Following the end of the First World War, a new world order emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was an order riddled with contradictions and problems that were only finally resolved after the Second World War. Beyond the Great War brings together a group of both well-established and younger historians who share a rejection of the dominant view of the peace process that ended the First World War. The book expands beyond the traditional focus on diplomatic and high political history to question the assumption that the Paris Peace Treaties were the progenitors of a new world order. Extending the ongoing debate about the success of the Treaty of Versailles and surrounding events, this collection approaches the heritage of the Great War through a variety of lenses: gender, race, the high politics of diplomacy, the peace movement, provision for veterans, international science, socialism, and the way the war ended. Collectively, contributors argue that the treaties were at best a mitigated success, and that the "brave new world" of 1919 cannot be separated from the Great War that preceded it.

This book breaks new ground in examining for the first time the history of pacifism in inter-war France. Norman Ingram sets out to define the contours of the French peace movement, to explore its organization, tactics, and intellectual content, and to place it in the broader context of French political culture in the years between the two world wars. Based particularly on hitherto untapped primary sources, The Politics of Dissent traces the development of French pacifism from its nineteenth-century roots. Dr Ingram analyses the intertwining of three strands of dissent: over the origins of the First World War and the thesis of unique German war guilt; over the nature of contemporary French political society; and over the belief that another war would spell the end of western civilization. He also explores the nature and development of feminist pacifism in the inter-war period. His comprehensive and scholarly analysis reveals that, unlike the primarily ethical or religious thinking which underpinned the Anglo-American peace movement, the nature of French pacifism was essentially political, with some elements prepared even to accept violence as a means to a desirable end, especially in response to the threat of incipient fascism.

The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme is a significant new volume from Norman Ingram, addressing the history of the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), an organisation founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair and which lay at the very centre of French Republican politics in the era of the two world wars. Ingram posits that the Ligue's inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War was what led to its decline by 1937, well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940. As well as developing our understanding of how the issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the LDH from 1914 down to the Second World War, this volume also explores the aetiology of French pacifism, expanding on the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism. It argues that from 1916 onwards, one can see a principled dissent from the Union sacree war effort that occurred within mainstream French Republicanism and not on the syndicalist or anarchist fringes. Based on substantial research in a large number of French archives, primarily in the papers of the LDH which were repatriated to France from the former Soviet Union in late 2001, but also on considerable new research in the German archives, the book proposes a new explanatory model to help us understand some of the choices made in Vichy France, moving beyond the usual triptych of collaboration, resistance or accommodation.