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Reviewed by:
  • Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France
  • Tyler Stovall
Susan B. Whitney , Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2009)

In this important study, Susan B. Whitney looks at the history of French politics during the interwar years from an unusual angle, the youth movements sponsored by the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Both sponsored vibrant youth organizations during the 1920s and 1930s, and both wrestled with how to incorporate young people into their ideological vision, while at the same time incorporating new ideas that youth could bring to them as a way of ensuring their organizations' popular appeal and future success. In Mobilizing Youth, Whitney uses political, social, and cultural analysis to portray the evolution of working-class youth culture during this period, focusing in particular on the legacy of World War I and on the Popular Front. She argues convincingly that both Communists and Catholics devoted much attention to youth politics, though both insisted upon adult control of youth organizations. In effect, especially when compared with the youthful transformation of the country after 1945, Mobilizing Youth gives a portrait of a new France struggling to be born, yet restrained by old patterns and practices.

Whitney places her book within the historiography of youth in interwar Europe, a topic that has received much attention in recent years. As she notes, "youth" is a slippery concept, one that varies greatly according to time, place, and social status. The idea of a period of life between childhood and adulthood, symbolized in particular by the increased amount of formal education required of young people, has usually been considered not just a recent phenomenon but a hallmark of modernity. Consequently, much of the scholarship on youth has focused on the children of the middle class, in particular young intellectuals and college students. In contrast, Whitney studies working-class young people, in part because they were so much more numerous. For them the transition from childhood to adulthood was much more abrupt than for their bourgeois peers, and yet, as the author notes, even when they went off to work they had an identity distinct from their more mature peers. The author generally looks at the period from the ages of 13, when most working-class children left school for good and took up full-time work, to the mid-20s. Yet as she notes, this span of years encompassed a multitude of different experiences and perspectives. The Communist and Catholic youth movements she studies confronted the challenge of addressing these [End Page 286] differences yet at the same time crafting a common social and political identity for young workers, one that would simultaneously address the workers' primary concerns and buttress the organizations' political strength.

In focusing on Communists and Catholics, Whitney considers two major institutions in French society that have often been opposed and yet have had some important qualities in common. The idea of Communism as a kind of secular religion is an old one, and a broader comparison of these two polities would be very useful for this study. Both had important claims to be parties of youth. The Communist Party was the newest major political organization in France, born in the aftermath of World War I, and moreover claimed to be creating a new world. While certainly no newcomer, the Catholic Church had a very long history of involvement with education and youth causes in general. As Whitney demonstrates, their positions at opposite ends of the French political spectrum during the interwar years underscored the centrality of youth to visions of French renewal. In an aging Third Republic that seemed to have sacrificed its élan vital in the trenches of the Great War, both Communists and Catholics fastened upon young working people as the key to building a new France.

Whitney starts her tale with World War I, a conflict that in many respects created the modern concept of "youth," and in particular served as the cradle of the French Communist Party. She notes how the war politicized two generations, those who fought in the trenches and those who experienced the conflict as children observing its impact on their...

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