"In 1 908, the French financier and industrialist Albert Kahn launched one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography" "He recruited a team of photographers and sent them around the world to produce what he called" ""a photographic inventory of life on the planet"" "Driven by the idealistic belief that knowledge of other cultures would promote peace and international understanding," "Kahn drew on his immense private fortune to equip his team with the latest photographic technology" "They used the autochrome, the world's first user-friendly system capable of taking true colour photographs" "In the course of the next two decades," "Kahn's photographers shot over 72,000 autochromes and around 1 00 hours of film footage" "This vast treasury of images records everything from momentous historical events to the intimate details of everyday life" "Some of the photographers' finest work was shot in the 1 920s, a period when old empires disintegrated, new technologies transformed the way we lived" "and Europe struggled to rebuild itself after the chaos and carnage of the First World War" "In November 1 91 8, Parisians celebrated the Armistice that brought the war with Germany to an end" "A correspondent for the Times reported that Paris went "charmingly off her head" ""The whole city resounds with cheers and the Marseillaise-"" "Albert Kahn's cameramen were present on the boulevards, recording the scenes ofjubilation" "I think that footage is fascinating because it captures the outpouring of tremendous emotion, pent-up feelings at the signature of the Armistice... after four-and-a-half years of economic hardship, suffering, loss of loved ones." "I think very few of us will ever live through a moment like that." "In the capital, the revellers celebrated on streets lined with the guns and aeroplanes captured from the Germans" "PR0F JAY WINTER:" "The notion of illustrating the victory in the simplest possible way is to bring home the weapons of war of the other side." "0f course, these are also symbols of the broken soldiers on the other side, but without the ghoulishness of displaying their bodies." "PR0F PAULA AMAD:" "We see this more static and sober representation of the end of the war, the sort of spoils of war, as it were versus what can only be described as a jubilant celebration of a return to life." "Yet as Parisians rejoiced in the streets, grisly scenes were unfolding just a few miles away" "The battlefields of the Western Front had been turned into a giant graveyard" "Kahn's photographers documented the harrowing discoveries made by those who recovered the bodies of the fallen soldiers" "(TRANSLATI0N) You can see a shell-hole, and lying inside human remains still in uniform." "This sort of image wouldn't have been taken by the Archive during the war." "They steered clear of images which could have had a negative effect on morale." "But after the war, such an image is seen as part of the record." "It's viewed with the same mindset as the images which documented the ruins and demonstrated the changes that affected society because of the war." "DR MATTHEW T0MLINS0N:" "It would've been a daily event for people who returned to the ruins to encounter the dead themselves." "There's real tension between reconstruction and remembrance, because farmers who are returning to the ruins want to restore their earth as soon as possible to productivity, and if they come across bodies, they are legally bound to inform their mayor" "that there are bodies in their fields which need to be identified, and ultimately, graves have to be dug for them." "Therefore they are left with a choice - do they do what is morally and legally right or do they plough these bodies back into the land so they can restore their earth as soon as possible?" "The families of the war dead were expected to pay 1 5 francs for the exhumation of their loved ones" "Another 1 5 francs was levied for transporting their remains and a further 20 francs was needed for each burial" "Gravediggers were uncovering around 20 bodies a day in the immediate aftermath of the First World War." "Most of them, because of the filthy nature of their occupation, would have been very highly paid, but would have had to get drunk before they started work because of the stench that came from rotting corpses on the battlefield." "More than eight million servicemen were killed during the Great War" "The conflict would transform Europe for ever" "It's a landscape of total devastation." "In regions such as the Somme, 30 million cubic metres of earth would be required to fill the trenches, mazes, dug-outs and shell-holes which remained there after the First World War." "There are thousands and thousands of tonnes of unfired shells in the earth." "There are dead bodies." "There is barbed wire sufficient across the Western Front to wrap round the equator seven-and-a-half times." "This had been the first war to be fought in the air" "In the months after the Armistice," "Kahn's film-makers used the reconnaissance airships flown during the conflict to film the devastation of France" "Their cameras filmed a 250-kilometre swath of destruction- 0ver three-quarters of a million buildings had been reduced to rubble" "PR0F IAN CHRISTIE:" "The major impact of the First World War was in its legacy of ruined towns, villages, ruined countryside." "I think Kahn, coming from where he did on the borderland between the two great combatant nations, France and Germany, would have been particularly aware of the sheer scale of devastation and would