Military Defeat Research Articles

When Will Non-Democratic Actors Win a Moral Victory Following Highly Costly Military Defeats?

Following costly military defeats political elites usually attempt to persuade their publics that the battlefield outcome was not a shameful defeat but a ‘moral victory’. Yet, only sometimes their public accepts these claims. The paper tries to explain this variation in the domestic publics' perceptions in the cases of non-democratic entities. It is argued that the key variable that determines actors' success in claiming a moral victory is the existence of certain battlefield elements, or at least symbolic military acts/achievements of the defeated actor which can persuade his public that these battlefield elements existed. Propaganda efforts to misrepresent the battlefield facts can play only a secondary role and only under certain conditions.

Rational or reckless? Georgia's zugzwang in the Caucasus

Although the 2008 Russian-Georgian war was a military defeat for Georgia, it has only reinforced Georgia's westward trajectory. One noteworthy difference from Georgia's pre-war policy is a new regional strategy — the North Caucasus Initiative — that seeks to create a soft power alternative to Russia's military dominance in the region. We suggest that this approach is rational rather than reckless, as some critics have claimed. It represents a carefully calculated strategy that is already benefiting Georgia and from which all concerned parties, including Russia, stand to gain. If the South and North Caucasus were more open and less divided — a direction in which this new initiative appears to point — the Caucasus could become more prosperous and more stable. That would serve Russia's long-term interest by significantly reducing the cost of subsidies to sustain and stabilize the volatile region.

Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany

When a system loses legitimacy, authority or ultimately identity, its military elites are usually considered the most potentially dangerous to replace. As the most visible collective symbol of a displaced and denounced authority, the armed forces’ officer corps are corresponding objects of discrimination and reprisal, often scapegoats for behaviours recently accepted as legitimate and praised as heroic. These newly defined scapegoats, moreover, include an overwhelming proportion of Alpha personalities: ultimately oriented towards action rather than reflection, projection as opposed to introspection. Even after complete or shameful military defeats, military elites have sustained their positions. France after 1870, Germany after the First World War, the US after Vietnam—these are only some obvious examples. The élites of a system not merely displaced but ‘disappeared’ peacefully, without a shot fired or an execution implemented, might correspondingly be expected to become a festering sore in the new order—unless co-opted or bought off at high financial, political and moral prices.

The Fall of the Roman Empire: Film and History (review)

Martin Winkler, editor The Fall of Roman Empire: Film and History Blackwell, 2009; 334 pages; $54-95 Edited and introduced by Martin Winkler, The Fall of Roman Empire: Film and History is a collection of essays providing a wide-ranging treatment of oft-maligned 1964 movie The Fall of Roman Empire, from a variety of historical and cinematic perspectives. The book fits within flourishing recent genre of scholarship exploring cinematic depictions of ancient world. In introduction, Winkler places The Fall in appropriate thematic context of an ongoing 'dialogue' between classical past and America of film's present. The Roman past has long served as a precedent, an ideal, and a warning to American political and cultural commentators, and The Fall provides a powerful example of this trend. Allen Ward in chapter 2, for example, makes particular reference to spirit of liberal internationalism in a movie produced not long after Cuban missile crisis.1 Yet at same time, The Fall represents a fairly radical departure from conventions of epic genre, and book highlights and lauds these differences with its peers. The sword-and-sandals spectacles that preceded it, most notably Quo Vadis, were fundamentally religious eschatologies, in which Roman decline was both prophesized and celebrated through clash of paganism and Christianity.2 Conversely, in The Fall, decline is presented purely in Roman and secular terms: it comes not through military defeat, but moral corruption and weakening of Roman institutions. The director, Anthony Mann, was interested in Rome at what he thought was its most civilized peak: end of age of Antonines, celebrated by Gibbon (a stated inspiration) as great water-mark of Roman civilization that preceded a long and grinding decline. The result of this is that The Fall is imbued not with religious triumphalism, but an air of futility and despair - We leave cinema with a sense of regret for doom of Rome.3 Winkler describes The Fall as boldly departing from epic tradition to focus on the mechanisms that underlie historical events,4 declaring that the film is a serious attempt to do justice to Roman civilization and to make a case for continuing importance of Roman history.5 Furthermore, goal of this type of filmmaking is praised not as an attempt to deliver literal factual truth about past, but to capture 'feeling' and 'understanding' of history for its audience.6 This praiseworthy perspective informs choice of much of content for this volume. It includes translations of major sources about Marcus Aurelius because Winkler deems that historical films such as this are best watched and evaluated alongside historical record. An essay of Mann's from 1964 (reprinted as chapter 6) demonstrates same attitude. This comparison extends throughout book. Diskin Clay, in chapter 3, barely references movie, instead discussing how Aurelius's stoicism was perceived in a range of ancient sources. In chapter four, Eleonora Cavallini uses film as basis for a discussion about misrepresentations of Commodus in historical and literary record. …

