Search results
This book provides a unique perspective on the Allied bombing of France during the Second World War which killed around 57,000 French civilians. Using oral history as well as archival research, it provides an insight into children's wartime lives in which bombing often featured prominently, even though it has slipped out of French collective memory. The book compares three French towns with different experiences of bombing: Boulogne-Billancourt , Brest, and Lille. Divided into three parts dealing with expectations, experiences and explanations of bombing, the book considers the child's view of wartime violence, analysing resilience, understanding and trauma. The first part of the book deals with the time before bombing. It examines how the French prepared for war and preparations made specifically for bombing, showing how state-level and municipal-level preparations. The second part considers the time during bombing and its aftermath. It discusses the experience of being bombed, examining children's practical, sensory and emotional responses. The fascinating and frightening scenes in the immediate aftermath of bombing that made lasting impressions on children, including destruction, chaos and encounters with violent, public death. Changes in status as a result of bombing becoming a sinistre, refugee or evacuee had far-reaching consequences in some children's lives, affecting their education and economic situation. The last section looks at the way in which air raids were explained to the French population. It considers the propaganda that criticised and defended the Allies, and an understanding of the history of Vichy.
’s perspective. Stories are integral to human communication and our primary means of transmitting experience. The oral narratives that comprise this book’s sources are stories; that is, they are narrated versions of parts of autobiographical memory. They are interpretations of the past. In his essay on ‘The painter of modern life’, the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose work ushered in modern(ist) ideas about subjectivity, wrote that when a work of art is viewed, what reaches that spectator is not the painter’s replication of a scene from reality, but a
Death is simultaneously silent, and very loud, in political life. Politicians and media scream about potential threats lurking behind every corner, but academic discourse often neglects mortality. Life is everywhere in theorisation of security, but death is nowhere.
Making a bold intervention into the Critical Security Studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security after the Death of God – arguing that security emerged in response to the removal of promises to immortal salvation. Combining the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman with literature from the sociology of death, Heath-Kelly shows how security is a response to the death anxiety implicit within the human condition.
The book explores the theoretical literature on mortality before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Center in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, Heath-Kelly shows that practices of memorialization are a retrospective security endeavour – they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority.
The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of Critical Security Studies, Memory Studies and International Politics.
that a particular event – bombing – might produce. Oral history has illuminated shared memories of bombing, within and across locations and age ranges. Whatever elements memories share, however, they remain heterogeneous. That bombing made an impact on the interviewees’ lives is clear from their stories; but without a place in commonly told versions of the war in France, many do not remember it that way. Evaluating the impact of bombing on the individual The Allied bombing of France has left its mark on survivors into old age. These traces often appear in forms of
v v The consequences of bombing Yvette Chapalain: I’ve got some bad memories of those years, which still upset me a bit. It was just that we didn’t have any choice, but were sent away to these other schools where we weren’t made very welcome by the other children, the children who lived there. We were ‘the refugees’. We were sent to the centre of Finistère. Even though it was a Catholic school, eh! Us, ‘the refugees’. The children who lived there lived with their parents, lots of them farmers. And they were spoilt. They had good bread, pancakes, things like
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.
little cupboard, very small, but we were all in there. The memory I have is of being squashed in there, with my brothers and my mother, and my father who – there wasn’t enough space for him, so he was a bit further away, and everyone lying on the ground. Then it started, and it lasted an eternity. It lasted (so I found out later) 45 minutes, in two waves. But, well, you can’t imagine – how can I put it? – the terror, you know. But for us, there, the memory that I have, it’s with each – there was – a cluster of bombs which fell, and as they fell they made a terrible
happened to him and to France, and has enabled him to compose a version of his own past with which he is comfortable by fitting disturbing memories into the wider patterns of history. Why be angry about what happened in La Chapelle when it was a drop in the ocean compared to what others dealt with? This relativisation is common across the stories. The Allies: friends? Criticism of the Allies clearly emerged in several of the oral narratives. Did this criticism echo anti-Allied propaganda in matters such as British betrayal, the designation of enemies and the creation of
-Soir. And I used to read it. I was seven, eight, nine years old, and I read the paper. I have very clear memories, for example, of the Spanish Civil War, news about the bombing of Valencia, the battle of Madrid, you see. Between Franco and the Republicans. I remember very clearly the invasion of Albania by Mussolini in 1938, and I remember the Anschluss very clearly too. I was really aware of that. We felt like war was just a normal part of things. It was part of our life. And in 1939, I remember my reaction when they declared war. All around you, you heard: ‘Ah, we have
installations – factories, railway depots, and so on – were surrounded by the communities whose members worked in them. Home and family were at the centre of children’s worlds, and journeys across bombed towns to find them were nailed to adult memories of the aftermath. Children also encountered death – first-, second- and third-hand – in the wake of air raids; these were public, violent deaths, that contributed to juvenile understanding of war and bombing. War drew the public and private realms together, but wedged between state and citizen was community. Assistance in the