Royal republicans

"In Royal Republican, Chalmers Hood explores the forces that caused French naval officers to gravitate toward antidemocratic movements after the armistice of 1918. He seeks to explain their involvement in the Action Française and in the breakdown of civil-military relations that helped decide the fate of the Third Republic in 1940. Hood shows that a variety of social and intellectual factors allowed for a stability of tradition and royalist sentiment in the navy in a period when the attitudes of mainstream French society were growing away from Cartesian and anti-republican beliefs. Only when the traditionally comfortable and carefree life-style of the naval officers was threatened did this rift between navy and nation begin to constitute a real danger to the French government. Static salaries and the rising cost of living after World War I provokedresentment toward resentment toward an initially unresponsive government that eventually boiled over in the summer of 1940." -- from dust jacket.