Journal of Contemporary History

In 1901, Gustave Hervé attained notoriety by creating an image of the tricolour planted in a dungheap. Soon he formed a prominent anti-militarist movement called Hervéism. When France's socialist parties united in 1905, Hervé led the most extreme faction. Soon Hervéists started a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale, which attempted to unite the French extreme left. Six years of sensational and provocative campaigns and organizations failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé became frustrated by continuing leftist divisions. His disillusionment was connected to a rather naive reading of the increasingly anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Despite his sincerity, Hervé's romantic and eclectic socialism exhibited atavistic features. His gradual transition to blatant chauvinism by 1914 culminated in a form of national socialism after 1919, which sought to recruit workers and former militants in a crusade for French renewal. Hervé's activist socialism had included an anti-materialistic critique of society; his interwar national socialism looked to the nation and its religious traditions to remedy social divisions and decadence. His renamed newspaper, La Victoire, and its associated groups offered authoritarian panaceas to end French disorder. Despite Hervé's marginalized status during the interwar era and his general reluctance to engage in violence, his neo-Bonapartist views and admiration for Mussolini must inescapably be included within what Philippe Burrin has called ‘the fascist drift’. Striking shifts such as Hervé's, from one extreme to the other, have often been tied to the origins of fascism. But the two chief interpretations of French fascism, the ‘consensus’ approach associated with Zeev Sternhell and Eugen Weber as well as the ‘neo-traditionalist’ approach associated with Robert J. Soucy and William D. Irvine, sometimes use the case of Hervé to buttress their contrasting arguments. Such a paradoxical situation demands a thorough exploration of the life and political career of Gustave Hervé.

This article offers a re-evaluation of a high-ranking German Catholic clergyman, Bishop von Galen, and his position under the National Socialist regime. In particular, the article focuses on three critical sermons the Bishop gave in the summer of 1941 which instantly propelled him to national and international fame. These sermons have traditionally been pointed to as examples of anti-nazi resistance on the part of the Catholic Church in Germany. Although these sermons were forthright denunciations of certain nazi policies, this article argues that von Galen's three summer sermons were never calls for insurrection against the nazi state, nor were they pleas for German Catholics to rise up and protect all of their neighbours who were experiencing nazi persecution. By placing the summer sermons in their appropriate context, one can see how the example of von Galen complicates the picture of what constitutes resistance. His life represents a complex portrait of a high-ranking German Catholic clergyman who mixed some selective opposition with conformity, accommodation and surrender in order to achieve a sense of balance in his life.

Few issues in medicine and society today are more controversial than euthanasia, the term derived from the Greek word for ‘easy death’ and often called ‘mercy-killing’. Current debates raise questions about the past and what euthanasia has meant to earlier generations. The most infamous example of a state euthanasia programme occurred between 1939 and 1945 in nazi Germany when thousands of handicapped men, women and children were murdered. But little is known about the history of Anglo-American euthanasia. This article, based on an examination of documents from a variety of archival collections in England and the USA, explores the early history of the unsuccessful movement to legalize euthanasia in Great Britain, as embodied in the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society (VELS). By focusing on the career of C. Killick Millard (1870–1952), the founder of the VELS, this article argues that although the VELS tried to convince the public that it sought the legalization of only mercy-killing with consent, there was a tendency within the VELS to obscure the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. There is even some evidence of VELS sympathy for nazi euthanasia. At the same time, VELS members also tended to be involved in the eugenics, birth control and public health movements or belong to liberal religious groups like the Unitarians, or they were physicians radicalized by the experience of watching patients die in protracted agony. It is this complex constellation of motives — some murky and some indisputably humane — that warrants attention nowadays, at a time when courts and legislatures are being asked to rule on such literally life and death issues.

Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lion's failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917–18 Palestine campaign as the ‘Last’ or the ‘New’ Crusade.

This representation, in turn, with its anti-Moslem overtones, introduced complicated problems for the British propaganda apparatus, to the point (demonstrated here through an array of official documentation, press accounts and popular works) of becoming enmeshed in a hopeless web of contradictory directives. This article argues that the ambiguity underlying the representation of the Palestine campaign in British wartime propaganda was not a coincidence, but rather an inevitable result of the complex, often incompatible, historical and religious images associated with this particular front. By exploring the cultural currency of the Crusading motif and its multiple significations, the article suggests that the almost instinctive evocation of the Crusade in this context exposed inherent faultlines and tensions which normally remained obscured within the self-assured ethos of imperial order. This applied not only to the relationship between Britain and its Moslem subjects abroad, but also to rifts within metropolitan British society, where the resonance of the Crusading theme depended on class position, thus vitiating its projected propagandistic effects even among the British soldiers themselves.

The Great War (1914–18) continues to shape political culture and collective memory in the major combatant nations. Its influence can be seen in public holidays, expressions of national identity, and attitudes towards war and peace. This is most certainly the case in Australia, where ANZAC Day (25 April) still anchors the public calendar, and the first world war experience anchors the activities on that day. Why have the battles on the Western Front and at Gallipoli on the Dardenelles remained at the centre of those commemorations and their visions of Australian identity? Why has the Anzac myth remained so powerful while Australian society has changed so much? This article considers those questions in light of the early literary creation of the Anzac tradition in the writings of C.E.W. Bean, the official Australian war historian, John Masefield, the English Poet Laureate, and many of the soldiers themselves. Wartime diaries, letters, poems and reflections suggest the powerful linkage of the Australian war experience with commonly held ideas and images of the Australian landscape and collective past. The more that the writers and myth-makers described fighting and battlefields as complements and sometimes mirror images of key Australian landmarks, such as the Outback and Botany Bay, the more meaningful and accessible the war experience became. Without a military tradition to draw upon, Australians made sense of the unprecedented horrors of the first world war by comparing them to mythic experiences of migration, exile and struggles with a hostile land. Those might be revelant and accessible to different social groups and different times, whether Aboriginal Australians, white settlers or more recent Asian migrants. Such national myths are not forms of escapism, but integrate experience and imagination, linking citizens in a persistent and viable way not only with one another, but with a shared, more inclusive past.

Among the numerous aspects of decolonization (mostly political and economic) studied during the half-century since the beginning of the end of the British Empire, one major social phenomenon has received very little attention in the literature. This is the diaspora of the expatriate career civil servants who were still employed by HM government when independence was granted. Between the transfer of power in India in 1947 and that of Hong Kong in 1997, it is estimated that at least 25,000 prematurely retired British officials of the Indian Civil Service, the All-India Services, the Colonial Service (administration and departmental), the Sudan Political Service and the Sudan Civil Service engaged on permanent and pensionable terms returned to Britain in search of relocation and further employment. Many took up a ‘second career’ with the help of the three ad hoc ex-Service Resettlement Bureaux set up by the British government; others found employment under their own steam; a few, especially in the 45+ age group, looked for voluntary work rather than further paid employment.

Based on largely unpublished material and statistics, this article summarizes and analyses the kinds of second careers secured by Britain's former imperial officials. It also invites further research, both into the comparative French, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgian Colonial Service experience and into the impact of this considerable body of experienced and able men and women on Britain's economy and society in the past half-century.