French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation PDF Download

Author: Henry Walter Ehrmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Author: Olivier Wieviorka
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497039X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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“Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and will not go out.” As Charles de Gaulle ended his radio address to the French nation in June 1940, listeners must have felt a surge of patriotism tinged with uncertainty. Who would keep the flame burning through dark years of occupation? At what cost? Olivier Wieviorka presents a comprehensive history of the French Resistance, synthesizing its social, political, and military aspects to offer fresh insights into its operation. Detailing the Resistance from the inside out, he reveals not one organization but many interlocking groups often at odds over goals, methods, and leadership. He debunks lingering myths, including the idea that the Resistance sprang up in response to the exhortations of de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile. The Resistance was homegrown, arising from the soil of French civil society. Resisters had to improvise in the fight against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy regime. They had no blueprint to follow, but resisters from all walks of life and across the political spectrum formed networks, organizing activities from printing newspapers to rescuing downed airmen to sabotage. Although the Resistance was never strong enough to fight the Germans openly, it provided the Allies invaluable intelligence, sowed havoc behind enemy lines on D-Day, and played a key role in Paris’s liberation. Wieviorka shatters the conventional image of a united resistance with no interest in political power. But setting the record straight does not tarnish the legacy of its fighters, who braved Nazism without blinking.

Author: Adam Steinhouse
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739102831
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Workers' Participation in Post-Liberation France is a vivid portrait of French labor's failure to achieve greater industrial democracy. Drawing on original archival research, Adam Steinhouse recasts the traditional view of this critical period of French history, demonstrating the fundamental importance of the immediate post-liberation period in determining the future course of industrial relations in France. He brings to life the labor disputes of the 1940s, charting the interplay between industry and politicians that dealt a crushing blow to organized labor's demands for political change. Steinhouse captures the rise of state intervention in the economy and plots the growth of French employers' organized intransigence in the face of workers' collective action; which culminated in a series of actions effectively marginalizing labor's voice in the economic boom of the early 1950s. Steinhouse's impressive scholarship provides an excellent case study of the French state and its efforts to balance growing worker demands for representation with the imperatives of social peace and prosperity. This book makes a significant contribution to modern French political history and the development of modern industrial relations.

Author: George Ross
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520310071
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Workers and Communists in France analyzes the relationship between the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), France’s largest and most influential trade union organization. All trade union movements in advanced capitalist societies have had to develop mechanisms to achieve their goals within the labor market and the political realm. The nature of such mechanisms varies dramatically from society to society. George Ross examines a trade union movement whose philosophy and actions are derived from the political and organizational perspectives of the Communist Third International tradition. Workers and Communists in France submits the modern history of the relationship between the PCF and the CGT to the complex test of a cost-benefit analysis. How well has the linkage between party and trade union worked for French Communism, for French workers, for the French left, and for French society? Since World War II, the ties between the PDF and the CGT have enabled them to promote and perpetuate sharp notions of class and class conflict among French workers and French society in general. The CGT has been the central agency through which French Communism has shaped debate about the nature of French society, a debate with profound effects on the structure of French politics and intellectual life. On the other hand, the basic contradiction between the Communist Party’s desire to use the CGT for partisan purposes and the CGT’s need to generate mass support has never been resolved. This failure may have followed from the very structure of the relationship between the PCF and the CGT, as well as from consistently inappropriate strategic calculations by the PCF. Ross concludes that the Communist Third International's concept of the link between party and trade union is becoming obsolete. The future of Communism in France may well depend, therefore, on a reappraisal of the party’s relationship with organized labor. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Author: Val Rogin Lorwin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674322004
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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This book is based on careful historical analysis and personal observation. Dr. Lorwin has broken his material down under three main headings: first, an abbreviated history of the origins and development of French unionism through 1944; second, a close examination of the critical years 1944-53, which saw the reunification in the Confédération Générale du Travail of the Communists purged in 1940, and the subsequent bolt of the anti-Communists to form the Confédération Générale du Travail-Force Ouvrière; and, third, an analysis of the international life of French unions, their bargaining techniques, their structure, and their goals. While the discussion in the first two parts of the book is significant, the major contribution to knowledge is in the third section. An extremely valuable analysis for those who are concerned with the nature of French unionism, students of political behavior, and particularly to those who are engaged in discriminating between institutional myths and institutional realities.

