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8.1. WWII & Cold War Readings: Econ 115
Required Readings Note:
There are no required readings outside of the DeLong chapters this
week.
(Very) Optional Readings Note:
Only if you have lots of spare time—and if you want to procrastinate
on your other tasks—do I recommend that you read this optional
reading: 15 pages from the end of
Marc Bloch
(1940):
Strange
Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940
.
In this passage, Bloch attempts to grapple with the fact that in 1940
the upper-middle class of France—the people who ran and staffed
France’s controlling organizations, private, and public—did not
understand and were in fact fi lled with a combination of fear and
contempt for the working-class mass population of France. Right-
wing politicians had sought to preserve the unequal property order of
France by painting left-wing politicians and their supporters,
especially those who made up the Popular Front headed by Judeo-
French Leon Blum, as decadent, lazy, and untrustworthy—un-
French. Why? How else can you hold on to power when your
economic policy is to block reforms that would benefi t the
overwhelming majority at a cost of taxing the rich more.
Thus when the middle- and working-class males of military age in
France were gathered into the army, the army’s leaders did not trust
the soldiers to do their job. Bloch thinks
that this underpinned an
unwillingness on the part of the army command structure—from
generals down to lieutenants—to ask and lead the soldiers to fi ght to
the utmost.
Bloch may be wrong here. Of the 2 million soldiers committed to the
front-line French forces, 300,000 were killed or wounded in the
six
He was arrested by the Vichy police in March 1944 and handed over
to the
local Nazi
Gestapo
, then
under the command of Klaus Barbie,
“The Butcher of
Lyons”
. He was tortured. A week after the beginning
of the Anglo-American invasion of France he was shot by the
Gestapo. Again, Wikipedia: “According to Lyon, Bloch spent his last
moments comforting a 16-year-old beside him who was worried that
the bullets might hurt. Bloch fell fi rst, reputedly shouting ‘Vive la
France’ before being shot
”.
Besides
Strange Defeat
, the only other book of Bloch’s that I have
read with any great attention is his 1939
Feudal Society
, which is still
well worth reading as a sketch of how European society in the central
middle ages “worked”, at least in the lands between the rivers Loire
and Rhine (and, paradoxically, in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem of
the 1100s, to which the system was transplanted after the First
Crusade).
Required Readings:
<
https://github.com/braddelong/public-fi les/blob/master/
slouching-1
2-wwii
-%23tceh.pdf
>
<
https://github.com/braddelong/public-fi les/blob/master/
slouching-1
5-cold-war
-%23tceh.pdf
>
(Very) Optional Readings:
<
https://github.com/braddelong/public-fi les/blob/master/
readings/book-bloch-strange-defeat-selections.pdf
>
weeks of war before the French surrender. That is a casualty rate of
0.35
%
/day. (The Nazi front-line armies of 2.5 million suffered
150,000 killed or wounded in those six weeks.) The French in 1940
were outmaneuvered and outfought—but so was everybody the fi rst
time they ran into the Nazi army. It is not clear that they were
unwilling to try to fi ght, or unwilling to risk themselves and die.
But he may be right. And it is certainly true that the French right had
waged a “culture war”—the rich trying to secure their position
against economic reforms and high progressive taxes by breaking the
country in two along sociological lines, in the hope that enough not-
rich people would vote for right-wing candidates to allow them to
maintain power.
Marc Bloch (
6 July 1886–16 June 1944) was a French historian
speciali
zing
in medieval history
.
Born in Lyon to an Alsatian Jewish
family, Bloch was raised in Paris
, educated at
the École Normale
Supérieure
, and served during World War I as an offi cer, When World
War II began, at the age of 54 he volunteered for the army and
became the
fuel czar for the French 1st Army, positioned on the far
left of the French battleline. After the French defeat in 1940, he
simply took off his army uniform, put back on his professor clothes,
and resumed teaching medieval history.
Two years later he joined the French Resistance. Wikipedia quotes
fellow Resistance fi ghter George Altman: “resistance fi ghter Georges
Altman, who “later told how he knew Bloch as, although originally
‘a man, made for the creative silence of gentle study, with a cabinet
full of books’ was now ‘running from street to street, deciphering
secret letters in some Lyonaisse Resistance garret’
…”
<
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/10/81-wwii-cold-war-readings-econ-115.html
> <
https://github.com/braddelong/public-fi les/blob/master/econ-115-8.1-wwii-%26-cold-war-readings-note.pptx
> <
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0SeHtO2Tno7Vf_ddUMm0dhAaw
> 2020-10-19
