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About the Author

Robert Gildea is a professor of modern European history at the University of Oxford

Works by Robert Gildea

France since 1945 (1996) 54 copies
The Past in French History (1994) 21 copies
France, 1870-1914 (1988) 14 copies

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Legal name
Gildea, Robert Nigel
Birthdate
1952
Gender
male
Nationality
UK
Places of residence
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK

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Reviews

In the UK, May and June 2022 were officially a ‘hot strike summer’, in which the context of the country’s cost of living crisis generated popular support for workers’ action and admiration for plain-speaking union leaders such as the RMT’s Mick Lynch. The whole thing seemed underpinned by a certain nostalgia, not least bringing to mind that other ‘hot strike summer’ of 1984.

In his introduction, Robert Gildea notes the resonance of Lynch’s rhetoric as a reason to pay the strike renewed attention. He also acknowledges the breadth of scholarship on the strike, both contemporary reportage and memoirs and more recent explorations: Seumas Milne (1994) on the involvement of state intelligence services, Diarmaid Kelliher (2021) on the cultural links developed between London and the coalfields, and Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson (2021) on the strike’s bleak legacy. All of which might cause us to ask not whether we should now pay attention to the Miners’ Strike, but whether we have paid enough already.

What Backbone of the Nation offers, however, is the first comprehensive oral history of the strike based on new interviews supplemented with archived testimony from across Wales, England and Scotland. It has a cast of ordinary characters (some, like MP and scholar Hywel Francis and activist Anne Scargill, are better known than others) and its objective overview extends to the miners of Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire as well as the rock-solid strongholds of Yorkshire and south Wales.

The book’s title is reflected in the opening outline of coal mining’s development in Britain. From our post-industrial perspective, the story is overshadowed by the knowledge of impending disaster, but mining communities at the time of the strike had also glimpsed what was coming. Siân James, whose journey from miner’s wife and activist to MP formed part of the 2014 film Pride, recalls that 1984 had ‘the inevitability of a train wreck’.

Gildea is clear that, although demand for coal had been in decline for decades before Thatcher, the 1984-85 strike was a deliberate act. The intricacies of internal ballots, picketing strategies and tactical divisions across different regions of the coalfield – keenly debated here by contributors – were secondary to the overall desire for a titanic clash of people and state. In preparation, the government stockpiled coal, appointed the hawkish Ian MacGregor as National Coal Board chairman, and drew up a list of colliery closures that would decimate the industry. On the other side, Gildea records an uncompromising generation of young miners, often Marx-reading students of industrial relations, economics and politics, intent on shaking up their union’s staid bureaucracy.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Rhian E. Jones writes on history and politics.
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HistoryToday | Sep 27, 2023 |
I read this one for a university course on 19th century European history.. It's not bad. There are a lot of details and plenty of information, but it's hard to digest it all, especially since there's no real indication of whether or not certain events are more significant than others. I wish the author included a summary at the beginning of each chapter which identified the key concepts and historical events. The author throws out dates and names and mentions events without really defining or explaining them first. He made references to things that didn't come up in the text previously, which, as someone without a history background, I found really confusing. So all in all, this is a comprehensive text, as far as I can tell, but I think it's best read as a supplement to introductory material on the topic, as it can be somewhat confusing and overwhelming if you're new to the subject.… (more)
 
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serru | Oct 6, 2022 |
A timely work that reiterates the damage caused by colonialism, as well as pointing out that Colonialism did not actually die off, but rather changed its shape. Highly recommended for those interested in geopolitics, colonialsm and history
 
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Archivist13 | Mar 11, 2020 |
Fighters in the Shadows – An excellent examination of French Resistance.

Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at Oxford and specialises in nineteenth and twentieth century French history. Professor Gildea is an expert on France under German occupation and more importantly on collective memory and political culture. In Fighters in the Shadows, Gildea shines a very bright light in to this very dark area of history.

Churchill said that ‘history is written by the victors’, no more so than in the French collective memory of the Second World War and the occupation by the Germans. It was General Charles de Gaulle who created the myth that resistance represented the true heart of France. In this book Robert Gildea clearly states that ‘De Gaulle’s resistance myth was military, national and male” before he goes on to disprove the myth that the resistance movement was more civilian, international and female then was ever allowed to remain.

This book shines a light of the famous myth that the French freed themselves and that there were only a few scoundrels who collaborated during the Nazi occupation. Gildea challenges this in that resistance only capable of mobilising a minority of people everyone else attempted to carry on as if nothing had changed. At the end of the war it was the prostitute who was tar and feathered, while the likes of Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf got away with their collaboration, for example.

One of the great things that his book does is contest the De Gaulle version of resistance and restores to their rightful positions those often ignored such as women and the Allied Armies. The Allies often referred to De Gaulle as their ‘mutual headache’. De Gaulle’s myth also ignored the anti-fascist fighters that came from Spain, they emigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, Jewish refugees and British Operatives from the SOE, these are now remembered. De Gaulle airbrushed them out of history Robert Gildea puts them back to where they belong at the centre of the resistance history.

It required a great deal of courage to stand and make even the smallest of gestures against the Germans and the French Vichy collaborators, it was the French Police that confronted children of Beziers as they wanted to lay wreaths on Remembrance Day. It was the French Police, aided by French citizens, who rounded up the Jews and transported them to Paris for the final journey east, not the Germans.

After the war plenty of romantic guff was written and movies made that enhanced the myth of French Resistance and it was not until 1971 that sentimental view was challenged in France, and even then somewhat drowns out.

The French Resistance in the War occupies one of the great moral tests of the war and asks some challenging questions such as how ordinary people behaved and able to define themselves in what were dangerous times. Gildea has taken a step back and looked at the bigger picture that helps to give context to those acts of courage that did take place. Gildea has done more in this book to challenge the myth of resistance and ask people to open their eyes to the bigger picture as well as look at the moral and political impact on French history.

It does leave one question hanging which only the reader can answer, how would we have acted if we had been occupied. One has to remember there were certainly people who were sympathetic to the German cause here too before one tries to take the moral high ground.
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atticusfinch1048 | Nov 10, 2015 |

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Works
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