Abstract
The Société Proudhon was founded in 1917, in the midst of the most difficult year of the First World War. Its first director was Jean Hennessy (1874–1944), deputy from the Charente and member of the famous dynasty of cognac producers. The letter that announced its creation was distributed in political and intellectual circles, and insisted that the society aimed ‘to help the formation of a Society of Allied states, presently struggling against the militarist empires. It will set up the federation of democracies against the conspiracy of imperialists’.1 There was nothing particularly original in the tone or spirit of the letter. A number of societies and individuals were calling for an alliance of democracies to defeat the German autocracy, and an international organisation equipped with military power to punish aggressor states, if not a world parliament for the establishment of everlasting peace. The First World War was effectively the moment of a remarkable individual and collective craze, seeking new methods for a lasting peace after the end of the war.2
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Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists. The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971);
Keith Robbins, The Abolition of War. The ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976);
Jean-Michel Guieu, Le rameau et le glaive, Les militants français pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po, 2008);
Carl Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial (1914–1919). Le rêve d’une paix durable au lendemain de la Grande Guerre, en France, en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis (Paris: Pedone, 2008).
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Du principe fédératif et de la nécessité de reconstituer le parti de la révolution [1863] (Paris: Romillat, 1999).
This absence can be noted in the conference papers published over thirty years ago by Christian Gras and Georges Livet, Régions et régionalisme en France du XVIII siècle à nos jours (Paris: PUF, 1977);
but it is also noticeable in recent studies, for example Michel Dumoulin, ‘Europe une ou multiple. L’idée européenne en tant qu’enjeu de 1990 à nos jours’, in L’Europe inachevée. Actes de la X Chaire Glaverbel d’études européennes 2004–2005 (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 13–38.
Julian Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 95.
Exceptions to this rule include, in the British case, a longstanding awareness of the connection between international federalism and the imperialism of the Round Table. See Andrea Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea, vol. 1, The History of Federalism from Enlightenment to 1945, (London; New York: Lothian Foundation Press, 1991);
David Boucher, ‘British idealism, the state, and international relations’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994), 671–94.
See Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The analogical process is used by Kant in the second definitive article of his Perpetual Peace: see Kant, Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss and translated by H.B. Nisbet, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 102–5;
and Chiara Bottici, ‘The domestic analogy and the Kantian project of Perpetual Peace’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 11 (2003), 392–410.
In addition to the monographs and articles cited above, see: Julian Wright & Christopher Clark, ‘Regionalism and the state in France and Prussia’, European Review of History 15 (2008), 277–93;
Anne-Marie Thiesse, Écrire la France. Le mouvement littéraire régionaliste de langue française entre la Belle Époque et la Libération (Paris: PUF, 1991);
Thiébaut Flory, Le mouvement régionaliste français. Sources et développements (Paris: PUF, 1966);
Mireille Meyer, introduction, and Julian Wright, collaboration, Jean Charles-Brun, Le régionalisme [1911] (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 2004);
Guy Rossi-Landi, ‘La région’, in J.-F. Sirinelli (ed.), Histoire des droites en France, vol. 3 Les sensibilités (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 71–98.
Thierry Gasnier, ‘Le local: une et divisible’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 3rd vol., 1997), p. 3423.
Charles Maurras and Joseph Paul-Boncour, Un Débat nouveau sur la décentralisation (Toulouse: Société provinciale d’édition, 1904). See Thiesse, Écrire la France, p. 69; Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, ch. 5.
Jean-Michel Guieu, ‘De Proudhon à Pétain, le parcours européen de Jean Hennessy’, in Gérard Bossuat (ed.), Inventer l’Europe. Histoire nouvelle des groupes d’influence et des acteurs de l’unité européenne (Bruxelles: PIE-Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 111–23;
François Dubasque, Jean Hennessy (1874–1944). Argent et réseaux au service d’une nouvelle République, (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008).
Jean Hennessy, Ni à Droite, ni à Gauche (Paris: Figuière, 1935); Wright, The Regionalist Movement in France, pp. 168–9.
Bernard Voyenne, Le Fédéralisme de P.-J. Proudhon (Paris: Presses d’Europe, 1973), p. 168.
See Bouchard, Le Citoyen et l’ordre mondial, as well as Jean-Michel Guieu, ‘“Pour la paix par la Société Des Nations”: la laborieuse organisation d’un mouvement français de soutien à la Société des Nations (1915–1920)’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 222 (2006), 89–102.
Jean Hennessy, ‘Mes raisons d’adhérer’, in Vers la Société des Nations. Leçons professées au Collège libre des Sciences sociales pendant l’année 1918 (Paris: Giard & Brière, 1919), pp. 157–77.
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Bouchard, C. (2012). Regionalism, Federalism and Internationalism in First World War France. In: Wright, J., Jones, H.S. (eds) Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_11
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