ABSTRACT
The French do not have a very good track record when it comes to writing German history. Over the decades, relatively few historians in France have concerned themselves with the internal history of their neighbours across the Rhine, and the contribution of the French historical profession to modern research on the German past has been disappointing in comparison to that of its British and American counterparts. Those Frenchmen who did attempt to tackle the subject generally took a strongly anti-German line, from writers like Camille Bloch, who devoted themselves between the wars to trying to pin the exclusive blame for the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 onto the Central Powers, to historians such as Edmond Vermeil, who thought Nazism was a degenerate form of a specifically German intellectual tradition, and sought the ultimate roots of Hitler’s dictatorship in what he regarded as Germany’s unfortunate abandonment of Western, Catholic ways of thinking for Lutheran doctrines of subordination to secular authority in the Reformation.