Environmental Histories

Environmental Histories Lisa M. Brady Consider the following statements: weather and geography critically influenced the planning and outcome of Civil War battles; disease killed more Civil War soldiers, sailors, and marines than combat; the South's reliance on cotton monoculture hampered the Confederacy's ability to feed and provision its forces and contributed to its military defeat. Each of these facts, separately and together, has been the subject of myriad studies aimed at elucidating the war's events and its greater meaning. Until recently, however, one fundamental lesson of these three points has gone unexplored by students of the Civil War: nature matters in history. Over the past decade or so, environmental historians have turned their attention to the connections between war and nature, with at least a dozen undertaking studies of the Civil War. Most of these scholars have examined the military conflict, though a handful have discussed the home front as well. Each has made compelling arguments about the fundamental role nature played in the war, encompassing both its material implications and its intellectual import. Two major areas have captured the interest of these scholars: soldier health and strategic decision-making. Through their work, we have gained important insight into nature's place in the war and into the ways Americans of all loyalties and backgrounds responded to the changes wrought by the conflict. Rich new ground invites future research: We still need an environmental analysis of mobilization, which affected ecosystems of all descriptions. We still need a comprehensive environmental history of the war, from its origins to its long-term impact on nature. As this subfield merges with the mainstream, and as this proliferation of environmental histories gets aggregated, how does it change our understandings of the Civil War era and American environmental history? [End Page 8] Lisa M. Brady Boise State University http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies Copyright © 2012 The University of North Carolina Press

Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies

Wars for the American SouthThe First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies Mark Grimsley (bio) The Civil War did not end when the guns fell silent at Appomattox and Durham Station. It continued, in a different guise, for another decade. True, white southerners had abandoned their attempt to sustain an independent Confederacy, but the Confederacy had been only marginally the creature of a preexisting southern nationalism. Its component states separated from the Union primarily to protect themselves from northern encroachments, especially those that threatened the institution of slavery.1 The Confederacy was therefore just one of several mechanisms by which white southerners, at various times in the American experience, sought to enact what historian [End Page 6] Ulrich B. Phillips would later term “the central theme of Southern history”; that it “shall be and remain a white man’s country.”2 Earlier attempts to maintain the South as a white man’s country had played out politically in efforts to shield slavery from challenge—in the debates on the Constitution, in the attempt to balance slave and free states, in efforts to create a selective, self-serving theory of states’ rights, and most dramatically in secession.3 If the Confederacy perished, the determination to maintain white supremacy did not. It would survive for at least another century. Vestiges of that determination linger even to this day. Although military defeat meant the destruction of slavery, it also meant the genesis of a post-emancipation order whose contours even the victors could not agree upon. Emboldened by divisions in the North, southern conservative whites struggled to gain control over the contours of that order.4 The struggle was conducted in the political and economic arenas, but it was also waged through political violence so extensive that historians have begun to view Reconstruction as a “second civil war.”5 In this second war, conservative whites prevailed. For the next century they removed black southerners from meaningful participation in political life. They created and remorselessly enforced a system of racial apartheid. And they used violence—sometimes extensive violence—to maintain iron control over the African American labor force. They throttled all significant attempts by black southerners to organize and to carve out for themselves any enclave of economic independence. It took a second insurgency, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and [End Page 7] 1960s, to end this system. Just as white southerners destroyed the biracial state governments of the Reconstruction era, civil rights activists destroyed the segregationist state governments of the Jim Crow era. The century after Appomattox can therefore be seen as a protracted war for the American South, pitting the forces of white supremacy against those of black liberation. Both the First and Second Reconstructions were instances of insurgencies hiding in plain sight. But partly because of popular misconceptions about Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, and partly because of overly constricted conceptions of war, this reality has long gone unrecognized. Only in recent decades have historians begun to see the conservative white “Redemption” of the South as an example of insurgency. The present essay is one of the first attempts to argue that the Civil Rights Movement was also an insurgency. Yet, thanks to the vast and still growing literature on the Civil Rights era, the case for the movement as an insurgency is tacitly already being made. To clinch that case, one need only draw out the implications of that literature. The concept of war employed in this essay utilizes the idea of revolutionary crisis. The tenets of revolutionary crisis maintain that under ordinary circumstances, a state holds an unchallenged monopoly on the instruments of administration, justice, and military force. Within the state there is an accepted rule set that determines who holds political power (and by extension, economic and social power) and how that power is utilized. The population within the state need not give voluntary assent to this rule set. The key issue is not consent, but obedience. The power system of even despotic states may allow for incremental modi fications of the rule set within the realm of ordinary politics. Within the American democracy, the scope for such modifications has generally been much larger...

From rebel governance to state consolidation – Dynamics of loyalty and the securitisation of the state in Eritrea

This paper discusses Eritrea as a contemporary case of state-making grounded in war, a fact that has resulted in the emergence of one of the ‘hardest’ states in sub-Saharan Africa. The state-making process in Eritrea is looked at with a focus on the legacies of liberation movement governance in the changing dynamics of state consolidation from 1993 to this day. Those dynamics are analysed by reverting to Hirsch-man’s categories of ‘loyalty’, ‘exit’ and ‘voice’. Hirschman’s framework is chosen because the category of loyalty and resulting dynamics illuminate particularly well the transitions within the Eritrean state making process.It is shown that the parameters of war that have resulted in the creation of the Eritrean state have led to a particular kind of state characterised by a high degree of loyalty, visible in the propensity of large segments of the population to associate with state activities. Over time and partly based on military defeat in renewed warfare, the exit option has gained prominence particular among the young generation. This has resulted in a drive towards state securitisation combined with measures to make exit a pillar of power consolidation. Those dynamics have not considerably altered the loyalty of Eritrea’s transnational citizenry to the wider project of state consolidation. The paper concludes that state consolidation in Eritrea can thus far be analysed as a successful shift from fostering voice via politics of mobilisation to controlling exit and voice in ways that keep citizens tied to the state project.

France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home, and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy by Jackie Clarke

