Carow Hall, Conference Room
November 19, 2019, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
This dissertation is slated to be a rigorous economic case study in the effect of several years of total war on Twentieth Century France. In chapter 1, I test the impact on the German invasion in 1914 on French city growth. I find that cities overtaken during the initial German invasion took much longer to recover from the war-time population shock that did cities spared by the invasion. In chapter 2, I examine whether WWI and WWII had nationwide impact on French urban structure. The results indicate that temporarily after WWI, and permanently after WWII, French city growth shifted from a dynamic in which largest cities grew the faster to one where smaller cities grew more quickly, especially those in close proximity to Paris. In the final chapter, assess the effect of antimilitarism measured through wartime casualties on French communist vote shares. I find that higher casualty rates had little impact on communist voting in France and weak evidence that the effect was negative for certain interwar years.