Science, progress, and morality: French intellectuals and internationalism during the interwar

This thesis studies the thought of French intellectuals who wrote about internationalism during the interwar period (1918-1940). For intellectuals in France, the upheavals caused by the First World War represented an opportunity to rethink the world. The conflict they experienced was of a magnitude that had never been seen before, and they believed that the world was in need of a reconstruction, in need of a new order that could give meaning to the horrors it had just gone through. It is in this context that ‘spaces’ (journals and associations) were created to address internationalism and its implications. Focusing on the discourse of French intellectuals who contributed to these different spaces of productions of ideas about internationalism, this thesis attempts to uncover ideas and assumptions that underpinned and structured French intellectuals’ thought about internationalism in France after the First World War. It therefore contributes to the field of intellectual international history and the field of French intellectual history by revealing the importance internationalism had in French intellectual milieus.
Because this thesis is about ideas, the primary source research focuses on five spaces of production of the ideas regarding internationalism: the Carnegie Endowment for peace’s journal L’Esprit international, edited in Paris and published four times a year from 1927 to 1940; ‘transcripts’ from the Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, a committee which met every week between 1916 and 1931 to talk about the main problems of its times and was very much interested in international topics; the journal Affaires étrangères, published monthly between 1931 and 1940; the journal Année politique française et étrangère, published four times a year between 1925 and 1940; and Europe nouvelle, published weekly between 1918 and 1940. The thesis highlights the tension between the impact of the new post-war context and the influence of important ideas of the 19th century on how internationalism was conceived during the interwar. The new diplomatic context created by the war indeed acted as a catalyst for the interest in such a subject, and by creating their journals, these French intellectuals contributed to the popularisation of the topic. If the impulse behind the creation of the journals came from the new postwar context, the inspiration had roots in the 19th century. Republican Nationalism (expressed through the notion of the international mind), the ideas of Auguste Comte, and paradigms of progress had an important place in the mental universe of these intellectuals. The discourse around these ideas helped them give weight to their claims that an international system like the League of Nations was the best option. The language of morality also played a similar role while at the same time allowing them to confirm the supposedly superiority of Europe.