CLARKE, JACKIE. France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home, and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy. New York: Berghahn, 2011. ISBN 978-0-85745-080-7. Pp. 218. $80. The title is in itself somewhat provocative. The “Age of Organization” is the type of descriptive label usually applied to the post-1945 Trente Glorieuses, which were characterized by rapid economic and demographic growth, as well as by sweeping social and political transformations: “Historians often think of the period after the Second World War as the key moment in the reorganization of social, economic, and political life in twentieth-century France” (2). By comparison, the interwar years are often presented as a period of generalized societal stasis and/ or crisis, leading up to the catastrophic military defeat of 1940. Jackie Clarke’s study aims to nuance this stark historical contrast between interwar regression and postwar renewal, in part by finding parallels and continuities between the levels of public influence attained by the interwar techniciens and by their postwar counterparts, the better-known cadres and technocrates who are generally associated with the deep structural changes of the Trente Glorieuses. The term technicien here encompasses a broad category of individuals and associations that were loosely linked by advanced professional training and the desire to bring more organizational efficiency to French society as a whole. Not just engineers and industrialists, but also economists, civil servants, trade unionists, social professionals , and “domestic science” specialists thus fit into this category. Many of these would-be reformers of French socioeconomic patterns were influenced by the managerial practices and movements derived from two main sources: Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” and the less widely known concepts of administration and leadership formulated by Henri Fayol, whose Administration industrielle et générale was published in 1916. One of the merits of Clarke’s book is that it points out the enduring influence of Fayol’s work, which is often summarized by his five-point definition of the main managerial functions: “prévoir, organiser, commander, coordonner, contrôler” (also known by the POCCC acronym). France in the Age of Organization provides much biographical information on the techniciens of the interwar and Vichy periods, including an appendix with profiles of some of the most notable individuals. It highlights the ways in which concepts and procedures taken from industrial and public management were adapted for use at all levels of French society, including inside the home, with middle-class wives being called upon to become efficient “managers” of their presumably rationalized domestic space. The impetus to modernize the social as well as economic realms derived in large part from the perceived backwardness of a still disproportionately agricultural France trying to catch up with more industrialized and therefore more powerful competitors. In this sense, the techniciens of the 1920s and 1930s had the same broad objectives, if not necessarily the same level of success, as their postwar counterparts. Clarke’s book is meticulously researched and well written. There is a refreshingly low incidence of typographical errors: “principle” for “principal” (44); “Dirigsme” (132). By stressing certain organizational and conceptual continuities in French society throughout most of the twentieth century, France in the Age of Organization breaks new ground. One area of investigation does seem lacking: since one of the main goals of this study is to reconfigure the post-World War II period of rapid economic development as part of a historical continuum that stretches back at least to l’Entre-deux-guerres, rather than as a sudden, isolated, quasi-miraculous flowering of economic and social life in France, a critical engagement with the writings of the author who most convincingly conceptualized the Trente Glorieuses, Jean 966 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 Fourastié, would have been called for. However, Fourastié is briefly mentioned only once (168). Western Washington University Edward Ousselin DELESSE, CATHERINE, et BERTRAND RICHET. Le coq gaulois à l’heure anglaise: analyse de la traduction anglaise d’Astérix. Arras: Artois PU, 2009. ISBN 978-2-84832-077-9. Pp. 447. 24 a. This book deserves a belated review because it presents a major research project on Astérix that deals with the difficult art of translating cultural humor. The authors compare thirty...

Mission to Survive: Hungarian Historian Gyula Szekfű as Agent and Diplomat

This study assesses the wartime intelligence activities of the leading Hungarian historian Gyula Szekfu, and the controversial diplomatic role he played in Moscow after the Second World War. It is argued that the scholar-turned-diplomat nurtured the forlorn hope of mitigating the impact of military defeat by securing Soviet benevolence towards Hungary. Szekfu's deep anxiety for his country, inextricably entwined with his own existential fears and a powerful motive of self-preservation, contributed to his complete political metamorphosis. Instead of justifying or condemning his inconsistencies and moral choices, this article traces the elements of continuity in his thinking and in Hungarian foreign policy.

La incidencia de la situación internacional en la guerra en Euskadi, 1936-1937

The Italo-German intervention was determining in the military defeat of the Spanish Republic in the Basque Country. In fact, the Basque Country was defeated because of the overwhelming superiority of the aviation and the artillery sent from Italy and Germany. In this article, it is explained how the combined action of both the artillery and the aviation, followed by the frontal assault performed by the pro-Franco infantry, will be determining in the overcoming of the Basque resistance, and that, therefore, without the decisive aid of Germany and Italy, the war in Euskadi would have been of totally different nature and its result, uncertain.

