the dark humour of a song like Georges Brassens’s ‘La Guerre de 14-18’ was considered deeply transgressive when it was released in 1961. It was always easier for the British to distance themselves from the horrors of the First World War and over time this came to be expressed in a certain ironic distance. For the French, it was their land and their territory at stake: the killing fields of Verdun could never be a laughing matter.
Likewise, a Franco-British comparison can shed light on what Gove describes as the lack of “patriotism” in discussions surrounding the First World War. Whereas in France the tragedy of the “Grande Guerre” only partly undermined French interwar militarism, the same was not true in Britain, where the war was quickly seen as a folly and a monumental waste of human life. It was the conflict itself which put paid to British triumphalism about the First World War, which explains why it is so hard to resurrect these feelings today.
It is important to recognise that the First World War was, and remains, one of Britain’s greatest military tragedies. The French subsequently experienced the catastrophic Fall of France in 1940 and the humiliation of colonial defeats in Indochina in 1954 and Algeria in 1962. These provided many opportunities for introspection and national guilt. The story in Britain was different: if British memories of the First World War are, in Gove’s words, of a “misbegotten shambles”, it is because the war remains one of the most significant scars on national memory.
Indeed, one might argue that Gove’s plea for a patriotic view of the First World War is actually an attempt to give it the same comforting glow as the Second World War, which has been mythologised as the quintessential example of British resolve and independence. But this would be to succumb to the (common) temptation of reading the First World War through the lens of the Second World War – a problem discussed at length in the final chapters of our volume. It would also be a grave historical error: the “Dunkirk Spirit”, of which the British are so proud, rested on the immense sacrifice of thousands of French soldiers who gave their lives to protect the departing British and Allied forces.
This kind of forgotten history is a reminder that global conflicts demand global perspectives. While the British and the French were by no means the only actors in the First World War, telling their stories together, rather than separately, is as valuable today as it was a hundred years ago.
Robert Tombs is Professor of French History at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Emile Chabal is a Chancellor’s Fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
Britain and France In Two World Wars is available for purchase through the Bloomsbury website.
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