“[…] And honored be our great dead, who made this victory for us ! […] Through them, we can say that before any armistice, France was liberated by the power of arms […]. As for the living, to whom, from that day, we extend our hand and whom we will welcome, when they walk on our boulevards, on their way to the Arc de Triomphe, may they be saluted in advance ! We are waiting for them for the great work of social reconstruction […] Thanks to them, France, yesterday a soldier of God, today a soldier of humanity, will always be the soldier of ideal !”  (Georges Clemenceau, Extracts from the speech delivered before the Chamber of Deputies on November 11, 1918). With these words spoken on thepour lire la suite…

Institutions in the Great War, law schools contributed heavily to the conflict by way of men sent to the front. They also played their part in the battle of ideas. Leading figures in this commitment, the deans of the faculties developed a mobilizing discourse for the benefit of their young students. Law is a weapon against the enemy. It is antithetical to war. Far from being the only ones to carry the flag of law, deans were part of an environment where legal doctrine also dealt with conflict in its various dimensions and implications. Propaganda efforts or diplomatic engagements, legal controversies or choice of thesis topics were all ways in which professors and students engaged in war. The jurists’ war A questioned neutrality Legal literaturepour lire la suite…

In The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914 (Penguin Books, 2013), historian Christopher Clark shows how European statesmen, each caught up in unilaterally rational political and institutional strategies, were collectively drawn into the Great War. Transposing the perspective, one may wonder whether, in determining the causes of the engagement of faculties in the war of law, men were the ones who involved their institutions, or institutions mobilized their men. As the movement ultimately appears largely circular, this part is interested in the involvement of this specific category of the population at war that were law professors and their students (French and foreign, men and women) to reveal the variety of commitments, collective and individual, to the war effort of the nation mobilized ; includingpour lire la suite…