How Terrorism Ceases: The Tupamaros in Uruguay

In order to understand how the Tupamaros ended it is necessary to give an overview of Uruguay's situation in the 1950s and 1960s and explain why in this relatively rich South American country an urban guerilla group developed. The first section presents the topographical, historical, socio-political and ideological context in which the Tupamaros emerged. The following sections describe the violent organization's “career” and point out some of its structural traits such as ideology, strategy and tactics, support milieu and interaction dynamics. As to the end of the guerilla group, first the question is discussed whether a pacific outcome of the conflict by negotiations would have been possible. Then the reasons for the rapid and total military defeat of the insurgents are analyzed as well as the long-term consequences of their organization's destruction.

The Black Experience in the Civil War South , and: The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture , and: Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War , and: Weary of War: Life on the Confederate Home Front , and: True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army , and: The Civil War at Sea

Reviewed by: The Black Experience in the Civil War South, and: The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture, and: Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War, and: Weary of War: Life on the Confederate Home Front, and: True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army, and: The Civil War at Sea, and: Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West Carol Sheriff (bio) The Black Experience in the Civil War South. By Stephen V. Ash. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010. Pp. 140. Cloth, $44.95.) The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture. By Paul D. Escott. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010. Pp. 185. Cloth, $34.95.) Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War. By Michael S. Green. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010. Pp. 212. Cloth, $44.95.) Weary of War: Life on the Confederate Home Front. By Joe A. Mobley. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. Pp. 187. Cloth, $49.95.) True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army. By Martin W. Öfele. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. Pp. 213. Cloth, $49.95.) The Civil War at Sea. By Craig L. Symonds. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2009. Pp. 211. Cloth, $39.95.) Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West. By Steven E. Woodworth. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. Pp. 178. Cloth, $39.95.) In his foreword to Praeger’s Reflections on the Civil War Era series, John David Smith promises “concise, informed, readable syntheses—fresh looks at familiar topics with new source material and original arguments.” Although its first seven volumes deliver better on compelling syntheses than on original arguments, they nonetheless make welcome additions to Civil War scholarship. In Politics and America in Crisis, Michael Green provides a sprightly narrative of political schism from the Wilmot Proviso to secession. Green adeptly explains both well-known and lesser-known events, such as the California duel between David Broderick and David Terry, and he carefully eschews reading events backward—that is, with the knowledge that they ultimately led to war. His book would have benefited, however, from a clearer historiographical stance and a more sustained interweaving of social with political history. Paul Escott’s The Confederacy: The Slaveholders’ Failed Venture displays such qualities in abundance. Escott positions himself within existing debates over how civilian factors contributed to the Confederacy’s [End Page 428] military defeat when he argues that even as the Confederacy’s internal cohesion foundered with wartime stresses and strains, white southerners’ antipathy toward the Union increased, reinforcing, at least temporarily, their resolve to fight. Thus even if Confederate nationalism was fleeting, the Confederacy could retain the will to fight well into the war. Escott chronicles the flows and ebbs of the Confederacy’s fortunes and morale while foreshadowing the postwar era. By 1865, Escott argues, “white Southerners were hostile to their government and weary of war. They allowed defeat to come, even as they continued to hate the victor” (114). Joe Mobley’s Weary of War likewise addresses why the Confederacy lost. Yet he gives less prominence to military developments, and whereas Escott organizes his book chronologically, Mobley’s chapters are topical. As a result, Weary of War offers a simpler explanation of the war’s outcome: by 1865, the Confederacy’s civilians had grown weary. En route to that conclusion, Mobley vividly describes the challenges facing the wartorn southern population—white and black, free and enslaved, male and female, native-born and immigrant. In his slender The Black Experience in the Civil War South, Stephen Ash provides an eloquent, wide-ranging discussion of African Americans’ wartime attitudes and experiences—frequently reminding readers that although the Civil War is often remembered as a bondage-to-freedom narrative, most African Americans remained enslaved throughout the war. Even as Ash emphasizes slaves’ role in securing their own freedom, he stresses that such freedom depended on Union victory, which was far from assured for much of the war. Drawing on fresh source material, Ash brings to life individual experiences, with all their complexities and uncertainties, without losing sight of broader developments. Despite the book’s unfortunate title, which belies the diversity of experiences within the South’s African...

