French History Advance Access originally published online on July 16, 2008
French History 2008 22(3):337-357; doi:10.1093/fh/crn029
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Selbstmord or Euthanasia? Who killed the Ligue des droits de l'homme?
* Norman Ingram is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University and Adjunct Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal and may be contacted at Ingram{at}alcor.concordia.ca. He is the author of The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford, 1991) and is presently working on a manuscript, from which this paper is drawn, entitled Eyes Across the Rhine: The Ligue des droits de l’homme and the German Problem, 1914–1944
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Abstract |
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The Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH) carried enormous moral authority in the political culture of the Third Republic; its importance to French political history in the period of the two world wars can hardly be overemphasized. Strangely, though, until very recently, it has suffered from an almost total neglect from French historians. The cloud of oubli has begun to lift. In its place, however, a new orthodoxy seems set to establish itself, one which sees the Ligue as the incarnation of Republican Virtue, and the hapless victim in 1940 of Nazi oppression. This article is based on the archives of the Ligue which were returned to France from the former Soviet Union in 2001, together with the records of Gestapo interrogations of Ligue members after the fall of France, and other German archival records in Berlin. It argues for a more nuanced, less hagiographical appreciation of the Ligue and suggests on the contrary that it was not the Nazis or the war experience which killed the Ligue, but rather that the LDH was dead or dying long before the Nazi invasion of 1940.