Sovereignty, Democracy and Neutrality: French Foreign Policy and the National-Patriotic Humanitarianism of the French Red Cross, 1919–1928

Romain Fathi

doi:10.1017/s096077732100062x

Abstract

Recent historiography pertaining to the International Red Cross has generally emphasised the transnational scale as best suited for analysing this global movement. Using the French Red Cross as a case study, this article suggests that focusing on the national scale, or even on the national-imperial scale, does not exclude transnational approaches but enriches them. In doing so, it highlights the dialectic between scales of humanitarian activity and complicates our understanding of the Red Cross movement in the early twentieth century. The article examines how the French Red Cross strived for its independence within the broader Red Cross world in a postwar humanitarian context increasingly dominated by transnational organisations. It also argues that in the 1920s the French Red Cross, a traditional auxiliary of the French army, became an arm of the French Foreign Office, advancing French diplomacy and sovereignty.

Highlights

The decade that followed the First World War witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the works of humanitarian and international organisations.[1]
It explores a contrast between the national-patriotic character of the French Red Cross and the transnational humanitarian agenda of the broader Red Cross movement, especially as that contrast arose around the question of the democratic character and representative protocols of humanitarian organisations
The term Croix-Rouge française was used to speak about the Red Cross movement in France before the First World War, the French Red Cross as an institution was not formalised until 7 August 1940.4 Prior to that date, three associations – la Société de secours aux blessés militaires (SSBM), l’Union des femmes des France, and l’Association des dames françaises – made up the French Red Cross movement and were represented in a body called the Comité central de la Croix-Rouge française