have had a special interest" "in collecting that footage as an awful warning." "Kahn's remarkable aerial footage is an important historical document, showing in graphic detail the destructive power of the German assault on the towns and cities of France" "It was estimated that reconstruction would take at least ten years and cost billions of francs" "France demanded compensation from Germany for the immense damage inflicted on her north-eastern territories" "Although the Armistice was signed in November 1 91 8, it took until the following summer for the terms of the peace treaty to be finalised" "0n 28th June 1 91 9, delegates from around the world gathered at the Palace of Versailles near Paris for the signing of the treaty" "(TRANSLATI0N) The peace conference was, for Albert Kahn, the embodiment of all his political ideals." "Here were men of goodwill, whatever their way of thinking, their background or history, all coming together in one place." "Kahn was one of the few granted permission to send a cameraman into the famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles where delegates gathered for what would be a pivotal moment in 2Oth-century history" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "For Albert Kahn to have been able to send cameramen into the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles to film the signing of the peace treaty and the document itself up close shows that he was extremely well connected." "Very few people would have been in a position to do that." "But the terms of the treaty left the German delegation angry and humiliated" "DR PETERJACKS0N:" "When the treaty had been presented to them initially, they had protested on several grounds and had been told, basically, they had two choices." "0ne was to sign the treaty and accept German responsibility for having starting the war, and German responsibility for paying for the reconstruction of Europe, or they could go home and hostilities would recommence with the Allied armies on the borders of Germany ready to march to Berlin." "The treaty required Germany to return the disputed territories of Alsace and Lorraine to France, whittle down its army to just 1 00,000 troops and pay huge reparations in cash or industrial goods" "The measures were intended to ensure that Germany would be incapable of waging war for years to come" "And in creating the League of Nations, the peace conference developed an international institution designed to make all war a thing of the past" "It was an attempt to circumscribe the sovereignty of individual states and their capacity to go to war by placing them within a society which would act as a buffer when war crises emerged." "Kahn was an enthusiastic supporter of this idea" "During the war he had written" ""By embracing a new way of thinking," ""we can put an end to war and usher in peace." ""To reproduce old mistakes will keep us in a state of chaos," ""darkness, anarchy and destruction."" "PR0F JAY WINTER:" "The League of Nations was a visionary project, by and large the brainchild of the American President, Woodrow Wilson." "And it provided the basis of the current United Nations today." "As an admirer of Wilson, Kahn ensured that his cameras were there to film the American President's arrival in Paris" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "Albert Kahn was a liberal pacifist who viewed war in some sense as deeply disturbing, as an outrage." "And that, I think, is why Albert Kahn was such a committed supporter of the League of Nations and why he devoted his film-making and photographing projects towards trying to ensure that that new peace was built." "The League's headquarters were established in Switzerland" "Kahn's Archives 0f The Planet contain rare film and photographs of key deliberations during the League's early sessions" "Although later in the inter-war period an elaborate palace was built, in the crucial period of the 1 920s, it sat in a large church hall, and that church hall, which Albert Kahn's photographers documented," "was a rather simple, primitive even, setting for these momentous decisions and debates which occurred." "At Versailles, Germany had been compelled to accept the authority of the League, even though their membership had been disallowed" "To add further injury to this humiliation, Germany had lost 1 2% of her territories" "0ne of her concessions was the province of Alsace which Germany had seized from France in 1 87 1" "For Albert Kahn, these images had a special resonance" "He had been born in Alsace and, as a boy, he'd witnessed Germany's annexation of the territory in 1 87 1" "Now, nearly half a century later," "Kahn's photographers would record the return of his homeland to his beloved France" "PR0F C0NAN FISCHER:" "I'm particularly struck by this photo." "This is the future of Alsace, the new generation, small children who of course were going to be French." "The irony is, as young Alsatians, they would have only spoken German." "Their parents spoke German at home, or Alsatian German, they were taught German at school, and yet on 26th November, their German-speaking teacher would have been dismissed, sacked, and the next day, a French speaker from the interior of France" "would've come into the class and addressed the bewildered children in French." "Kahn was anxious to document the impact of the war on France" "He was equally determined to record the effect on his country's most important wartime ally" "In Britain, in the summer of 1 91 9, the flags of the Allied powers were