-Defeated Flesh: Welfare, Warfare and the Making of Modern France, Manchester University Press, 1999, To order the book see Manchester University Press

Table of Contents:

Ch 1.  Memories of wars: 1870-1871
    Meanings of War
    Defeated Flesh

Ch 2.  The Franco-Prussian War, Revolution and     Commune: an Overview
    Origin Debates
    Immediate Causes of the War
    The War and Defeat
    Politics and the Commune
    Chronology of the War and Commune

Ch 3.  The Politics of Social Practice: Medicine, War     and Revolution in Paris.
   French Medicine in 1870
   Health in Paris in 1870
   Revolution and Medicine

Ch 4.  Militarisation and War Effort: Paris, the ‘Giant     Hospital’.
    Military Medicine.
    The ‘Giant Hospital’
    Discipline and Space
    Post-war

Ch 5.  The Politics of Care and Order
    To Free Paris
    To Feed Paris
    The Politics of Food
    The Politics of Care

Ch 6.  Revolutionary Society and Medicine
    Towards Secular Medicine
    Doctors Against the Commune
    The Agony of the Commune
    Conclusion

Ch 7.  The Dynamics of Humanitarianism and the Making of the Red Cross
    Humanitarianism
    Official Movements
    voluntary Movements
    Ideology
    Conclusion

Ch 8.  Defeat Embodied: The Severed Limbs of the Nation
    Bodyloss
    Outliving War
    Conclusion

Ch 9.   Seeds of Defeat: Alcohol and Syphilis
    From the Cabaret to the Grave
    Syphilis
    Shifting Regulation
    Symbolic Regulation and Prohibition
    Conclusion

Ch 10.   Conclusion: War Stories.

Description:

While I don't want to summarise the book that recently came out with Manchester University Press/Rowman and Littlefield, I would like to explain what this first volume was before I move on to the book I am currently writing.

The first book dwells largely on the history medical men wrote which fittingly integrated individual sufferings and national overviews. Many of them were bourgeois thrown into the conflict as semi-military ambulance staff or as volunteers of the service de santé. Their writings illustrate the complex and paradoxical relationship between war and civilian social practices, in this instance, medicine. While few challenged the notion that war is a terrible situation, the nature of their writing, mixing anecdotes and casebooks showed a universal belief that wars offer useful clinical and surgical experience. The surgeon's trademark on this type of writing is perhaps more obvious, but the belief in the ‘goodness of war’ for medicine is at the heart of most analyses. At a time of social and political upheaval the expectations rising from the fall of a system of government before the emergence of another, stirred the deeply divided French medical world of 1870 and uncovered layers of political dissent rarely touched on by political historians and which ought to enrich our perception of the democratic culture of the Second Empire.

To explore this further I paid close attention to the welfare institutions of Paris during the war. The Assistance Publique, dreaded and indispensable institution of social control played a particularly important role in the making of a giant hospital/fortress torn between civilian revolutionary aspirations and war priorities. This showed how theories of decentralization and municipal government sketched out in Sudhir Hazareesingh’s work came to be tested in the heat of the war and how reformism found its own limits in democratic practices. The war came also helped me analyse the tensions between civilian civic norms and military disciplining gaze on society in wartime. In a manner comparable with the Boer wars recruitment panics in Britain, this disciplining gaze directed at a changing and heterogeneous crowd produced an agonizing discourse of decline and an analysis of national unfitness.

The following theme in the book is a political analysis of care in warfare. For instance the politics of food, rationing and home care in besieged Paris. The provision of sufficient food to the right people involved the creation of a multitude of agencies rationing and distributing food, controlling the origins and the quality of food and even creating ersatz food. Food rationing and requisitions touched a raw nerve and contested property rights enshrined in the bourgeois legal codes. In practice, the rationing of food gave renewed powers to municipal arrondissements in Paris and became one of their main priorities and a major source of legitimacy in the war context. Food was only one key issue of the conflict. Policing, housing, unemployment, all fell into the hands of the civic administration. Parisian urban administration had always been under the close scrutiny of the state, in besieged Paris the reverse seems to have been true and Parisian municipalities concentrated in their hands effective power if not the legitimate jurisdictions. Through the debates on food and care, the state itself came to be contested and eventually confronted by municipal democracy. The Commune of Paris may in this context appear to be the continuation of wartime social order. There was thus real continuity between war order and revolutionary order. The Commune had to deal with the politics of care and social order with more urgency than the Versailles government. The power-base of the Commune, its legitimacy even were closely linked to its ability to deliver or maintain welfare and symbolic measures introduced during the siege, such as the moratorium on rent and loan debts, enforced secularization or pension rights. The Commune did not simply inherit a complex situation and very unwieldy administration from the National Defence government, it also attempted to create and legislate according to a mixture of historical precedent and ideological dogma. The Commune’s dealings with health provisions, medical practitioners and medical training illustrate some of the fundamental contradictions of Communard politics. Another aspect of this meshing of social and political aspirations was the rise of a humanitarian political agenda and the construction of a new humanitarian subject who could simultaneously be the victim of war and its best expression. The involvement of national and international societies for the help to the wounded and the sick played an important role during the war and in many ways complicated singularly the task of mobilizing society in the war effort. For the many governments and societies involved in the conflict, the international missions played the useful part of surrogate diplomacy but also enabled the collection of information on modern warfare. Within France the Red Cross channelled money and people towards new forms of warfare involvement. The divisions and contradictions in the Red Cross movement reflected not only the social fabric of French medicine but also the inherent contradictions of humanitarianism at war. There are unavoidable discrepancies between the rise of internationalist idealism and the integration of humanitarianism in war as an auxiliary of combating armies.
The last theme of the book is the defeat rather than the war. Scrutinizing medical practices and discourses during and after the conflict they focus on sets of metaphorical representations produced from a reflection on the causes of the defeat and on the embodiment of defeat. To show how political issues and medical metaphors inter-connect and permeate each other's semantic field I have chosen three essentially medical debates which were also explicitly political: amputations, alcoholism and syphilis. I was particularly intrigued that representations of France included not only Marianne wounded but also France as an amputated hero. By contrast with this heroic imagery, the sordid haggles on pension rights, the fact that the defeat had to remain the unspoken issue at the back of ‘one’s mind’ created a situation in which people were oblivious of war veterans and cripples. One had to wait until 1912 for a medal to be coined for war veterans, and until the 1930s to see it distributed to the remaining few.
By looking at two constituting elements of the medical phantasms of French fin-de-siècle alcohol and syphilis any analysis may either state that French fin-de-siècle did start in 1870 and deny that it did. Alcohol constructed as a social scourge serves as a counterfactual to check the evidence provided by the debates on syphilis. Drunkenness and defeat did become closely associated during and immediately after the war, but it was drunkenness as an agent of disorder subverting discipline, not as a major cause of racial inferiority. On the other hand syphilis had the potential to affect the race. While civilian administrations neglected the police regulation of prostitution, army surgeons dealt, with some trepidation with a large contingent of unfit conscripts. Post-war regulationism was simultaneously attacked on political grounds and defended much more vigorously and anxiously on medical ones. In Alfred Fournier’s post-war analysis of the dangers of syphilis, which combined, with psychiatric analyses of the defeat and Commune, venereal disease and particularly heredo-syphilis took on a more sinister role as causative agents of decadence. The fin-de-siècle began in this medicalized introspection of the defeat.

Email me: Bertrand.taithe@man.ac.uk