Professor Robert Gildea: List of publications

In 1984 the Communist daily 'L'Humanite' invited its readers to send in testimonies of resistance activity in Vichy and German-occupied France. The project may be seen as an attempt by the Communist Party to recover some legitimacy at a moment when its wartime record was under attack and electoral support in decline. An analysis of the 400 letters received nevertheless also allows us to explore what ordinary people thought resistance was: was it the heroic, organised actions of the few or the sporadic, spontaneous and symbolic gestures of the many?

This article explores the case of the Larzac plateau in southern France which was the site of protests against the extension of a military base in the 1970s. It analyses the development of the site as a focus of local, national and transnational protest, drawing in post-1968 gauchistes in France and West Germany. After the cancellation of the military base the Larzac protest became a model for protest from Latin America to the Pacific against the threats of globalization, which in turn transformed local protest. The limits of transnationalism were nevertheless demonstrated by contested understandings of the Larzac model of non-violent protest by activists from different contexts with their own agendas.

By the late 1960s, in a Europe divided by the Cold War and challenged by global revolution in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, thousands of young people threw themselves into activism to change both the world and themselves. This new and exciting study of "Europe's 1968" is based on the rich oral histories of nearly 500 former activists collected by an international team of historians across fourteen countries. Activists' own voices reflect on how they were drawn into activism, how they worked and struggled together, how they combined the political and the personal in their lives, and the pride or regret with which they look back on those momentous years. Themes explored include generational revolt and activists' relationship with their families, the meanings of revolution, transnational encounters and spaces of revolt, faith and radicalism, dropping out, gender and sexuality, and revolutionary violence. Focussing on the way in which the activists themselves made sense of their revolt, this work makes a major contribution to both oral history and memory studies. This ambitious study ranges widely across Europe from Franco's Spain to the Soviet Union, and from the two Germanys to Greece, and throws new light on moments and movements which both united and divided the activists of Europe's 1968.

This article addresses the importance of Third Worldism/tiersmondisme as a source of inspiration for European radicals on both sides of the Iron Curtain 1958–73, focusing on the cases of France, the Netherlands and Hungary. Using both oral history and archival material, it considers the decline of domestic anti-fascist traditions as a source of revolutionary identity; the emergence of new political networks both within and outside Europe based on solidarity with ‘Third World’ anti-imperial movements; and the way in which the Algerian anti-colonial movement, the Cuban revolution, the Chinese cultural revolution and the struggles of Vietnam provided inspiration for, and were ‘domesticated’ by, European activists. Finally, the article considers the decline of Third Worldism as a source of inspiration for political practice in the early to mid-1970s.

Every ten years after the events of 1968 in France, there has been a spate of publications about this pivotal moment in the twentieth century. In 1978, the Maoist leader Robert Linhart published his experience of ‘going to the people’ as a car worker in L’Etabli. 1988 saw the publication of Laurent Joffrin's Mai 68. Histoire des événements and Génération by Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, a collective biography of the Paris-centred intellectual leadership of 1968, especially the Maoists. In 1998, Jean-Pierre Le Goff attacked what he saw as the hedonistic, amoral project of 1968 in Mai 68, l'héritage impossible, an attack that was resumed by Nicolas Sarkozy during the presidential election campaign of 2007, when he vowed to ‘liquidate 1968’...

Daily Life in Occupied Europe Robert Gildea, Olivier Wieviorka, Anette Warring. Occupation in Europe Series Surviving Hitler and Mussolini is part of the European Science Foundation (ESF) programme 'Occupation in Europe: The Impact of ...

Through a collection of case studies, this volume aims to address the question how the German occupier during World Ward II organized its collaboration with local and regional authorities.

This is a comprehensive survey of European history from the coup detat of Napoleon Bonaparte in France to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo, which led to the First World War.

The French Revolution of 1789 was followed by a century of upheaval, rebellion, and change. Napoleonic dictatorship, monarchical restoration, Second Republic, and Second Empire all rapidly succeeded one another, and it was not until the advent of the Third Republic in the 1870s that political stability was restored. The period 1788-1880 thus possesses a unity as Revolutionary France, though it is seldom treated as a whole. In this volume, a team of leading international historians explore the major issues of politics and society, together with the dynamics of culture, gender, national identity, and overseas empire, during this vital period of French history.

The last fifty years of French history have seen immense challenges for the French: constructing a new European order, building a modern economy, searching for a stable political system. It has also been a time of anxiety and doubt. The French have had to come to terms with the legacy of the German Occupation, the loss of Empire, the political and social implications of the influx of foreign immigrants, the rise of Islam, the destruction of rural life, and the threat of Anglo-American culture to French language and civilization. Robert Gildea's account examines the French political system and France's role in the world from 1945 to 2000. He looks at France's attempt to recover national greatness after the Second World War, its attempt to deal with the fear of German resurgence by building the European Community, and its struggle to preserve its Empire. He also discusses the Algerian War and its legacy, and the later development of a neo-colonialism to preserve its influence in Africa and the Pacific. Gildea also examines the rise and fall of the two Republics, the rise of and fall of De Gaulle, and the revolution of 1968, along with topics such as the construction of the myth of the Resistance, the painful truths of French involvement in anti-Semitic persecution, and France's continuing obsession with national identity.

The period 1870 - 1914 in France saw the consolidation of republican government and the recovery of national self-confidence. Though political crises such as the Dreyfus Affair threatened to tear it apart, the Republic established firm parliamentary rule, built up an Empire and an army which was to see it through the Great War. The new edition of this key text - first published as The Third Republic From 1870 to 1914 - offers a clear introduction to the period and incorporates the latest research.