BOOK: Christine HAYES, Our Friends the Enemies. The Occupation of France after Napoleon (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 2018), 416 p. ISBN 9780674972315, € 36

(image source: HUP)

Book abstract:

The Napoleonic wars did not end with Waterloo. That famous battle was just the beginning of a long, complex transition to peace. After a massive invasion of France by more than a million soldiers from across Europe, the Allied powers insisted on a long-term occupation of the country to guarantee that the defeated nation rebuild itself and pay substantial reparations to its conquerors. Our Friends the Enemies provides the first comprehensive history of the post-Napoleonic occupation of France and its innovative approach to peacemaking. From 1815 to 1818, a multinational force of 150,000 men under the command of the Duke of Wellington occupied northeastern France. From military, political, and cultural perspectives, Christine Haynes reconstructs the experience of the occupiers and the occupied in Paris and across the French countryside. The occupation involved some violence, but it also promoted considerable exchange and reconciliation between the French and their former enemies. By forcing the restored monarchy to undertake reforms to meet its financial obligations, this early peacekeeping operation played a pivotal role in the economic and political reconstruction of France after twenty-five years of revolution and war. Transforming former European enemies into allies, the mission established Paris as a cosmopolitan capital and foreshadowed efforts at postwar reconstruction in the twentieth century.

 On the author:

Christine Haynes is Associate Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Table of contents here.

(more information at Harvard UP)
(source: H-France)

ARTICLE: Jonathan GUMZ, International Law and the Transformation of War, 1899–1949: The Case of Military Occupation (The Journal of Modern History CX (2018), Nr. 3, 621-660

(image source: JMH)

Excerpt:

This article seeks to examine the law of occupation looking forward from its position within the late nineteenth-century European norm of contained war, not backward from contemporary international law. When it was codified, the law of military occupation was closely connected to the norm of war containment within the realm of “civilization,” but that connection was severed by 1949. Reaching this point requires the examination of four moments in occupation’s history from the late nineteenth century through 1949. The first arose with the codification of military occupation at the Hague Conference of 1899; the next came with the National Socialist assault on the codified law of occupation; the third came in the Hostages Trial of 1947–48, when high-ranking Wehrmacht defendants sought to reframe National Socialist occupation practices within the law of occupation codified at The Hague in 1899; and the fourth arrived with the Geneva Conference of 1949 and its preparatory conferences. In this last instance the American and British defense of the norm of contained war and the law of occupation faced a broad European reaction against occupation. That reaction transformed key elements of the law of occupation such as the status of resistance fighters, severing occupation’s links with the norm of contained war.

More information here.