Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

The articles in this special issue originated as a panel on political violence and terrorism in modern France at the Society for the Study of French History conference in summer 2021. Taken together, they help deepen our understanding of these two issues, and particularly the ways in which they intersected with gender and race in interwar and wartime France. In his classic lecture Politics as a Vocation, the German sociologist Max Weber famously defined a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force as the defining characteristic of the modern state. Weber's maxim cannot have been based on French history. From the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789 to the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, France was gripped by constitutional uncertainty and political violence. Monarchies, empires, and republics rose and fell with alarming speed as different factions competed to claim power and remake the country in their image. This uncertainty was brought to an end by the establishment of the Third Republic, which would go on to last for seventy years until its abolition after France's defeat to Nazi Germany in 1940.

This article argues that the Union Nationale des Anciens Combattants Coloniaux (UNACC) was the premier organization in a broader colonialist movement. Colonialists sought to transpose the racialized and patriarchal hierarchies that drove colonial conquest to the metropole for authoritarian and fascist purposes. The first case study of the UNACC, this article traces its creation, ideology, and activities in order to show that the group appropriated the Republican label for its own anti-democratic agenda. UNACC newspapers reveal that colonialists believed that they had a mission to civilize the metropolitan Republic by destroying anti-French forces of disorder, which included leftists, pacifists, immigrants, and feminists. To do so, the UNACC crafted a colonialist identity and organized white colonial veterans into a political force.

This article explores four case studies of women on France's extreme right, 1935–1945, to elucidate their agency, in terms of political activism and sexuality. We contend that, just as did women on the left, including in the Resistance, they profited from the liminal space the political disruptions the election of the Popular Front in 1936, and the war and Occupation created to engage in behavior normally deemed transgressive in their culture. They joined extreme-right political organizations and grasped opportunities to exert authority, even obtaining leadership roles. Likewise, they collaborated with their male lovers, kin, and colleagues in participating in violent terrorist activities. We contend that scholars have underestimated the agency of women on the right and seek to comprehend how these women understood their actions.

Despite their inherently transgressive dimension, neither the French Resistance nor its maquis groups challenged the assimilation of virile and warlike qualities in force during World War Two. While historiography has extensively studied the assistance functions assigned to female members of the Resistance, a number of questions remain. Why did the maquis groups “virilize” warfare with as much application as regular armies? What circumstances, on the contrary, led to exceptions to this rule, and with what consequences? Through the portraits of some of the women who joined the maquis, or even took up arms, this article examines gender assignments and the fate of women who transgressed them—bringing to light power structures that the resistance itself was not yet ready to question.

 • Starting with its occupation of the Chinese city of Mukden, Japan continuously disregarded the post–World War I peace mechanism between 1931 and 1937. Unlike white Americans, who sympathized with China and condemned the encroachment as a crass invasion, mainstream African-American opinion leaders approached the crisis as a righteous, Japanese-led offensive against whites. Yet ironically, this response did not undercut but reinforced the white imperial logic. Not only did prominent African Americans excuse Japan's invasion by citing the precedents of white imperialism and pointing to Japan's modernity; they also considered it beneficial to both Chinese and themselves. Japan emerged through the process as a qualified co-dominator of the nonwhite world while China's color was ignored or erased. This contrast testifies to the apparent constraints of a color-centered reading of the Far Eastern Crisis.