Ohio Northern University Professor of History Michael B. Loughlin recently published a political biography of the infamous French socialist and later national socialist Gustave Hervé.
Loughlin’s volume is titled “From Revolutionary Theater to Reactionary Litanies: Gustave Hervé (1871-1944) at the Extremes of the French Third Republic” (New York, Frankfurt, Paris, Zurich, etc.:Peter Lang Company, December 2015).
“Hervé was the most notorious French antimilitarist in the years before World War I, by which time he gradually had transformed into a major chauvinist and supporter of the French war effort,” Loughlin explained.
“The volume stresses Hervé’s continuous need to base his life on some sort of faith, much like that expressed in Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic ‘The True Believer,’” Loughlin said. “Thus, Hervé evolved from Catholicism to atheistic socialism, antimilitarism, insurrectionalism, nationalism, then to a national socialism with an increasingly religious basis, and finally to some form of Christian socialism.”
Loughlin’s work takes a look at the events surrounding the life and times of Hervé.
“It is not only a biography of one supposedly infamous Frenchman, but a history of France during the Third Republic and an attempt to deconstruct the binary language with which so much of history and politics is invariably written,” Loughlin said.
Loughlin is a recognized expert and has published extensively in this area.
As part of Loughlin’s more recent research on Hervé during the war and interwar eras, he has written an article on the origins of Hervé’s national socialism titled “From Insurrectional Socialism to French National Socialism: Gustave Hervé and the Great War,” which will appear in the journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques in early 2017.
Last year, Loughlin published an article in a monumental two-volume edition of the Russian journal Beregynia. 777. Owl: The Journal. (“Берегиня. 777. Сова: Научный журнал”) dealing with recent examples of European fascism and the radical right. That article was titled “The Historiography of French Fascism: Is the Front National a Contemporary Avatar?”
Loughlin, who joined the ONU faculty in 1988, earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Indiana University, all in the area of history, and his Ph.D. involved modern European history.