An “Eventful” History ofHind Swaraj: Gandhi between the Battle of Tsushima and the Union of South Africa

This article argues that Gandhi's book Hind Swaraj was centrally concerned with undermining the influence of the violent “terrorist” wing of nationalism on Indian political militants. In particular he sought to question the inspiration that Japan's military defeat of Russia in 1905 had given to the terrorists. For Gandhi, the Japanese example led in a militaristic and Westernizing direction. To this he counterposed his own model of peaceful resistance and idealized village life. Gandhi's critique of modernity needs to be understood within the context of this project, which explains some of the inconsistencies of his relation to ideas of the modern. In the long run, the doctrine of Hind Swaraj successfully positioned Gandhi as the most radical and national of Indian political leaders, while at the same time almost surreptitiously leaving the door open to pragmatic engagement with the colonial power. This article also emphasizes the South African location of Gandhi's book; his campaign in the Transvaal and its unique conditions were crucial to the formation of the ideas put forward in it, and the unification of South Africa in 1910 was a key reference point for his constitutional notions. Winning the battle for the minds of the Indian political elite, a campaign that he launched through Hind Swaraj, was the necessary preliminary to Gandhi's later, broader achievement.

Restraint or Retreat? The Debate over the Panama Canal Treaties and U.S. Nationalism after Vietnam*

Historians have long recognized that the 1977-8 debate surrounding the Panama Canal treaties constituted a formative moment in the history of the New Right. By closely analyzing the arguments both for and against the treaties, Natasha Zaretsky contends that the debate crystallized a broader struggle between two articulations of U.S. nationalism after Vietnam. Supporters believed that the treaties signaled the development of a post-Cold War, post-Vietnam framework for U.S. foreign policy, one that would reinsert moral considerations into the realm of policymaking. Meanwhile, opponents believed that what they called the “giveaway” of the Canal was symptomatic of a larger pattern of American retreat in the wake of military defeat in Vietnam. The essay traces the contours of the debate among members of the Carter Administration, Congress, grassroots organizers, and ordinary men and women.

The Limits of Diplomacy: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War

Swimming in a sea of military defeats, the Ottoman leadership, it seems, should have opted for less war, not more, in 1914. The generation at the helm of the state, however, welcomed the July Crisis not as a reprieve but as an opportunity to end the empire’s international isolation. Whereas the Ottoman leaders of the nineteenth century had launched a broad program of reforms in their search for a place in the European Concert, by the twentieth century a new crop of radical leaders had taken charge of the state. Many of these new leaders came from borderlands, from territories now lost, and they believed that the survival of their state rested on the creation of a “nation in arms.”

New Viceroyalty, New Nation, New Empire: A Transnational Imaginary for Peruvian Independence

