Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (review)

What is particularly noticeable about Susan Whitney’s earlier work and this book is her fresh and lucid analysis of significant groups of young Frenchwomen in the interwar period. The Communist and Catholic organizations she describes were previously studied by admiring historians—either members of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) or former students of René Rémond, the “pope” of Sciences Po. The party oversaw the PCF archives and potential interviewees; Remond oversaw the Catholic sources. The cocos and cathos, with exclusive access to sources, were gentle with their subjects and their failings. Whitney’s approach is distinguished for its scholarly detachment and reassuring “ring of truth” as it depicts zealous, often blinkered, young people, who were willing to give their lives for their respective causes.

Whitney’s book—multidimensional, fair-minded, neither pious nor patronizing— cites a considerable amount of relatively unknown and unexplored sources while providing a rich amount of new information about young women who, only a few decades ago, seemed mortal enemies divided by life and death issues. Cathos were usually more economically advantaged and sexually repressed, and considered themselves gentler and kinder, than the cocos, but in their willingness to submit to authority and discipline as well as their earnest selflessness, were fairly similar to their fearsome adversaries.

Why have the greatest autobiographies of the twentieth century been written by detached atheists and not by catho or coco believers? Whitney makes resourceful use of relatively unknown autobiographies by communists (e.g., of the tough Stalinist Jeannette Thorez-Vermeersch [pp. 75–78]) and by Catholics (e.g., of the budding communitarian theologian Yves Congar [pp. 26–27]), providing a number of telling, vivid illustrations and anecdotes. Rather than searching out materials on the Web, Whitney obviously did considerable digging in dusty French archives, where she found interesting, unfamiliar, and enlightening things.

Whitney has made an authoritative contribution in this area and is already known as one of Canada’s leading authorities on modern European history. Her scholarship is unassuming, informed, wide-ranging, and solid. Her ideas and conclusions are fair-minded and substantiated. She tells the story of these young people in an empathic, lively, and interesting way, without revealing her personal sympathies or ideological or spiritual bent.

The roles of age, gender, and class in interwar France—particularly in the background to the National Revolution of Marshall Pétain—are finally beginning to receive free, full, and objective treatment from a gifted new generation of scholars less beholden to powerful mentors. Whitney’s debt to Joan Scott is not obtrusive. This book, built upon extensive work in primary and secondary sources, constitutes a solid and significant contribution to knowledge in an important field of historical inquiry.