Dr Ludivine Broch

Born in France, raised in Pittsburgh and Paris and having studied and settled in the UK, I am a historian who specialises in society and culture in Second World War France. I am interested in peoples' lives during this period, their thoughts, feelings and the objects which surrounded them. I was awarded a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2010 for my doctoral thesis, funded by the AHRC, on the role of French railway workers during the German Occupation of France (1940-44). I then taught at Birkbeck and the University of Bristol, and was awarded an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute in Florence. In September 2014, I joined the University of Westminster where I teach on a range of topics relating to 19th and 20th century European but also global history. I coordinate the Humanities Programme Coordinator for Study Abroad and Summer Schools, and am heavily involved in Outreach. 

Over the years my research on twentieth-century France and the world wars has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy-Leverhulme, the SSFH-ASMCF, and the Westminster-Smithsonian Partnership Development Fund. My work has appeared in journals including French History; Contemporary European History; French Politics, Culture and Society; Diasporas. At the moment I am finishing a project with Professor Martin Sorrell to contextualise and translate the memoirs of the Italian anti-fascist resister Francesco Fausto Nitti, under contract with Pen&Sword. My current research on the French Gratitude Train sent to Americans in 1949 has already been published in several outlets and I am now writing a monograph, MERCI! and getting involved in public engagement projects with the Smithsonian in Washington D.C..

I am actively engaged in the wider academic field as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society; co-convenor for the Modern French History seminar at the IHR; co-founder of the French History Network; Conference Officer of the Society for the Study of French History; an associate fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism. I am on the Editorial Boards of the UCL Booc Paper Trails, the ‘Global France’ series with Palgrave Macmillan, and a Board Member of Contemporary European History.

I specialise in Vichy France; the history and memory of the world wars; modern France; the Holocaust and genocide; the history of material culture; the history of emotions and sensory history. I am happy to supervise students in any of these areas.

I am currently working on two projects: First, The Gratitude Train, which explores the history of 52,000 personal objects gifted from French people to Americans in 1949 in thanks for their aid during and after the Second World War. Why did people in war-torn France want to give away personal items to strangers they had never met? What did they give, what were they grateful for, and what did this gesture mean to them? Likewise, why was it that the reception of these gifts in every single American state was so extensively celebrated at the time, only to be forgotten in the decades to follow? The materialisation of gratitude into thousands of dolls, embroidered handkerchiefs and priceless vases asks new questions about how people felt about the world wars, and the ways in which people recovered from their experiences and rebuilt their lives. The study of these objects takes us away from the usual post-war images of smoke-filled rooms and male politicians, and brings us to a post-war everyday reality centred around womens' crafts, childrens' toys, artisanship and aesthetics. Funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme, this project will result in a number of academic publications but also public events in America, Britain and France.

Second, Francesco Fausto Nitti, the story of an Italian anti-fascist resister who was a resister in Toulouse during the Occupation, was arrested alogside Pierre Bertaux and Jean Cassou, interned in French prisons and camps, and deported from Le Vernet on the ‘phantom train’ on 3 July 2944. Nitti managed to escape from this train after weeks of being trapped inside as it wandered through war-torn France. Before the war ended, he wrote a short but powerful memoir on his experience inside the Phantom Train, giving us a unique, raw, and highly sensorial insight into the past and specifically into the experience of deportation. I am collaborating with Professor Martin Sorrell to contextualise the translation of his memoir into English for the first time. The book will come out with Pen&Sword. 

My first book, Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust, was published by Cambridge University Press iin June 2016, and was translated in French with Tallandier in September 2016. It studied the lives of French railway workers during the war, and crucially de-sanctified the myth of French railway men as heroic resisters and saboteurs which had been erected by films such as La Bataille du Rail (1945). Instead, it revealed the daily life of these workers who accommodated with the Vichy regime, cohabitated with the Germans and stole from their employer. I also challenged the demonisation of railwaymen in the 2000s for their role in the Holocaust, offering a more nuanced account of everyday decisions people made in wartime. I have written chapters and articles related to this research on resistance, French railwaymen and the Holocaust, explaining how resisters could also be regarded as terrorists, how decisions to help and/or rescue Jews were not so straightforward at the time and how the memory of French railway men during the war reflected the broader legal and political debates about Holocaust memory in the 1990s and 2000s. 

My interest in the history of the French resistance led me to reflect on the very noticeable silence in regard to the colonial, non-white resisters who joined resistance networks and groups in Occupied France. These hundreds of men and women have been almost completely written out of history - and yet their stories are hugely important and deeply revealing. In a recent article, I examined the roles that many colonial subjects took on in the French internal resistance, but also the hesitancy of other colonial workers in Vichy France to fight for a Republic which, ultimately, never really acknowledged them. 

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.