Professor Kevin Passmore

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

Forthcoming

The Maginot Line. A New History (Forthcoming, Yale University Press, 14 August, 2025)

This project is supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2014-17), by two British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Personal Research Grants (2013-5 and 2018-19) by the Cardiff University Research Leave Scheme (2018-19) 

'Zeev Sternhell et le fascisme français', in Pierre Serna (ed) Zeev Sternhell contre le fascisme (Forthcoming, Folio histoire, September 2025).

'Au contact. French infantry tactics on the Maginot Line during the phoney war', War in History, 2025/6.

Representations of the Maginot Line. A Microhistory.

Books

Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd wholly revised edition, 2014) (Translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Swedish).

The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. xiii+163 (Translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Korean, Kurdish, Russian, Tamil and Turkish).

From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. xvii + 333.

Edited books

Writing History: Theory and Practice, jointly edited with Stephan Berger and Heiko Feldner (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. xvii + 323 (Third edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

Political Violence in Europe, 1918-1945, edited with Chris Millington (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015)

The 1950s in European Society, Politics and Culture, jointly edited with Heiko Feldner and Claire Gorrara (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar press, 2011).

Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press and New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, March 2003), pp. xii + 275.

Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800, jointly edited with Stephan Berger and Mark Donovan (London: Routledge, 1999) pp. 304.

Refereed journal articles

‘The drôle de guerre on the Maginot Line: Soldiers and Civilians in Alsace-Lorraine, September, 1939 to June, 1940, French Historical Studies, 48:1 (2025), pp. 101-37. 

‘Organizing the terrain: the Maginot Line in the natural world, 1919-1939’, Environmental History, 29:1 (January 2024), pp. 86-117. Winner of a Vandervort Prize, 2025).

‘La droite entre les deux guerres : psychologie des foules, sciences de l’organisation et publicité moderne’, Politix 27:106 (2014), 5-31.

‘L’historiographie du « fascisme » en France’, French Historical Studies 37:3 (Summer 2014), pp. 469-499. Subject of the H-France Salon, vol. 6, issue 11 (2014).

‘Writing the history of Fascism and National Socialism transnationally: the Example of France’, Bereginya, 23:4 (2014), pp. 287-304. (In Russian)

‘The gendered genealogy of political religions theory’, Gender and History, 20:3 (2008), pp. 644-68 Nominated for best article in 25 Years of Gender & History

‘The naming of fascism’, and ‘Generic fascism and the historians’, Erwägen Wissen Ethik, 15:3 (2004), pp. 335-7 and 403-5.

‘Femininity and the right: from Moral Order to Moral Order’, Modern and Contemporary France, 8:1 (February 2000), pp. 55-69.

‘“Planting the tricolor in the citadels of communism”: Women’s social action in the Croix de feu and Parti Social Français’, The Journal of Modern History, 71:4 (December 1999), pp. 814-851.

‘Boy-scouting for grown-ups? Paramilitarism in the Croix de Feu and PSF’, French Historical Studies, 19:2 (Fall, 1995), pp. 527-57.

‘Business, corporatism and the crisis of the French Third Republic: the example of the silk industry in Lyon’, Historical Journal, 38:4 (1995), pp. 959-987.

‘The Croix de Feu: Bonapartism, national-populism or fascism?’ French History, 9:1 (March,1995), pp.93-123. Reprinted in Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, Vol. 4, The Fascist Epoch, edited by Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 202-228.

‘The French Third Republic: stalemate society or cradle of fascism?’, French History, 7:4 (December, 1993), pp. 417-449.

Contributions to edited books

‘La Ligne Maginot dans les espaces transfrontalières franco-allemandes, 1928-39’, in Ludovic Laloux (dir), Frontières en Europe depuis le congrès de Vienne (1815) : Enjeux diplomatiques, stratégiques, militaires et économiques (Presses universitaires de Valenciennes, 2020), pp. 254-70.

‘Le Croix de Feu et le PSF. Une perspective transnationale’, in Zeev Sternhell (ed) L’histoire refoulée. La Rocque, les Croix de feu, et le fascisme français (Paris : Editions du Cerf, 2019), 181-224

‘The Theory and Practice of Conservative Propaganda and Organisation in Britain and France in the Interwar Years’. In Clarisse Berthezène and Jean-Christian Vinel, Postwar Conservatism, A Transnational Investigation: Britain, France, and the United States, 1930-1990, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 23-42.

‘Fascism as a social movement’, in Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds), Social Movements in Global Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp 579-617.

‘Evidence and Objectivity’, in Tracey Loughran (ed), History at University (London: Bloomsbury forthcoming, 2017), pp. 140-153

‘Les tentatives de banalisation de l’extrême-droite dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, in Nadia Afiouni et Nicolas Guillet (dir), Les tentatives de banalisation de l’extrême droite en Europe (Bruxelles: Presses universitaires de Bruxelles) pp. 19-36.

‘Political violence and democracy in Western Europe 1918-1940’, in Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore (eds), Political Violence in Europe, 1918-1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 1–13

‘History and Historiography’, in Philippe Fontaine and Roger Backhouse (eds), A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29-61.

