Derfler, Leslie

An examination of French Marxists on art and literature reveals what was a previously neglected area of French Marxism: the degree to which the conflict of revolutionism versus reformism influenced a nonpolitical area of thought. Critical attitudes toward art and literature were inextricably conditioned by socialist factionalism in early Third Republic France. The arguments preventing socialist unity during this time period provided distinct and separate approaches to art and literary criticism, a phenomenon undetected in previous scholarship.

No single subject covered in the French press proved so divisive in the late 1930s as the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 the radical right-wing daily La Liberte was purchased by Jacques Doriot, leader of the essentially fascist Parti Populaire Francais, who disseminated party propaganda through pro-Nationalist coverage of the Spanish crisis. In highly biased accounts of atrocities committed by the "Marxist hordes" of the Spanish Republic, La Liberte emphasized the blessings of a stable regime under a decisive leader (Franco). Weak, "overly democratic" coalition governments such as the Spanish Frente Popularand its apparent close relation, the French Front Populaire, were described as tools of Stalinism and the enemies of justice, order, and personal liberty.

For the Surrealists, the unconscious was not the seat of psychopathology, but the key to health, both individual and collective. Freudian psychoanalysis seeks to achieve a measure of psychic health for the individual through making the unconscious conscious, thereby resolving partially the inherent conflict between the pleasure principle of the unconscious id and the reality principle of the conscious ego. Surrealism hoped to obtain this same end on a collective basis through the use of symbols generated by the unconscious and expressed poetically in literary and visual art. "I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality," Surrealism's chief spokesman, Andre Breton wrote in the Manifesto.

An examination of the attitudes of the French and German
Socialists toward war and peace between 1870 and 1914 provides
an understanding of the dilemma faced by Socialists
in August, 1914. Discussed is Marx's position on the Franco-
Prussian War, doctrinal and theoretical contradictions, and
different anti-war strategies put forward by the French and
German Socialist Parties. Rather than a simplistic response
to innate patriotic sentiment, wide-spread Socialist support
of the war-effort in 1914 emerged from revised (and more
pacifist) Socialist interpretations of capitalism, shifting
moods in the workers' anti-war movement, and changing economic
conditions upon these moods and working class behavior.

The purpose of this Master's Thesis is to show that King
Juan Carlos was primarily responsible for the democratic
political changes which occurred in Spain after the death
of Franco. Only Juan Carlos, as Head of State, could
peacefully transform the Franquist political structure.
It was his ability to do so while maintaining control of the
military that allowed Spain to have its first free election
in 41 yrears.

With the discovery of Marx's Theory of Alienation (1932), it
has become necessary to revise much of what passes for Marxism.
Questions over the unity of the theory and practice of socialist
parties must be raised. No longer able to claim that 'alienation'
is peculiar to capitalism, socialist parties have had to re-establish
both their objectives and methods of organization. Marx's critique
of capitalism on the basis of alienated relations is also valid when
applied to the state controlled economies of socialist systems.
Thus by interpreting Marx's mature works (namely Capital) in the
light of his philosophical synthesis of subject-object internal
relations, this paper presents some of the theoretical and political
implications of Marx's theory for socialist movements.

The Spanish Socialist Party must bear primary responsibility
for the failure of the second Republic's agrarian program.
The need of Spanish Socialism to achieve acceptance as a
legally constituted political movement conflicted with its
need to maintain ideological purity. This contradiction
was manifested in the agrarian reform legislation. Socialist
leaders, caught between these two needs, were unable to
provide viable solutions to Spain's agrarian problems.
Their inability to perceive Spain's real agrarian needs
resulted from the party's gyrations on agrarian reform and
from internal, ideological conflict. By the end of 1933,
this conflict divided Spanish Socialism into two camps:
moderate and revolutionary. Therefore, the Socialists'
agrarian reform program, which in 1931 was committed to
changing the land tenure system within a democratic, rational,
economic framework had to be discarded in favor of agrarian
revolution.

This inquiry considers the nature of the treaty ratification debates in France, England, and the United States from the June 28, 1919 signing of the Versailles Treaty until its final repudiation by the U.S. Senate in March 1920. It has two main linked objectives: to examine the agendas of Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson and the strategies each employed in their attempts to convince their constituents to accept the treaty package, and to argue that the peace these executives negotiated was by no means a foregone conclusion at the treaty signing since legislative approval was required in each case. In each country, objections to the Treaty were closely linked to the personalities and actions of each negotiator. Opposition to the treaty developed long before the delegates ever assembled at Paris. Prompted in part by a curious gap in historical scholarship in the time frame between the ceremony at Versailles and the decade of the 1920's, this thesis endeavors to prove that matters disputed after the conclusion of deliberations with Germany were actually a continuation of, rather than a reaction to, the politics conducted during the war itself.