This history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of French political activism at the end of World War I.

This history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of French political activism at the end of World War I.

This history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of French political activism at the end of World War I.

This book traces the spread of a global anti-imperialism from the vantage point of Paris between the two World Wars, where countless future leaders of Third World countries spent formative stints. Exploring the local social context in which these emergent activists moved, the study delves into assassination plots allegedly hatched by Chinese students, demonstrations by Latin American nationalists, and the everyday lives of Algerian, Senegalese and Vietnamese workers. On the basis of police reports and other primary sources, the book foregrounds the role of migration and interaction as driving forces enabling challenges to the imperial world order, weaving together the stories of peoples of three continents. Drawing on the scholarship of twentieth-century imperial, international and global history as well as migration, race and ethnicity in France, it ultimately proposes a new understanding of the roots of the Third World idea.

Excerpt from Paris Sees It Through: A Diary, 1914-1919 On the other hand, if the universe is an accident, and emanates from no mind at all, this life is all we have, and we cling to it. We do our best to make safe the thing we believe in. This world for the materialist; the next for the devout; the inner world for the thinker and the emotionalist. The human spirit may be all that it is said to be a dauntless and heroic affair, equal to facing any odds. The human body, however, which is the casket of the spirit, is unfortunately softer than the greater part of inanimate substances. Had it been harder than the earth, than iron, than steel, we might have made a show of safety in our arrangements. But there would have remained lightning and ice and fog, and the possibility of meteorites, which can go to rest in a granite mountain like a fat man jumping into a feather-bed. The fact is, we are searching for a thing we cannot conceive. Safety is as much outside our conscious ness as some star of which we have never heard. We cannot conceive, by the highest efforts of our brains, what it would be like for one instant to have the esh of our body safe in this world or the comfort of our spirit assured in the next. The sensation, if it were imparted to us by a. Miracle, would probably kill us. The nearest approach to it known to us is the ecstasy of a revivalist meeting, which usually bears an ample aftermath of lunacy on the one hand and crime on the other. Those who are strong enough to survive the feeling of being saved without losing their mental balance quite frequently go and commit some Specially vile kind of offence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

Morelon reconstructs the collapse of the Habsburg Empire as it was experienced on the streets of Prague.

This book stretches and challenges current canonical configurations of modernism by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating 'blackness' as