Author: Myriam Catusse
Publisher: Presses de l’Ifpo
ISBN: 2351592611
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Are Arab parties facing a predicament? Are they paying the price of repression and limited pluralism? Have they become obsolete to the benefit of other political groups and mobilization modes such as communities, tribes, “asabiyyat” or to the disadvantage of non governmental organizations, associations and social movements? While some predicted “the end of parties” in the region as a result of authoritarian political systems, doesn’t the recent transition from the one party rule towards a fragile plural party system in many countries put again party organizations in the spotlight? Most of the time, contemporary Arab parties have little mobilizing power. Yet some are crawling out of underground activities and trying their hands at the exercise of power after years of oppositions. Others, and mainly on the Islamist arena, assert themselves as first hand mobilization structures, able in certain cases to compete with regimes in power. This book addresses those research questions. Emphasizing new and unpublished data, the book’s diverse contributions tackle holistically party life in six countries that have adopted very different political pathways: Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria and Iraq. All the studies approach the decline or the revival of the parties from a long term historical perspective mainly with regard to political institutions in those six countries. The studies focus on the rules of party games, on the junction between “the right to politics” and “political rights”. They reveal the fine-tuning between ideological frameworks and political strategies. They raise questions about the renewal of elites, forms of militant activism, the array of parties’ political activities, particularly social ones. They examine the issue of identity construction and political solidarities in the framework of the nation state, or in contradiction with it. As a final point, the book inquires about how party life in those six countries accounts for political transformations: possible democratization of regimes, forms of domination that are played out within those regimes, the emergence of the breakdown of leaderships and finally the rationale behind mobilization and collective action. This book is published with the support of the program on Political Party Development in the Arab World (Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco and Yemen) financed by the International Development Research Center (Ottawa, Canada).This publication gathers a series of studies...

Author: Christophe Guilluy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240821
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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A passionate account of how the gulf between France’s metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apart Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an “American society”—one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on “the periphery.” As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.

Author: Jean Edward Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501164937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Prize-winning and bestselling historian Jean Edward Smith tells the “rousing” (Jay Winik, author of 1944) story of the liberation of Paris during World War II—a triumph achieved only through the remarkable efforts of Americans, French, and Germans, racing to save the city from destruction. Following their breakout from Normandy in late June 1944, the Allies swept across northern France in pursuit of the German army. The Allies intended to bypass Paris and cross the Rhine into Germany, ending the war before winter set in. But as they advanced, local forces in Paris began their own liberation, defying the occupying German troops. Charles de Gaulle, the leading figure of the Free French government, urged General Dwight Eisenhower to divert forces to liberate Paris. Eisenhower’s advisers recommended otherwise, but Ike wanted to help position de Gaulle to lead France after the war. And both men were concerned about partisan conflict in Paris that could leave the communists in control of the city and the national government. Neither man knew that the German commandant, Dietrich von Choltitz, convinced that the war was lost, schemed to surrender the city to the Allies intact, defying Hitler’s orders to leave it a burning ruin. In The Liberation of Paris, Jean Edward Smith puts “one of the most moving moments in the history of the Second World War” (Michael Korda) in context, showing how the decision to free the city came at a heavy price: it slowed the Allied momentum and allowed the Germans to regroup. After the war German generals argued that Eisenhower’s decision to enter Paris prolonged the war for another six months. Was Paris worth this price? Smith answers this question in a “brisk new recounting” that is “terse, authoritative, [and] unsentimental” (The Washington Post).

Author: Helmut Gruber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Author: Julian Jackson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521312523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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This is the first full-length study in English of the Popular Front, the left-wing coalition which emerged in France during the 1930s in response to the threat of fascism and which went on to win the elections of 1936, giving France her first socialist premier, Léon Blum. After a brief narrative history of the Popular Front the book is organised thematically around the main historiographical debates to which the Popular Front has given rise. Among the issues considered are the origins of the strikes of 1936, the reasons for the failure of the Popular Front economic policy, the relationship between culture and politics in France in the 1930s and the causes of France's policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The book views the Popular Front at three levels - as a mass movement, political coalition and government - and argues that it must not be seen just as a narrowly political phenomenon but as a political, social and cultural explosion which attempted to break down the barriers between all areas of human activity in the highly compartmentalised society of France in the 1930s. Even if the Popular Front ultimately failed in this aim it has acquired legendary status in France, and the epilogue to the book briefly examines the 'myth' of the Popular Front from 1936 to the present day.