Buried Language

This chapter marks a departure from the previous three authors treated in this book and looks at an author who questioned the role of a particular Jewish identity in French. Triolet shifted from writing about the painful and confining experience of being a bilingual writer in interwar France to celebrating French-Russian bilingualism in the war in her novel about the Communist Resistance in Lyon and its environs, Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents frances (A Fine of Two Hundred Francs). In the same novel, she also began to analyze Franco-Jewish identity. While she embraces bilingualism in the war, and while she includes Jews in the International struggle, she rejects a particular Jewish language and a particular Jewish experience of the war. The chapter traces her shifting approach to language and Jewishness through three symbols: the corset, a painting of a woman, and buried notebooks.

Luftwaffe Officer Training in the Interwar Period

This chapter argues that while the l'École supérieure de guerre aérienne (ESGA) and the Centre des hautes études aériennes (CHEA) played important roles in the development of air doctrine and in the professional education of French airmen on strategic issues, overall these programmes touched only a small number of aviators, and their impact was too short-lived to have a real influence on the conduct of operations in 1940. Nonetheless, the chapter suggests that previous judgments about air power thinking in interwar France have been too harsh. The emphasis put on bombing operations in the curriculum at ESGA and CHEA goes against the idea that France was the least successful nation in the interwar years in translating its air power theories into a coherent doctrine, or that air doctrines were solely a product of the theories of army generals.