My first book, Mobilisation, Sacrifice, Citoyenneté. Angleterre – France, 1900-1918 (Paris: 2013), offers a comparative history of social mobilization in France and England during the First World War. It combines local and transnational perspectives to offer an innovative urban history of the conflict. Mobilizing a wide array of primary sources in a critical dialogue with social sciences, including human geography, it investigates the societal adaptation to modern warfare. By contrast to conventional interpretations of wartime mobilization, it shows the continuing relevance of local identities and political cultures. It thus revaluates the nature of wartime patriotism and demonstrates that the consent to the war effort derived from a contested process of negotiation. It then investigates the wartime reconfigurations of citizenship and its focus on urban civil society eventually suggests a redefinition of the contours of the French and British states in 1914-1918. This book sets the urban experience of the Great War within the larger context of the nationalization of the masses, and furthers our understanding of the complex relationship between the state and civil society in wartime Europe. Articulated around a novel definition of belligerence, my analysis thus resolved the longstanding French historiographical debate over the nature of the war effort, often misleadingly reduced to unbridled nationalism or to imperious state coercion. This book also successfully challenges traditional academic boundaries between the military, social and cultural histories of the war and convincingly integrates their respective methodologies.
This book was the only work by an early-career researcher shortlisted for the 2014 French Senate’s Book Prize. It was also distinguished by the Centre National du Livre. On the basis of external peer reviews, Oxford University Press (USA) has decided to commission an English translation of the book. The Press has signed a translation contract with Les Belles Lettres to this effect. According to external reviewers independently chosen by OUP, this book makes a “major contribution to the historiography of the Great War”; it was received as an “important book” by Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, and deemed an “innovative … exemplary piece of work” in French History.
The following document includes pre-print and secured versions of the book’s introduction, conclusion and table of contents.
