The Memory of the First World War and the Key Problems of the French Foreign Policy during the Inter-War Period in the Reflection of the Journal “La Revue des Vivants”

Abstract

The article analyses the French journal “La Revue des Vivants” (1927-1935) as a source of studying the history of the Inter-war period. This journal, created by the veterans of the First World War, who at the same time represented the French intellectual elites, presents a unique combination of their war experience and current political agenda. The author examines three main subjects that characterized the political and social orientation of this journal. Firstly, its publishers and authors were deeply influenced by the First World War and its consequences. Its experience forced them to seek a better international system, where the repeat of such conflict would be impossible. This leads to the second subject, the European integration and the frame it was supposed to set. The idea of the united Europe was connected with the third subject, the relations with Germany, which could be successful only as a part of an international organization. The analysis of all these subjects brings a contradictory conclusion: despite all progressive and forward-thinking ideas of this journal, its publishers and authors failed to understand some important tendencies of their time (for example, the nature and the origins of the national socialism). However, this conclusion only confirms the nature of the Inter-war period as a time of many different ideologies and ideas and opens new perspectives of its studying.