Political Violence and Terrorism from the Belle Epoque to Vichy

Abstract The articles in this special issue originated as a panel on political violence and terrorism in modern France at the Society for the Study of French History conference in summer 2021. Taken together, they help deepen our understanding of these two issues, and particularly the ways in which they intersected with gender and race in interwar and wartime France. In his classic lecture Politics as a Vocation , the German sociologist Max Weber famously defined a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force as the defining characteristic of the modern state. Weber's maxim cannot have been based on French history. From the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789 to the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, France was gripped by constitutional uncertainty and political violence. Monarchies, empires, and republics rose and fell with alarming speed as different factions competed to claim power and remake the country in their image. This uncertainty was brought to an end by the establishment of the Third Republic, which would go on to last for seventy years until its abolition after France's defeat to Nazi Germany in 1940.