Dr Romain Fathi from Flinders University shares information about his latest publication and the archival sources he has used.
‘Sovereignty, Democracy and Neutrality: French Foreign Policy and the National-Patriotic Humanitarianism of the French Red Cross, 1919-1928.’
Dr Romain Fathi recently published an article in Contemporary European History which is available via Cambridge University Press here.
My article considers how the Central Committee of the French Red Cross navigated a post-World War One environment increasingly dominated by transnational humanitarian organisations. It looks at how the French Red Cross strived for its independence while learning how to engage with new international and humanitarian organisations and, in particular, the League of Red Cross Societies. Crucially, my article explores a contrast between the national-patriotic character of the French Red Cross in the aftermath of World War One and the transnational humanitarian agenda of the broader Red Cross movement, especially as that contrast arose around the question of the democratic character and representative protocols of humanitarian organisations.
In doing so, I demonstrate that in the 1920s, under the presidency of General Paul Pau, the French Red Cross, a traditional auxiliary of the French Army, became an arm of the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, a semi-official and semi non-official channel through which to advance French diplomacy. In particular, I show how the French Red Cross worked to advance France’s anti German campaign in the first half of the 1920s, using the Red Cross banner to isolate and undermine Germany.
Considering the 1919–1928 period, it should be said that the politicisation of the Red Cross movement was not a new phenomenon. Right from the inception of the Red Cross movement, politics played a role in shaping both aid and international humanitarian law. However, the reshuffling of the world order that followed the series of peace treaties signed after the First World War saw this politicisation shifting, with borders between the political and the humanitarian increasingly thin. I show that the French felt that the humanitarian terrain was moved around to favour those who were in the best position to move it (be that position financial, institutional, or moral). In order to be able to play its part within it, the French Red Cross progressively transitioned from being a military to a diplomatic auxiliary, or, rather, added the diplomatic feather to its cap, while remaining very close to the Ministry of War through the period.
As much of the archives of the French Red Cross were lost during the 1940 German invasion of France, my article mostly relies on archives kept at the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Those rich, and to this point unexplored and untranslated archives, document the work of the Central committee of the French Red Cross and its engagement with the wider Red Cross world, an engagement closely monitored by the Quai d’Orsay (the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs).