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For many civilians, including young children, bombing became a part of daily life. This chapter shows how children adapted to repeated bombing, revealing many of them as active participants and decision-makers within society. As bombing evolved, routines had to adapt. People switched shelters as air raids worsened, depending on local resources. The upheaval of nocturnal commuting was disturbing, and depended on available resources and finances, but it enabled families to get enough sleep to function more normally, and gave people a sense of protecting themselves. As Allied bombing policy developed, so did the way that the French State and municipalities met the challenge; families and individuals also adapted behaviour. Emotional responses of excitement, fear, anxiety and shock existed in all of the locations, pointing towards a universality of qualitative experience, because of common ways of processing the sensory impressions of bombing and the emotional states they engendered.
This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
possible … but some bombs must inevitably miss their mark’.54 Finally, pro-Allied propaganda refused to paint civilians as victims and martyrs. Not only were the French portrayed as being intelligently rational – they understood why they were being bombed – they were brave participants in the fight for liberation. Presenting some of the letters sent from listeners in France to the BBC, broadcaster Brunius repeated on air their ‘testimonies of reason’: the French, he said, were calm under the bombs.55 The population had to remain steady; British popular support was
able to retain him somewhere or other.63 One who is incapable of law, that much is clear, cannot be a part of and participant in law, in the sense explicated by Rousseau (see above, p. 14), since the legal order’s turning of every individual into a part of a social whole, into an equal citizen, is what gives rise to the curse or nightmare of self-judgment from which the revisionary relief of law is meant to release Adam. But doesn’t this inevitably lead to the fact, that for the one who is released into legal incapacity, the law is once again just an external and
Occupation, born in 1939 and 1937 respectively. Their consensual comments on their own understanding of the Allies’ motivations and of the context of the war more broadly underline the limitations of children’s understanding, as they see it. In clear contrast to the older Thomas brothers in Boulogne-Billancourt, Thérèse and Bernard, living in the Nord, described their ignorance. While the Thomas brothers narrated their adolescent selves as participants in the past, Thérèse and Bernard describe themselves as bewildered bystanders. Yet children were not seen by opinion
positive explanations for it and to play down lasting negative effects may derive from that part of national memory of the period that has left people bound up with guilt and shame. People who did not experience a direct or close hit did not consider themselves to be victims of bombing; nor could they consider themselves participants – through suffering – in liberation. This affected their perception of bombing, and the bombers, both then and now. Christian Solet (Boulogne-Billancourt) said that ‘those families who had deaths because of the bombing, perhaps they’d be
. Not only did Vichy wish to harness bombing to its communitarian project, but it hoped that the services of adolescents would contribute to its goal of reshaping French society. From fourteen years old, young people were therefore not just observers of bombing, or its victims, but were active participants in the aftermath. Drawing on the rhetoric of duty and sacrifice, Vichy’s Secrétariat Général de la Jeunesse (General Secretary for Youth) set up the Équipes nationales (National Teams) around the middle of 1942, organising young volunteers on the Occupied Zone
members of the legal community as participants of an interpretative process and thus treats them as subjects rather than objects of the legal procedure, it hopes to reconcile the adversaries with each other and at the same time with the legal rule. If we then again replace the religion-based motivation to enter into such a strenuous study with the illocutionary binding energies set free by radically democratic and participatory processes of deliberation, we arrive at a notion of law as a voluntary agreement that is based precisely on rational insight and that Benjamin
oral history evidence: the moment of the interview, its participants, its context all have an (often indeterminable) impact on what arises during the couple of hours that the microphone is on. Another day, another interviewer, another set of data, perhaps. In truth, this instability exists inside all historical evidence. The creation of any document is contingent on a range of circumstantial factors, yet we rarely know them. With oral history we have a chance to try to understand them. The interviews I conducted were part of a relationship between me, the
responses. This chapter answers a fundamental question at the root of any attempt to describe the past: what was it like? In Chapter 5, I show how children adapted to repeated bombing, revealing many of them as active participants and decision-makers within society. As Allied bombing policy developed, so did the way that the French State and municipalities met the challenge; families and individuals also adapted behaviour, with evolving routines that responded to understandings of the threat that were now based in experience. Chapter 6 examines the fascinating and