The End of Violence

The End of Violence focuses on General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière, who transformed from a rising star in the French army into a stalwart of nonviolence. In 1957, de Bollardière abruptly left his command in Algeria out of a refusal to countenance torture, publicly denouncing this paradigmatic war of European decolonization. In doing so, he jettisoned a glittering career forged in the Free French forces and Resistance maquis in the Second World War, and in France’s colonial war in Indochina (1945–1954).

Hugh McDonnell offers an innovative contribution with previously unexplored source material that reveals worldviews informing early twentieth-century provincial aristocratic family life, novel insights into Second World War dynamics, ethical problems of the Free French movement, and the messy and lethal world of the Ardennes maquis. He provides a complex analysis of “revolutionary warfare” as the guiding ethos of the French army in its colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the retrospective debates in the 1970s about torture in Algeria, and the wider, highly politicized public sphere in late Cold War France.

The End of Violence contextualizes de Bollardière’s public interventions to examine the contentious French debates about Western military alliances and commitment to nuclear weaponry. Thus, de Bollardière’s story, while unique, sheds light on vital wider historical questions, both in France and beyond: ideas and practices of violence and nonviolence, forms of socialization and possibilities for dissent in the military, and the achievements and limitations of the nonviolence movement.

Author Biography

Hugh McDonnell is Assistant Professor in European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen. He is a historian of twentieth-century France with broader interests in practices and ideas of violence and nonviolence. He is author of Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962.