Book Review: Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France

Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France. By Susan B. Whitney. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xii + 318 pp. $24.95 paper.

Reviewed by: Ben Mercer

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Youth acquired a newly important political role in interwar Europe. Yet unlike the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in France the state played a minimal role in youth mobilization. Instead, Susan B. Whitney analyzes the two groups—Communists and Catholics—that were more successful at creating large youth movements: respectively, the Jeunesse Communiste (JC) and the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC). Both Communists and Catholics, at least initially, defined youth narrowly as young male workers. Indeed, prior to the First World War, "the term 'youth' was generally limited to male intellectuals. Other young people fell outside this category, and were described by such terms as young worker, young woman or juvenile delinquent" (p. 18). The First World War upended the category of youth, exacerbated generational conflict, ushered in the Russian Revolution, and provoked an expansion of religiosity. After the war, both Communist and Catholic hierarchies saw the young ("wild little rabbits" as one Jesuit described them) as more susceptible to mobilization than adults with entrenched allegiances.