Cette thèse porte sur les neuf principales public schools anglaises entre 1914 et 1951, de la Grande Guerre à la fin de l’expérience travailliste. Elle revient sur la période de l’entre-deux-guerres, dans laquelle sont progressivement remises en cause les valeurs de la masculinité chrétienne promues par les écoles, alors que la critique se fait aussi politique à l’égard d’un système privé perçu comme de plus en plus inégalitaire. Cette étude montre que pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les public schools confrontées aux bombardements, à la mobilisation, à l’évacuation et à l’effort de guerre, apparaissent plus en phase avec la communauté nationale et que les écoles manifestent la volonté de maintenir, au-delà des années de guerre, un esprit de coopération nationale. Ce travail suggère enfin que les réformes éducatives des années 1940, dont le Fleming Report qui recommandait l’admission de 25% d’élèves issus de l’enseignement public, peinent cependant à rapprocher les systèmes privé et public dans la période de l’après-guerre. / This thesis focuses on the nine leading English public schools from 1914 to 1951, i.e. from the Great War to the end of the first Labour majority governments. It looks back on the interwar years, when the Muscular Christian values championed by public schools were progressively challenged, and politicised criticism was levelled at the social exclusiveness of the private system. This study shows that during World War Two, public schools were confronted to bombings, the calling-up of masters, evacuation schemes and the war effort, and appeared more attuned to the national community. Lead players in the field of private education also expressed their wish to maintain a spirit of national cooperation beyond the war years. However, this work finally suggests that the educational reforms of the 1940s, including the Fleming Report, which recommended the admission of 25% of students from state schools, failed to bring public schools more in line with the state system in the post-war period.

This dissertation examines British munitions procurement chronologically from 1914 through early 1916, the period in which Britain's war effort grew to encompass the nation's entire industrial capacity, as well as much of the industrial capacity of the neutral United States. The focus shifts from the political struggle in the British Cabinet between Kitchener and Lloyd George, to Britain's Commercial Agency Agreement with the American banking firm of J. P. Morgan and Company, and to British and German propaganda in the United States.