Forgetful Allies
Date: 26 September 2011
Conference entitled ‘Forgetful Allies: Truth, Myth and Memory in the two World Wars and After’
This two-day conference was held at Cambridge on 26-27 September, with the financial support of the Cambridge History Faculty, the French Embassy in London, and St John’s College, and under the auspices of the Franco-British Council. Its purpose was to present and discuss in detail a number of commissioned and pre-circulated papers among a mainly invited specialist audience (about 30 people in all) with a view to preparing them for a subsequent book. Each paper was the subject of a response, and after each session there was a panel discussion and then questions and comments from the floor. The result was intensive discussion (on average, 40 minutes for each paper). All the discussions are available on line by googling 'Forgetful Allies'.
The general aims of the conference were (as announced by the organizers) ‘To explore key moments at which British and French experience and understanding of events differed, and which have either remained controversial or been pushed out of public memory … to demolish old prejudices and combat misunderstanding, resentment, prejudice, and perhaps above all forgetfulness, and so contribute to a more aware and mutually respectful view of the past.’
There were 9 main speakers, 9 respondents, and 3 discussion panels. An attempt had been made to balance British, French and other perspectives, and consequently there were speakers from several British and French universities, as well as from the USA and from the French Ecole Militaire and the Australian Defence Academy. Some graduate students took part, as did very senior scholars such as Zara Steiner (doyenne of historians of 20th century British foreign policy) and Michael Foot (official historian of SOE in France).
Although the conference was not intended to be directly relevant to policy makers, a number of interesting points were made. Professor John Keiger demonstrated the consistent intellectual difference in approach between British and French foreign offices before 1914, which led to serious and even dangerous misunderstanding. Several speakers noted the almost inevitable divergence of interpretation of events among international coalition partners both at the time and subsequently as national historiographical traditions are usually greatly influenced by contemporary writers – Field Marshal Haig and General de Gaulle were examples given. As one speaker noted, alliances are not friendships.
Professor Jay Winter stressed how deep differences of language can create different memories of the past. Events too inevitably carry deeply different symbolic meanings: a paper on 1940 by Colonel Rémy Porte showed that still in France some see Dunkirk as a British betrayal. There was considerable discussion of the Normandy campaign of 1944, both the Allied bombing and the allegation that British troops fought poorly – presented by Professor Olivier Wieviorka as a reason why British participation in D-Day and the Liberation is today overlooked in France (a view regarded with some scepticism by the audience).
Main speakers:
Annette Becker, Professor at Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre, Member of Institut Universitaire de France, co-author of 1914-1918: Understanding the Great War (Profile, 2002)
Robert Frank, Professor at Université de Paris I Panthéon, author of La hantise du decline: le rang de la France en Europe, 1920-1960 (Belin, 1994)
Elizabeth Greenhalgh, research fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Academy, author of Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2005)
John Keiger, Professor of International History, University of Salford, author of France and the Origins of the First World War (Macmillan, 1983)
William Philpott, Professor of the History of War, Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, author of Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century (Little Brown, 2009)
Rémy Porte, Lt. Col. in the French army, historian and director of a research centre at the Ecole Militaire.
David Reynolds, Professor of International Relations, Cambridge, and author of In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Allen Lane, 2004)
Olivier Wieviorka, Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, author of Normandy: The Landings to the Liberation of Paris (Harvard UP, 2010)
Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University, author of Remembering War: The Great War between Historical Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (Yale UP, 2006)
Robert Tombs
28 September 2011