Ends of War

This volume explores how France’s ‘modernising mission’ unfolded during the post-war period and its reverberations in the decades after empire. In the aftermath of the Second World War, France sought to reinvent its empire by transforming the traditional ‘civilising mission’ into a ‘modernising mission’. Henceforth, French claims to rule would be based on extending citizenship rights and the promise of economic development and welfare within a ‘Greater France’. In the face of rising anti-colonial mobilization and a new international order, redefining the terms that bound colonised peoples and territories to the metropole was a strategic necessity but also a dynamic which Paris struggled to control.

When U.S. B-24 bomber pilot Clair Cline is shot down and captured in northern Germany, one war ends and another begins – to keep hope alive. Now behind Nazi barbed wire and oppression, Cline and his fellow POW's must find …