Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France

(Duke University Press) In Mobilizing Youth , Whitney explains how the Communist and Catholic youth movements came to the forefront of French politics in the two decades after the First World War. She chronicles the formative years of the Young Communists and Young Christian Workers, exploring each group’s ideologies, campaigns, styles of political and religious engagement, and male and female branches. She also examines the role of the war in the formation of youth political and religious identities, the role of work and leisure in their lives and political mobilization, the influence of the Depression, the importance of Soviet ideas in French Communist youth politics, and the state’s attention to youth after the victory of France’s Popular Front government in 1936. Whitney is an associate professor of history and an associate dean at Carleton University in Ottawa.