displayed all over central London in readiness for official ceremonies to celebrate victory and to remember the dead" "This early morning shot of 0xford Street shows the victory statues that had been commissioned by the retailer Gordon Selfridge and mounted outside his famous department store" "GE0FF DYER:" "A lot of the pictures taken either a few days before or a few days after the victory parade, the city is incredibly deserted." "There's a simple technical explanation for this - the long exposure times make all moving things disappear, but then there's a really useful, emotional quality to that." "You know, what had happened was really nothing short of apocalyptic." "You get this real sense of it being a land where there's this pall of death hanging over the city." "0n 1 9th July 1 91 9, 1 5,000 troops from 1 4 Allied nations set off for a two-and-a-half hour long parade through the streets of London" "This, for me, is one of the most remarkable pictures from the Archive." "More than that, it's one of the most remarkable pictures of that period" "I think I've ever seen." "There's this great army of soldiers walking through London, and although they're there to receive the tribute of the crowd, they're also there to offer tribute to the dead." "And one of the things that makes it so remarkable is, because of the long exposure time, what is a marching column of men just becomes this weird river flowing through the banks of spectators." "So what happens is the picture becomes a picture of the missing, of those who didn't make it back." "0n Whitehall, the parade filed past a new monument to the dead" "0riginally, the Cenotaph wasn't intended to be a permanent structure, but it would become one of the most potent and symbolic of all British landmarks" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "The government, acutely aware of the cost of the war, had asked the great society architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, to design a temporary monument which would place the dead at the heart of the victory commemoration." "And of course, the Cenotaph is an empty tomb, so the dead were there right at the heart of the commemoration from the start." "GE0FF DYER:" "It was calculated that if all of the Empire's million dead marched four abreast down Whitehall, it would take them three-and-a-half days to clear the Cenotaph." "The monument that was used during the commemorations and captured by Kahn's photographers was actually a plasterboard model, not the Portland stone edifice that stands there today" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "The photograph is very interesting because it shows us these banks of flowers around it, so that, by popular acclamation, the government realised that it had to turn this temporary monument into the permanent Cenotaph that we still have today." "PR0F JAY WINTER:" "I see it as the most powerfully sacred monument in the 20th century in Britain." "The word is "To the glorious dead"." "It was essentially a statement saying that we glorify those who die in war and we do not glorify war itself." "Like Britain, France had resolved to mark the sacrifice of its servicemen" "In the years after the war, no fewer than 38,000 war memorials were built in towns and villages across the country" "No war had cost so many lives" "No war would give rise to so many sites of remembrance" "The most ambitious of all the memorials was constructed at Verdun, the scene of one of the bloodiest confrontations of the war" "During 300 days of fighting, an astonishing 26 million shells rained down on the German and French troops who fought here" "At Douaumont on the Verdun battlefield, site of some of the fiercest fighting, one of the most important French war memorials was set up after the war." "It is built in the form of a Breton church tower with a light at the top of it." "It commemorates inside those who fought at Verdun, the missing of Verdun, those whose bodies were never found." "Inside, the names and rank of those who made the ultimate sacrifice are carved in stone" "while in the basement lie the skeletal remains of over 1 30,000 unidentified soldiers" "In 1 920, the Kahn Archive documented the creation of Douaumont's ossuary" "Initially, the remains of those who died at Verdun were stored in this simple wooden barrack" "This sacralisation of the great battlefield of France is something that had to be in the Archive because the most important legacy of the war was its monstrous capacity to kill." "Anyone who had a pacifist vision, as Kahn did, would go to Douaumont because to go there is to realise that war is impossible, unthinkable." "By 1 92 7, a more elaborate building had been constructed which by night lends a haunting power to the memorial" "A searchlight from the ossuary's tower sweeps across the 1 5,000 graves that surround it" "Touring northern France became a macabre pilgrimage as thousands of people came to see the legacy of war" "(TRANSLATI0N) A sort of war tourism developed." "Albert Kahn came to these places to witness the scale of the devastation." "Local people often resented this morbid curiosity" "DR MATTHEW T0MLINS0N:" "There were two types of day-trippers, as far as they were concerned - genuine pilgrims who would go to the sites of memory across the Western Front, or those who came to search out the grave of a lost loved one," "but there was a voyeuristic element." "Returnees to the ruins who had had such a hard time in the interior were apt to see the people coming in trainloads across the ruins as