BOOK LAUNCH: Chris Millington, The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939

The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organized international movements. 

Chris Millington is Reader in Modern European History at Manchester Metropolitan University.  He is the author of several works on twentieth-century France including Fighting for France: Violence in Interwar French Politics (2018), A History of Fascism in France (2019), and France in the Second World War (2020).  His latest book is The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939, published in 2023 by Stanford University Press.


Danielle Beaujon is Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. A historian with broad research interests in policing, race, and power in a global context, she works on the intimate and oppositional relationship of police officers and North Africans in a connected Franco-Mediterranean world. Her book project, “Criminalizing the Casbah: Policing North Africans in Marseille and Algiers, 1920-1950,” interrogates the quotidian interactions between the police and North Africans in these two Mediterranean port cities. She has written several articles around this topic, not least her award-winning piece ‘Policing Colonial Migrants’ published in French Historical Studies in 2019.


Julian Jackson is Emeritus Professor in Modern French History at Queen Mary University of London. He has written extensively on the history of twentieth-century France, with a special interest on the defeat of France in 1940, the German Occupation, homosexuality in post-war France, and 1968. His latest works include a biography of General de Gaulle and France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (Penguin, 2023).

- this event is free, but booking is required.