Course Code: 2XDP10C20
Start Date: 20/04/2021
Day of the Week:Session: Morning
Length in weeks: 10
Time: 10.00am-12.00pm
Price: £
During the years 1940-44 two soldiers claimed to be leaders of the ‘real’ France; each was projected by his partisans as the embodiment of the true French identity. Famously de Gaulle had ‘a certain idea of France’; what was it, and in what ways did it differ from that of Petain’s ‘Regenerated France’? Is it at all helpful to cast these years in terms of arm-wrestling between a ‘France’ and an ‘Anti-France’? When and why did the French abandon Petain for de Gaulle? Are ‘Gaullism’ and ‘Petainism’ now museum pieces or is their shadowy presence still detectable in present day feuding about French identity?