real voyeurs who were coming simply to view the freak show, to look at people who they had heard described as savages and troglodytes" "amongst all the filth and muck of the Western Front." "In the years after the war, France desperately needed to restore its agricultural land to full productivity and rebuild the towns and villages that the conflict had destroyed" "But with a third of the country's manpower dead or permanently wounded," "France needed to attract labour from abroad" "(TRANSLATI0N) In order to reconstruct France, many immigrant workers arrived." "Remember, a lot of men had been killed in the war and there was a real shortage of essential manpower." "The Italians and a few Portuguese came to do the building work." "It was the Poles and a few Russians who came for the farming." "We had a huge influx of foreign workers." "A lot of them stayed and married French women." "After all, there weren't many men left." "0ver half a million workers from across Europe arrived in France to help rebuild the country" "But they couldn't always rely on a warm welcome from their hosts" "DR MATTHEW T0MLINS0N:" "The French were very suspicious of the foreigners who came to work on the reconstruction." "They were very much hated and seen as a racial threat to the true Frenchmen whose numbers are clearly depleted by the bloodshed during the First World War." "While growing up in north-east France, Raymond Roncoroni was victimised because his father was a migrant worker from Italy" "(TRANSLATI0N) In my village, the majority of inhabitants were Polish or Italian." "The French would insult us by calling us "Macaroni", or accuse us of stealing France's daily bread." "But all that didn't last long because we were feisty." "And there were more of us Polish and Italian kids at school than there were French." "The newcomers arrived in a country in the grip of a housing crisis" "In France, two million people had been left homeless by the war" "Many were forced to live in hastily built wooden shacks" "DR MATTHEW T0MLINS0N:" "They were incredibly leaky or some were indeed rotten." "What they were provided with by way of repairs was just roll upon roll of tarred cardboard which would last a matter of weeks before it, too, began to leak." "Newspapers in the ruins would refer to these as "aquarium huts"" "during the rainy times and said, "You are best off going to bed with an umbrella" ""because you are sure to get wet by the morning."" "But good weather could cause problems too" "Cecile Derlon grew up in Soissons, which had been shelled relentlessly by the Germans" "After the war, she was educated in a hut where even sunny conditions were hazardous" "(TRANSLATI0N) It was so hot in 1 921 that we had to go to school in our petticoats." "The roofs of the wooden barracks had to be hosed down to stop them from catching fire." "For about a year, I went to a school like that, made of wood." "0bliterated French homes were a constant reminder of the conflict and the Allies remained mistrustful of their former adversary" "In December 1 91 8, Allied troops had marched into Germany to take control of an area of strategic importance - the Rhineland" "By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies occupied the Rhineland of Germany for a period of 1 5 years and the Rhineland was made permanently a demilitarised zone to prevent it being a springboard for unexpected invasions of France." "DR PETERJACKS0N:" "If Germany refused to fulfil its commitments, these troops in the Rhineland would be in a good position to move into Germany proper and march through to Berlin to re-impose the peace settlement on Germany by force." "The French tricolour now flew over German territory" "Across the Rhineland, French translations were added to every sign" "The war had left Germany in political and economic turmoil, and the financial penalties exacted by the Allies added to the country's woes" "Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles," "Germany was required to pay reparations to compensate for the damage suffered by the Allies during the war" "The sum demanded was colossal - more than £6-5 billion" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "An Allied commission was set up to determine the amount that the Germans should pay, but in 1 922, the Germans stopped paying, and it seemed as if the British and Americans were prepared to accept this." "The French and the Belgians weren't, and they moved beyond the Rhineland into the Ruhr, in order to physically take the reparations and maintain their payment." "0n January 1 1th 1 923," "French tanks rolled into Germany's industrial heartland" "The coal mines and factories of the Ruhr had been the driving force of the German economy" "Its workers decided to resist the French occupation" "PR0F C0NAN FISCHER:" "The response to the invasion of the Ruhr surprised everybody." "They had invaded other chunks of territory in 1 920, and so on, and had always been met with a passive, if unfriendly, reception." "This time, however, the workers in the Ruhr, the trade-union-organised workers, refused to co-operate in any way." "The railwaymen sabotaged the railways." "The miners refused to mine coal for the reparation authorities." "The steelmen threatened to damp down their furnaces." "In fact, economic life in the Ruhr quickly came to a stop." "Germany's economic crisis deepened as industrial production ground to a halt" "The government printed money to meet its shortfall in revenues" "Inflation spiralled out of control and within a year, the price