Douglas Haig / therooms.ca
Despised he was by most historians, many journalists, more idealists, and especially pacifists, Douglas Haig was born in 1861. He served under Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, and continued successful fighting in the colonial South African War. (more…)
The ‘Resistance’ was a term coined for underground movements that fought a courageous but sometimes useless battle against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The movements aided the Allies in at least four strategies: first, the providing of intelligence; second, sabotage; third, helping Jews and escaped prisoners of war to escape capture from the Gestapo (q.v.) and the SS (q.v.); and fourth, fighting in the open during the latter stages of the war. (more…)
Jean Monnet / lewebpedagoguique.com
Monnet (1888 – 1979) was, if not the progenitor, at least the clever uncle of the European Union. He was an able administrator and economist who devised and became the chief commissioner of a project that bears his name, whose object was to restore the French economy by means of a centralised planning system. But he was also an internationalist who was forever campaigning for European unification.
Monnet it was who worked out the details of the Schuman Plan, before French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman put it forward. The Plan aimed (at first) to pool the resources of the coal and steel industries of France and (what was then) West Germany, following a common authority that other European nations might join. It was 9 May, 1950; this was the first indication of what should have been a mutually beneficial European common market. (more…)
I suppose we are about half way through the London Olympics of 2012 – sad for some, radiant news for others. I suppose I will be accused of being a dry old stick (if not something much worse) but I used to enjoy the Olympic Games when in order to take part you had to be amateur. The moment the Committee plumped for professionals the Games gained a little glamour but lost all interest; for me anyway, and a few more like me.
And now the British Royal Mint makes gold coins to celebrate the Games. The coins’ designer explains that his inspiration was the first Games held ‘in ancient Greece, where athletes pledged their allegiance to the gods of Olympia’. Oh dear me no! There weren’t any ‘gods of Olympia’.
The Marquis fights in America (against the English) / ushistory.org
Marie-Joseph, Marquis de LaFayette, was born in 1757, into a firmly established aristocratic family in a large European country whose people had been spoiling for a rebellion since the death of Louis XIV. Aged only twenty he was an officer in the French Army, showing enthusiasm for the American War of Independence. In fact his enthusiasm was unbounded and he emigrated to North America to join the colonists in their struggle against British control.
George Washington soon got to hear of this Gallic firebrand, who fought well at Brandywine, endured with the rest at Valley Forge, and then again at Monmouth in 1778. He was just twenty-one years old. (more…)
Hebert / amis-robespierre.org
This French journalist and revolutionary was born in 1757, just thirty-two years before the French Revolution exploded on an astonished and cowed world. Hébert was not just a jobbing newspaperman, he owned the newspaper Le Père Duchesne, vulgar, scurrilous, earthy and therefore popular with the Paris mob known as the Sans Culottes In 1791 he intelligently joined a radical revolutionary club which was neither jacobin nor girondin. It was the Cordeliers. With his fellow members he joined in the assault of the Tuileries on 10 August, 1792 and was elected to the Paris Commune afterwards. (more…)
The term is self-contradictory, but the committee’s founders could hardly call it the ‘Committee of Public Danger’. It lasted only from 1793 to 1795 but greatly damaged France’s reputation and standing in the eighteenth century world. (more…)
France´s surrender / learning.blogs.nytimes.com
For many, if not all, of our seasoned history-lovers, the fact that the Second World War might have been over by the middle of 1940 is unknown. But for the dogged determination of certain European nations, Hitler’s Germany could have been the military victor of the War, not just, as has indeed happened, the political and economic leader it has become. The United States need never have entered the War at the end of 1941. Russia could have stayed Russia instead of being under the Soviet yoke until the fall of the Berlin Wall. German could have been the obligatory second language in all European schools. Berlin might have been the capital of a different kind of European Union. To find the reasons why this did not happen we must look at France. (more…)
Hiroshima after the atomic bomb / taringa.net
Hiroshima had a population of roughly 300,000 in 1945. It was a military base, port, and popular seaside resort in the western part of Honshu Island, Japan. The Potsdam Declaration on 26 July was the last of the conferences attended by the leaders of Russia, The United States, and Great Britain – those countries whose empires were considered to have been the victors at the end of the Second World War. Previous conferences, at Yalta and Casablanca had been attended by Winston Churchill (Britain) and Roosevelt (USA), but the latter was dead, and Churchill had been defeated in a General Election. (more…)
Constant blockade of the ports: the Continental System / xtimeline.com
When I was a schoolboy (the Punic Wars q.v.), Bonaparte’s genial idea was called ‘The Continental System’, a good name but implying a kind of applied plan to Continental economics, rather than a sustained attempt by him to ruin the British nation economically, and force it to sue for peace. In this sense the word ‘blockade’ is more appropriate. It is surprising however, that such a violent word, in these days of euphemism and political correctness, should emerge in the most modern history books – when the word ‘system’ appears infinitely more euphemistic and more politically correct. (more…)