The view from the border: a comparative study of autonomism in Alsace and the Moselle, 1918–29
This article offers a comparative analysis of the origins and development of autonomism in interwar Alsace and the Moselle. Upon the liberation of the provinces in November 1918, the local populations of Alsace and the Moselle enthusiastically welcomed French troops. For President Raymond Poincare´ this enthusiasm constituted a clear ‘plebiscite’. But, in light of perceived heavy-handedness on the part of the new French rulers, this enthusiasm proved short-lived and rapidly gave way to a widespread malaise. In response to local fears for the preservation of their distinctive social, linguistic and religious traditions, Autonomist organisations emerged to oppose the loss of what they perceived to be the soul and character of Alsace and the Moselle. They rapidly became a pervasive force in local politics, cutting across ideological and class barriers and dividing parties. For the French government, autonomism represented a serious threat to national unity. For local autonomists, however, it represented an attempt to preserve local socio-economic structures and linguistic and cultural practices. The discussion here seeks to reposition autonomism within the context of local politics and to compare the distinct experiences of Alsace and the Moselle in the decade after their return to French rule.
La jeunesse alsacienne et la France: mouvements de jeunes et nation, 1918–50
Abstract This paper deals with youth organizations in Alsace, a region standing at the crossroads between France and Germany. It focuses on how the issue of nationhood was constructed within these youth groups during the first half of the twentieth century. Our hypothesis is that these socio-educational organizations, training grounds for autonomy and responsibility, are based on a principle of civic engagement from their young members. To this effect, in post-First World War Alsace, these organizations served as vehicles for the reintegration of this region into France, a process that cannot, however, be considered without respect for local social and cultural specificities. In other words, with regard to the activist direction of these movements, a local socio-political configuration seems to far outweigh the ideology of each group.
A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat
largely absent in French culture generate, although both were socially and educationally conservative concepts by World War I. Ringer convincingly argues that German academics, who denounced almost without exception the evils of "positivism," were really opposing materialist and natural-science methods in the humanities and social sciences and worried about the eroding effect on the unity of knowledge posed by overspecialization. By contrast, in France, positivism was "an orthodox philosophy of science and the methodological underpinning of republican social and political doctrines" (p. 211). There was also a reaction to positivism in France at the beginning of the twentieth century, drawing on some of the same arguments current in Germany and reflecting a socially conservative agenda. Ringer also has interesting suggestions about classicism and modernism in the narrower educational as well as the broader cultural sense, about the similarities and differences between higher educational systems, and about differing structures of the bourgeoisie and social origins of academic ideology in the two countries. Significantly and appropriately, Ringer attacks many old myths about the differences between their modern cultures that were inflated by political animosities, as in World War I. On the other hand, as a good comparativist should, he points out important differences in the traditions and circumstances of the two countries that led to sometimes different ways of pegging the "fields of knowledge," the arena of intellectual debate. Although the book is primarily focused on France, its side views and comparisons to Germany are most valuable in themselves. And it is heartening to see that some historians actually undertake international comparisons of this complexity, rather than merely bewail the lack of them.