Abstract The independence process in Spanish America was accompanied by new imaginaries concerning the new political entities that would emerge from the breakdown of the old colonial jurisdictions. This essay explores an imaginary for Peruvian independence, Bolivarian in scope, which lay at the center of the Revolution of 1814–15 in the southern Andes. This “revolution of the patria” started in Cuzco in 1814 but soon captured Arequipa, Huamanga, and much of Charcas, until its military defeat by royalist forces in 1815. It not only proposed full independence from viceregal control but also aimed at completely severing American ties to the Spanish monarchy. Francisco Carrascón, a peninsular prebendary resident in Cuzco who became the movement’s leading ideologue, had in 1801 unsuccessfully proposed the creation of a new viceroyalty to the Council of the Indies. In 1814, however, he advocated the creation of a new and independent Peruvian empire stretching from Lima to the River Plate, from “Sun to Sun.” The cities of Buenos Aires, Lima, Montevideo, and Cuzco were equally to be the principal imperial cities, but Cuzco, because of its antiquity and central location, would be the seat of government or “national peak.” While there is a significant historiography on the Revolution of 1814–15, it has been largely overlooked in several key Latin American independence syntheses. This essay therefore also seeks to restore the movement to the center of wider historiographic debates on Latin American independence.

The Last Metro (review)

Last Metro (1980) Produced and Directed by Francois Truffaut 131 minutes In occupied Western Europe, paraphrasing the historian Tony Judt, there was no locally accredited regime - no legitimate government exercising authority - and thus, neither Norwegians, nor Belgians, nor Dutch were fully responsible for their actions. Although the Germans could not have ruled without the collaboration of the locals, it was they who issued the orders. exception, of course, was France. Marshall Petain's regime had been voted into office in July 1940 and claimed some continuity with the pre-war democratic institutions of the third French Republic. Furthermore, many French citizens regarded Vichy as their legitimate authority until November 1942. In the aftermath of the Second World War the French had to come to terms with the compliant role of the Vichy regime in Nazi policies. Until 1939 La Grand Nation had been a major international power; but the initial military defeat, followed by a demeaning German occupation during the Second World War and two bloody colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, were reprehensible enough to uphold the myth of a paramount French resistance for a long time in the postwar period. During the youth movement of the 1960s, artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Ophuls or historians like Robert Paxton brought about the end of the public amnesia. Ophuls' documentary Sorrow and the Pity (1969) questioned the self-serving legacy of the resistance, by detailing the daily bribery and collaboration of the citizen in Clermont Ferrand, a mid-size city in central France. He produced nothing short of a new visual representation of France under German occupation. Needless to say, Ophuls' images challenged the collective memory and triggered controversy and ideological struggle in the public sphere. Films dealing with the period that kindled this debate further include, to name just a few: Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and his later memoir Goodbye Children (1987), Claude Chabrol's newsreel collage Eye of Vichy (1993) and, of course, Truffaut's Last Metro (1980). Truffaut considered Sorrow and the Pity the first film to show this period in French history as a non-legendary story. He believed that in the aftermath of this movie, one couldn't show clowns play Vichy people or militiamen anymore. Surprisingly enough, film critic Naomi Greene evokes precisely Ophuls' work to condemn Truffaut's Last Metro as a resistancialist version of the past a film which us back, once again, to a reassuring world where ideological divisions scarcely existed (82). Could it be that Truffaut disobeyed the public debate entirely, or do Greene and several other critics overlook the artistic and emotional depth of Truffaut's vision of occupied Paris? Last Metro is the story of the prestigious Theâtre Montmartre putting on a production in late autumn of 1942. Lucas Steiner (Heinz Bennent), the German-Jewish director of the theater is forced to go underground. His wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve) takes over the management of the theater and has to survive an onslaught of anti-Semitic policies, material shortage and the looming threat of censorship. Nevertheless, apart from Madame Steiner's preoccupation with the artistic and financial welfare of her theater, she is concerned about her husband - who is not, like everyone is made to believe, in South America - but hidden in the basement of the theater. Tellingly, the play the ensemble performs is called The woman who disappeared. Since the curfew requires that the performance end in time for the theatergoers to catch the last metro home, Marion can disappear every night and pay her husband a clandestine visit. At the same time, a love story unfolds between Marion and the theater's new lead actor Bernard (Gerard Depardieu). Probing the heroism of the three lover's affair, the film ends in a liberated Paris when the curtain falls and Lucas joins Marion and Bernard onstage together taking a bow. …

