Hanna Diamond

Women’s History and Oral History: developments and debates

Women’s history and oral history grew up together. Each developed from a commitment to reveal and reverse, to challenge and to contest what were perceived to be dominant discourses framed by gender and class. In this article the relationship between these two endeavours is explored. Beginning with the 1960s the influence of feminist approaches to research and representation are given due consideration and acknowledgement. In reviewing changes over the last four decades the dilemma for women of being both subject and object in research is explored. The tension in this dilemma is discussed in relation to developments in relation to subjectivity in the interview, the process of doing oral history, the developments in public history and remembering in late life. The article concludes with an overview of new work in the field and concedes that, whatever issues remain unresolved, oral history continues to interest and attract researchers working in a wide range of disciplines with the promise of yet more theorised and gendered explorations of the past in years to come.

Miners, masculinity and the 'Bataille du Charbon' in France 1944-1948

In 1944, the French provisional government, backed by the Parti communiste français and the Confédération générale du travail, undertook an aggressive propaganda campaign to persuade miners to embark upon a ‘battle for coal’ which raised their efforts in extracting coal to that of a national endeavour. At the same time, miners had great hopes that nationalisation of the coal industry, under discussion at this time, would bring significant improvement to their working lives. In identifying the ways in which publicists posited miners as an ideal of working-class manhood, this article will argue that ‘la bataille du charbon’ marks a crucial moment in the celebration of working-class masculinity and that the ‘statut des mineurs’ which was passed in 1946 as a part of nationalisation enshrined many of the existing gender assumptions about mining life. What does an incorporation of gender to an analysis of the treatment of miners in the years 1944–1948 add to our understandings of the various economic, political and social dynamics around ‘la bataille du charbon’? How do these insights inform our perceptions of French coalfield societies in the mid-twentieth century?

Women and the Second World War in France (1939-1948)

Part I Womens lives during the war and the occupation 1939-44: financial resources and paid employment physical survival collaborations resistances. Part II Womens lives after the occupation, 1944-48, a liberation?: women and the purges everyday life and paid employment 1944-48 women gain new rights and become citizens.

A new dawn? French women and the liberation

This article draws on extensive archival and oral sources from Britanny, Toulouse, and Paris. It will discuss a number of aspects of the Occupation and Liberation experience for French women. It will first explore the importance attributed to the fact that women eventually gained their political rights in 1944, a measure that also saw an end to the “first wave” feminist movement that had believed that suffrage would resolve the “womens condition” and herald the start of a new era for women. This article will then move into an analysis of women and Collaboration during the Occupation offering a new approach to womens political involvement during the war. It finishes by presenting an overview of womens relationship to paid employment, the area where there was perhaps the greatest unfulfilled potential for women to experience a new beginning in the post-war period.

Representing defeat : Photographic images of the French exodus of 1940

Abstract This exploratory article analyses a number of photographs concerning the events of the first two years of the Second World War in France. It focuses on two key groups of pictures: the first presents the official and strategic narratives that were produced by the military; the second presents those taken by freelance photographers who were less subject to restrictions. Among the images in the latter group, a recurrent visual vocabulary has emerged that posits fleeing refugees in a particular way. However, a close analysis of the work of the American photographer Thrse Bonney suggests very different kinds of visual narratives from those that are commonly taken to represent this experience, and also implies the existence of a possible gendered narrative. This exploration therefore suggests that further research into the work of other photographers has the potential to uncover numerous visual narratives that nuance and complicate the existing dominant visual images of these events.

‘Prisoners of the Peace’: German Prisoners-of-War in Rural France 1944–48:

Historians have paid little attention to the over half a million German prisoners-of-war who were deployed for the purposes of reconstruction in France between 1944 and 1948. In an effort to contain the rural labour crisis over half were allocated to agriculture. Despite an initially hostile reception by the French, this article argues that moving the prisoners into farms marked the beginning of a strikingly rapid process of acceptance by these local communities. Farmers led the way to broader acceptance by refusing to enforce the rules and granting prisoners more freedom than the authorities intended. It shows how, despite opposition from some quarters, in a process of growing normalization, rural populations gradually came to identify the Germans less as prisoners and more as foreign workers living amongst them.

Reframing War: Histories and Memories of the Second World War in the Photography of Julia Pirotte

This article examines the photographic narratives of the Second World War produced by Jewish Polish-Belgian émigré photographer Julia Pirotte and their post-war trajectory. It begins by proposing a set of critical frames which ground the analysis of Pirottes press photographs of the Liberation of Marseille in 1944. It explores the narratives of liberation and resistance transmitted in these photographs and demonstrates how these photographs were mobilised to build and promote a ‘national’ picture of French activism and unity at the wars end. The article then proceeds to examine the ‘afterlives’ of Pirottes photographs and the ways in which they have been successively reframed to tell different war stories. In particular, this article connects Pirottes photographs and their reproduction to fraught debates on the histories and legacies of the Resistance and argues that they have been used, on a number of occasions, to make visible the contribution of foreigners to the French Resistance. This is evidenced in the re-captioning of her photographs for various publication and exhibition projects since the 1990s. By interrogating how Pirottes photographic narratives of liberation and resistance have been re-presented for different post-war audiences, this article makes a case for photography as an influential cultural medium which continues to shape the contours of French war memory today.

Facing the Past: French Wartime Memories at the Millennium

More than almost any other aspect of French twentieth-century history, the resistance has symbolized a set of democratic and liberal values which constitute the bedrock of French post-war identity. Yet in the 1990s, this heroic story of a national uprising against the forces of nazism was challenged. The war record of prominent resistance activists, such as Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, came under increasing attack.1 Both in the courtroom and in the pages of major newspapers, the lives and actions of resistance heroes, dead and alive, were contested in ways that point to the very dissolution of the Gaullist myth of la France resistante. In this chapter, we shall explore the shifting politics of memory by looking at the impact of two wartime figures on current debates over the legacy of France’s wartime past: Jean Moulin, the iconic figure of Gaullist resistance, and Maurice Papon, the former Vichy civil servant who was successfully prosecuted for complicity in crimes against humanity in 1998.

Reviews : W.D. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France, Oxford, Berg, ISBN 1-85973-071-X, 1995; 450 pp.; £17.95

are conspicuously short: usually 10 to 12 pages of large typeface with generous spaces between each paragraph. Specialists may find points of significance in these short, introspective sketches, but I suspect that most historians will be left baffled by them. The 17 essays are organized into four sections: history of education, from the middle ages to contemporary times; nineteenthcentury social history; cultural history; travel and travellers. There are a few glimmers of light within the gloom. The essays by each of the editors do acknowledge their debt to Gerbod, and do present solid examples of research. Claude-Isabelle Brelot examines the awkward position of ’precepteurs’ (i.e. male tutors) in aristocratic households. Jean-Luc Mayaud initiates a complex debate on the nature of rural cultural history. Some of the other contributors also rise to the occasion: Antoine Prost’s essay on the theme of ’democratization’ within French educational history is as masterly and as comprehensive as his classic work on the history of education, and shows the same remarkable ability to speak knowledgeably about issues in 1881 or 1981. Jean-Noel Luc contributes an interesting piece on female nursery school inspectors, and Frangois Mayeur discusses the post-1968 sociology of higher education in France. However, with some sadness, I have to state that this is not a work which will get the adrenalin flowing.