of a loaf of bread rose from a few pfennigs to an astonishing 340 million marks" "The economic meltdown left millions of Germans starving" "With the country in turmoil, political activists in the Rhineland agitated against their own government and campaigned for independence" "This poster was issued at the start of the so-called separatist uprising in the Rhineland in 0ctober 1 92 3." "The German mark had completely collapsed and you needed trillions of the things to buy a potato." "And there were isolated voices in the west of Germany who just said," ""Things have got to the point now" ""where we would be better to be a pro-French independent Rhineland" ""than to have any further part in Germany."" "These people, in late 0ctober, with French encouragement, staged an uprising." "Kahn's photographers encountered the separatist leaders who signalled their allegiance by wearing armbands in red, white and green, the colours of the flag they hoped would one day fly over an independent Rhineland" "Clearly, they're trying to act the statesmen here for Monsieur Kahn's cameras." "These, they hoped, would be the record of their first days in office." "But the political unrest generated great anxiety" "Across the Rhineland, shopkeepers boarded up their windows, fearing that trouble was imminent" "Clearly, no-one wanted to be out on the streets." "They had no idea who might or might not shoot them or what would happen to them." "There was this belief that these separatists were, as trade-union officials put it, "people of the worst sort"." "In the northern town of Krefeld, the separatists turned to violence" "In 0ctober 1 923, they stormed the town hall and their gunfire left a policeman wounded" "His fellow officers tried to rescue him, but he was pulled inside the building and murdered at point-blank range" "This remarkable picture shows the crime scene, complete with the murder weapon" "Soon, news of the unrest in the Rhineland reached governments around the world" "The protests from London were almost unprintable." "The reaction from the United States was one of incandescent fury." "And so within seven or eight days, the French and Belgian authorities issued instructions to their troops to arrest the leading separatists and to put a stop to the whole thing, and that was the end of the whole sorry affair." "Within days, support for the "revolution"fizzled out and the separatists'dream of an independent homeland vanished" "Kahn's German photographs capture a nation that was desperate, violent and chaotic" "But remarkably, by the end of 1 923, the economy stabilised, thanks in large part to the actions of Germany's new Chancellor," "Gustav Stresemann" "And in 1 925, as Foreign Minister," "Stresemann was part of a delegation that restored Germany's reputation amongst her former enemies" "In the Swiss town of Locarno, Europe's statesmen gathered to discuss how they could resolve future international tensions" "PR0F J0HN H0RNE:" "The Locarno Treaties, signed in 1 925, were the real beginning of peace-making in Europe after the Great War." "They were first of all, and most importantly, the introduction of the idea of arbitration in international disputes." "This meant, and it was very important, that the war was over, that people would not resort to arms in the future, but that they would try and negotiate their difficulties." "Kahn may have secured access to the meetings through the offices of one of his many high-powered acquaintances, the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand" "PR0F J0NATHAN WRIGHT:" "That's a photograph of the French delegation." "The central figure is Aristide Briand, and he was a superb politician." "He got the conference off to a very good start because the German Chancellor Luther was making a rather long and ponderous speech about German sufferings and Briand chipped in and said, "Don't go on." "You'll make us all cry."" "Then, when Luther looked rather cross and put out," "Briand made a kind of comical, terrified expression - agh!" " and made Stresemann, the German Foreign Minister, burst out laughing." "That was characteristic of Briand." "He had a sort of magician's way of changing the atmosphere of a meeting." "Later, Kahn invited one of those who'd brokered the deal at Locarno, the British Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain, to visit his home in Paris" "For their part in the negotiations," "Chamberlain, Stresemann and Briand were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize" "I suppose the essential point is that in Paris in 1 91 9," "Germany had had no alternative but to accept the peace treaty." "It couldn't fight on." "But the point about Locarno and then entering the League of Nations is here is Germany willingly, voluntarily accepting international obligations and becoming a full member of the League and also, therefore, being acknowledged as a great power again and a civilised power." "Across the continent, Europeans could at last enjoy the dividends of peace" "Kahn's cinematographers recorded the gradual lightening of the mood by filming here at the chic French holiday resort of Deauville near Le Havre" "PR0F R0D KEDWARD:" "Deauville represented Paris by the sea, just as Brighton was London by the sea." "Deauville had horse-racing, polo and the casino and this lovely beach." "It was an area where people went to be on holiday." "It was only 2 30 kilometres from Paris - an easy drive by the new automobile." "And that is the way that Deauville is seen - as a day out, as a long weekend, or as a