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This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies in the French infantry and navy in 1919. This revolt stretched from France’s intervention against the Soviet Union through the Black Sea, into the Mediterranean and finally resulting in unrest in France’s naval ports. As a consequence, mutineers faced court martials, the threat of the death penalty and years of hard labour.
This research is the result of careful scrutiny of official records and, more importantly, the testimony of dozens of mutineers. It is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers, assessing their own words for the traces of their sensory perceptions, their emotions and their thought processes. It shows that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as simple war-weariness and low morale as inadequate. It demonstrates that an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. It reveals the soundscape (its silences, shouts and songs) and visual aspect of the mutiny. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. It also considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.
This text will interest students, general readers and scholars of the both Great War and its contentious aftermath. Setting the mutiny in the transnational context, it will contribute to the growing interest in 1919 as the twentieth century’s most unruly year.
Chapter 4 Seditious memories: Contestation and cultural resistance T he first months of the Restoration saw the rapid seizure of the authority to speak for the past. The beneficiaries were a group of hard-line Royalists who had objected vocally to the conciliatory atmosphere that defined Charles II’s return to England. Through the passage of legislation that effectively supplanted the programme of oblivion and its clarion call for a process of forgetting, the aptly named Cavalier Parliament unleashed the systematic censure of their erstwhile enemies through
• 5 • Mobilising memory: reading the Second World War in children’s crime fiction of the 1990s and 2000s The 1990s and 2000s in France saw a number of memorial taboos surrounding the Second World War publicly overturned. The most symbolic of these acts occurred during the speech delivered by newly elected President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995 to mark the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver. For the first time in national history, a French head of state officially acknowledged the active support of the Vichy regime and its agents
This book deals with history's relationship to memory. By individual memory, it means a memory that is located in the minds of individuals and through which those individuals have knowledge of things that fall within their personal experience. Memory of this kind is an integral part of the mental functioning of individuals and is closely linked to concepts of personality and selfhood. But, individual or personal memory is also a part of the mental equipment that allows human beings to function in social settings. Its forms are influenced by its social uses, and it makes a contribution to social knowledge and social understanding that can be explored from a social as well as an individual angle. The book explores how individual memory is a resource both for individuals within society and for societies themselves and how it is connected to larger social processes. The exploration of social memory begins as a facet of the discussion of the social dimensions of in individual; it is carried further through the discussion of the workings of memory in social groups. It is then completed by the discussion of the ways in which representations, understandings and senses of the past are produced within the larger society.
5 Associational memory This chapter assesses the associational activity and the mnemonic practices of mutineers, as well as how these changed over time. Any event, not least one as significant for the participants as the mutinies of 1919, possesses an afterlife that unfolds in successive phases.1 Initially, the unofficial knowledge of the Black Sea Mutiny spread, inspiring collective action amongst the armed forces and in France’s port cities. This phase of collective action lasted until the autumn of 1919. Between then and 1923, the mutiny remained a matter of
’ wartime experiences play a prominent role, as emblematic. By presenting his ‘story’ this way, he rendered his high-achieving, atypical family unremarkable: sharing the poignancy of loss that was common to so many families and communities. Examining the intimate ways in which siblings ‘kept’ the memory of brothers contributes to our understanding of how the war is remembered. 3 Revealing and recording love is one of the vital functions of war writing, states Kate McLoughlin. 4 Often these memories remained hidden from view, recorded in private letters and diaries
South Africa – Canada alone was considered to have achieved this level of maturity because it had established a national school of art. The Wembley exhibition has figured as an important moment in national art history only in Canada. 2 In this chapter I explore why that moment was identified by Canada as memorable, and as such written into the annals of national cultural history, whereas it was consigned to insignificance and erased from the collective memory by the other Dominions. I argue that where a nation was most successful
Legacies of colonial empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, and in other forms. Heroic men have not been forgotten but at the same time erstwhile insurgents rebelling against the colonial order are now celebrated as freedom fighters. Even commodities of daily life, such as coffee or rubber, bear the deep imprint of their colonial histories. This book presents imperial history as a history of interwoven, overlapping, partly contradictory memories in which non-European outlooks are considered on a more equal footing, alongside the recollections of former colonial masters. These include imperial architecture in nineteenth-century Algeria, the Koregaon obelisk in India, the Hungarian monument commemorating the thirteen martyrs of Arad, and Japan's twentieth-century post-war repositories of memories of war, empire, suffering and heroism. The heroes and villains of the imperial era include the Dutch colonial governor Jan Pietersz Coen; Robert Clive, the victor of Plassey; and the explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Other manifestations of memory include Imam Shamil who resisted the troops of Tsarist Russia. The book looks at the fragility and precariousness of repositories of imperial memory. It traces the cycles of obliviousness and remembrance, of suppression and political instrumentalisation that have accompanied the history of Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The history of Berlin's Botanical Garden is intimately intertwined with Germany's colonial endeavours but this important aspect of the institution's history has remained all but suppressed.
The imperial past is all around us. Decades have come and gone since the dissolution of Europe’s great colonial empires, but the footprints they have left in the realm of memory all over the world are plain to see. Legacies of empire are present in the demarcations of state borders, in architecture and urban topographies, on the pedestals of monuments, in books, on cinema
2 MEMORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL In everyday life, if not always in scholarly discourse, when we speak of memory and remembering, we tend to mean something that we take to be personal and attributable to individuals. We all know what it feels like to have a memory of something, to strive to remember, to be aware of having forgotten, and we regard these experiences as ones that are at once part of the common human condition and yet innate, for each of us, in our existence as separate and self-conscious individual beings. Our memories seem (in Fentress and Wickham