The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme is a significant new volume from Norman Ingram, addressing the history of the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), an organisation founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair and which lay at the very centre of French Republican politics in the era of the two world wars. Ingram posits that the Ligue's inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War was what led to its declineby 1937, well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940. As well as developing our understanding of how the issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the LDH from 1914 down to the SecondWorld War, this volume also explores the aetiology of French pacifism, expanding on the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism. It argues that from 1916 onwards, one can see a principled dissent from the Union sacrée war effort that occurred within mainstream French Republicanism and not on the syndicalist or anarchist fringes. Based on substantial research in a large number of French archives, primarily in the papers of the LDH which were repatriated to France from theformer Soviet Union in late 2001, but also on considerable new research in the German archives, the book proposes a new explanatory model to help us understand some of the choices made in Vichy France, movingbeyond the usual triptych of collaboration, resistance or accommodation.

Norman Ingram is Professor of Modern French History at Concordia University in Montreal and has held Visiting Fellowships at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of St Andrews. He has served as Co-President of the Society for French Historical Studies in the United States. Although he is principally known for his first book, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism inFrance, 1919-1939 (1991 and 2011), he has published widely in English and French in a wide number of international scholarly venues.