holiday place during the summer." "In Paris, the capital's legendary night life was revived" "After the restraint of the war years, the city of light glittered once more as Parisians flocked to the city's dance halls" "Well, because dancing was a spontaneous expression of freedom, you expressed that kind of fascination with being alive, fascination with rediscovering people of the opposite sex, of getting close to them openly for the first time." "It had been frowned on during the war." "It had happened, but it had been covert." "Now it was overt." "DR PETERJACKS0N:" "Magic-City was a very popular dance hall and the footage is interesting because there are a lot of women dancing with other women." "And this reminds us of an important social fact." "As a result of the First World War, there just weren't a lot of men of dateable or marriageable age around." "As well as recording Europe at play," "Kahn's cinematographers spent the post-war years observing technological innovations that would change the world" "This is the golden age of aviation." "The French were at the forefront of so much of aviation technology during this period, so there is this sense of them recording the glories of technology." "PR0F R0N KEDWARD:" "During the war," "France had produced an enormous number of aeroplanes and aviation manufacturing was at a height in 1 91 8." "And so there was this great shift of aviation from the military sector into the private sector." "And the fascination with flight remains one of the highest, if you like, legacies of the modernity of the First World War." "Kahn's dream was to capture the entire planet on film and in photographs" "Aerial camera work gave him the chance to produce an image of the world from the heavens" "And another technical innovation gave him the chance to glimpse a world beyond the scope of the naked eye" "Microscopes fitted with cameras could reveal the inner workings of the tiniest organisms" "Fascinated by the possibilities of this micro-cinematography," "Kahn approached the leading scientific film-maker of the day, Dr Jean Comandon" "PR0F PAULA AMAD:" "Jean Comandon was a pioneer in the field of micro-cinematography, films that allow us to see the infinitely small, to see inside our bodies, to see the evolution of cells within human blood, for example, taking us into, you know, the previously unseen" "in a way that we could have never imagined." "PR0F IAN CHRISTIE:" "Scientific films, or popular science films as they were called in some places, were one of the surprise hits of early moving pictures." "You find audiences being fascinated by close-ups of cheese mites and microbes." "Kahn became Comandon's patron and at his Paris mansion built a state-of-the-art laboratory where Comandon could produce his films" "PR0F PAULA AMAD:" "He also funded the construction of a new ultra-microscopic camera which enabled him to do further research, and he worked there and produced a good number of films between around 1 92 3 and 1 929." "It seems that the Comandon films, in particular, the films of time-lapse sequences of flowers blooming, were some of the most popularly and regularly projected of the Kahn films." "Though Kahn was intrigued by progress in science and technology, he was just as fascinated by ancient traditions and ways of life" "(TRANSLATI0N) War turned everything on its head, and that was what Kahn recorded." "But when the war ended, Kahn's project returned to its idea of promoting peace and documenting the countryside and daily life." "In France, throughout the 1 920s, age-old working practices, such as collecting mussels or harvesting grapes, were lovingly preserved in Kahn's Archives 0f The Planet" "After the terrible trauma of war, his photographers witnessed the return of the traditional harmonies of rural life" "PR0F JAY WINTER:" "Getting back to the land was a dream most French soldiers had when they were in the trenches." "When they returned to the land and started to build up again the lives that had been interrupted by military service, we can see a pride, we can see, indeed, a skill and a partnership very frequently with women workers" "which hadn't been there before the war." "PR0F R0D KEDWARD:" "These amazing colour photographs show the obsession in the 1 920s with the return to the land, very much a theme of France in the '20s, as it had been during the First World War, the eternal peasant, the values of "la France profonde"," "something which was there at the very backbone of the French military endeavour and of the victory of 1 91 8." "Kahn's archive had borne witness to the lives of thousands of people who had survived the carnage of the First World War" "His images capture the emotional and political consequences of the conflict and Europe's recovery from the greatest war the world had ever known" "(TRANSLATI0N) The '20s are exceptional for Albert Kahn." "For him, it's the decade of hope." "The world is in the throes of trying to find a lasting peace." "Prosperity is gradually returning." "And the Archive captures the great diversity and wealth of this period." "By the end of the decade," "Albert Kahn's Archives 0f The Planet had amassed hundreds of rolls of film footage and over 72,000 colour photographs" "His project had documented some of the pivotal moments of the 2Oth century and recorded Europe's transition from war to peace" "The photographs in the Kahn collection are extremely rare and to find them in such number and covering such a variety of topics, that is unique to have a collection of that richness."