‘Collective psychology, anti-southern prejudice and constitutional reform in interwar France: The Stavisky scandal and the riots of 6 February 1934’, in Sam Kalman and Sean Kennedy (eds), The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism (Berghan, 2014), 25-47

‘Les préjugés antiméridionaux en France et anticeltiques en Grande Bretagne’, in Philippe Vervaecke (ed), À droite de la droite. Les droites radicales en France et en Grande Bretagne au XXe siècle, (Septentrion, 2012), pp. 59-86.

‘The 1950s in the historiography of Europe: Norman Davies and Eric Hobsbawm’, in Heiko Feldner, Claire Gorrara, and Kevin Passmore (eds), The 1950s in European Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge Scholar Press, 2011), pp. 29-39. ‘History and Social Science since 1945’, in Daniel Woolf and Axel Schneider (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 5: Historical Writing Since 1945(Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 199-219.

‘Theories of fascism: A view from the perspective of women’s and gender history’, in António Costa Pinto (ed.), Rethinking the Nature of Fascism, (Palgrave, 2009), pp. 119-140.

‘The intellectual origins of fascism’, in RJB Bosworth (ed), The Fascism Handbook (Oxford University Press, February 2009), pp. 11-31.

‘The construction of crisis in interwar France’, in Brian Jenkins (ed), France in the Fascist Era (Berg, 2005), pp. 151-199.

‘History and poststructuralism’, in Stephan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice (Arnold, 2003), pp. 118-40.

‘The Republic in crisis: politics, 1914-1945’, in James McMillan (ed.), The Oxford Short History of France, Vol. 7, Modern France: 1880-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 39-71.

‘Europe’, in Kevin Passmore (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Manchester University Press and Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 235-68.

‘Introduction’, in Kevin Passmore (ed.), Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 (Manchester University Press and Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 1-10.

‘Politics’, in Julian Jackson (ed) The Short Oxford History of Europe, Vol. 8: 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 77-115 (Translated into Spanish and Polish).

‘Catholicism and nationalism: the Fédération républicaine, 1927-1939’, in Kay Chadwick (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 47-72.

‘The Croix de Feu and fascism: a foreign thesis obstinately maintained’, in Edward J. Arnold (ed.), The Development of the Extreme-Right Wing in France since 1870: From Boulanger to Le Pen, (Macmillan, 2000), pp. 100-118.

‘Historians and the nation-state: Some conclusions’ (with Stefan Berger and Mark Donovan) in Stephan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (Routledge, 1999), pp. 281-304.

‘Class, gender and populism: the Parti Populaire Français in Lyon, 1936-1940’, in Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallet (eds), The Right in France, 1789-1997 (Tauris Academic Press, 1997), pp. 183-214.

‘Une Contre-mobilisation: la droite et l'extrême droite lyonnaises en 1939’, in Jean Duvallon, Philippe Dujardin and Gérard Sabatier (eds), Le Geste Commémoratif (Sup’Copy/CERIEP, 1994), pp. 445-465.

Teaching

Year Three Undergraduate Modules

HS1848: Fascism & Antifascism in France

HS1801 Dissertation

Year Two Undergradaute Modules

HS1605: France since 1789

HS1702 Exploring Historical Debate

Biography

I received my BA degree in Modern European History and my doctorate from the University of Warwick (supervised by the late Roger Magraw and the late Gwynne Lewis). After a period as Lecturer at the University of Manchester, I came to Cardiff University. I am also a qualified psychiatric nurse.

My historical expertise largely covers modern European history. Doubtless my interests reflect the desire of the History Department at Warwick, still pretty new when I was an undergraduate, to break with the national history tradition, and to embrace the movement for the integration of Britain into a 'forward-looking' Europe, without neglecting Europe's imperial past or its relations with the Americas. I also owe to my time at Warwick my interest historiography. That interest was reinforced during my time at Manchester, which was then at the centre of controversies over the 'cultural turn' in historical writing. I have developed all of these interests at Cardiff, in the context of a department that has long been sensitive to the problematic nature of national identity and its entanglement with trans- and non-national contexts, as the work of Gwynn Alf Williams testifies. My latest research, on the relationship between anti-Celtic prejudice in Britain and anti-southern prejudice in France, is very much within the Cardiff tradition.

Honours and awards

• 2019 British Academy Personal Research Grant
• 2014-17: Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (The Maginot Line)
• 2013: British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Personal Research Grant (The Maginot Line)
• 2007: AHRC Research Leave Scheme (The French Right)
• 2007: British Academy Personal Research Grant (The French Right)
• 2007: Scouloudi Foundation Travel Grant (The French Right)
• 2006: Directeur d'études invité (Ecole supériure des hautes études, Paris)
• 2003: British Academy Personal Research Grant (The French Right)
• 2000: Scouloudi Foundation Travel Grant (The French Right)
• 1999: British Academy, Elizabeth Barker Fund (Women and Fascism in Europe)
• 1998: British Academy Conference Grant (The Extreme Right in France)
• 1998: British Academy Personal Research Grant  (The French Right)
• 1997: The Wellcome Trust, Travel Grant  (Women and Fascism in France)
• 1995: British Academy Personal Research Grant (The French Right)

Academic positions

• 1993 - present, Cardiff University
• 1993 - 1989: Manchester University

Supervisions

I can superivise students working on French and European history sicne 1870 (espcially gender, political and miltiary history), on historiography and history and theory.

I can work with English, French and German sources.

Current supervision

Geraint Evans