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry L. Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution It requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists. Harlem newsboy, photographed by Gordon Parks, 1943, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress. What is it about photographs? They have been around since the 1830s but still seem far more novel than paintings or drawings. Photography equipment can be cheap and simple and takes no special talent to use, so everybody can take pictures. And we all do. Even so, it requires very special talent to make great photographs, and those who have it are among our finest artists. The most important thing about photographs may be that they seem to be an exact replica of reality, though of course they’re not. Everything about a photograph is artificial and manipulated, from the camera and film (or computer chip) to the light, the focus, the angle, the framing, and the flat, fragile surface itself. The only things natural are usually hidden from the viewer—the eye and mind of the photographer and the hand that pushes the button. The naturalist illusions of photographs make them favorite vehicles of memory. By freezing a moment in time, they seem to offer an immediate vision of pure reality. You look at a photograph and suddenly you are there on the scene, back at the moment when the shutter clicked and everything stood still. As historian Scott Matthews writes in this issue’s “Not Forgotten,” photographs are “torchbearers of memory” that seem to take us to the past as it really was, without distortion or deception. Family photos in particular can carry us back to vanished times, places, and people, “to reconstruct,” as Matthews puts it, “a society that look[s] at once familiar and foreign.” No one knows better than Matthews about the artificial and illusionary character of photographs. It is this artificial character that allows photos to carry so many warm memories. The photographer’s unobserved power to manipulate and capture a scene passes to the photograph itself, which continues to recreate a vision in memory—not the reality itself but the one we want to see and the photographer intended us to see. Knowing this, we still cherish our family snapshots. For Matthews and for us, the act of remembering repairs frayed connections [End Page 1] to beloved people and the beloved past they lived in, restoring a precious sense of belonging to a ruptured world—he to them, they to him. Are photographs special in the South? All around the world, people love their memories and their snapshots. But the South is often obsessed with memory, not only private and personal recollections, but public ones as well. “Old times there are not forgotten,” “Dixie” promises, and the Matthews box of family pictures is labeled “The Good Ol’ Days.” Is it the apparent truth and changelessness of photographs that makes them especially resonant for southern memory? Southerners have been through many changes that many of us did not welcome, and white southerners are especially apt to sentimentalize the past. A people whose “peculiar institution” long seemed, at least, to protect them from (or deprive them of) the hurley-burley of social and economic change, grew attached to things as they were. A society in constant motion, where any problem could be solved by moving away from it, held few charms. Antebellum southerners moved in great numbers from the South Atlantic to the Gulf states, only to recreate there a society based on the appearance of stability. Many others remained in communities where keeping a colonial land grant was not unheard of, and remembering great-grandparents was unremarkable. Much that followed those “good old days” was painful: military defeat, revolutionized race relations, the sting of poverty, the lure of cities, the sale of the old homeplace. And white southerners are not alone in such memories. No matter what suffering they endured, the blood and sweat of black southerners made the South their home. The Great Migration northward brought disappointment along with opportunity, which some have tried to remedy by reverse migration. No wonder southerners hang on to...

The Blame Game: An Aspect of Handling Military Defeat in the Early Principate

The Blame Game: An Aspect of Handling Military Defeat in the Early Principate

Separatist insurgency, objective referents and autonomy

In certain separatist conflicts there is a greater likelihood of external mediation if the political ‘redefinition’ of the state insisted upon by the insurgents undergoes a revision, from secession to self-determination, understood as a variant of autonomy. In the same vein, although it may not happen concurrently, insurgent movements become more amenable to external mediation if and when opposing governments revise the preferred conflict outcome from a military defeat of the insurgents to a ‘containment’ of the movement. These two developments — a revised demand from the insurgents for how the state should be defined and an altered military strategy adopted by the government — can serve as ‘objective referents’ helping external parties to identify a ripe moment in the conflict and initiate mediation.