France and the French: La Vie en Bleu Since 1900

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Overview

In this exhaustively researched narrative history, Rod Kedward brings to life the great, and often terrible, dramas of modern France - the two cataclysmic wars, the Algerian disaster, the student and worker revolt of 1968 - but also explores the special worlds of the workplace, immigration, minorities, the role of women, and the relationship of politics to place, everyday life, and collective memory.
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Overview

In this exhaustively researched narrative history, Rod Kedward brings to life the great, and often terrible, dramas of modern France - the two cataclysmic wars, the Algerian disaster, the student and worker revolt of 1968 - but also explores the special worlds of the workplace, immigration, minorities, the role of women, and the relationship of politics to place, everyday life, and collective memory.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
France rarely receives good press. Criticized for its haughtiness and breathtaking hypocrisy, France exists, so to speak, in a world of its own. Much of the abuse stems from a lack of understanding, says Kedward, an authority on France during WWII (In Search of the Maquis). He sets out to explain that "elusive, evocative quality" which is Frenchness. This book is not an easy read, but it's an amply rewarding one. The Revolution is alive and well in France, Kedward says, and every decision, every policy, is judged according to its adherence to enlightened republican principles. Conventional political distinctions between right and left are tangential to the ongoing struggle between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Just as abortion and gun-rights politics in America are utterly bewildering to the French, Americans fail to appreciate how the seemingly minor issue of Muslim head scarves in state schools can create an existential crisis of national identity. France, in other words, is less a country than an ideology-and a troubled one at that. Kedward's book may be the best tonic for Franco-American relations since the Statue of Liberty. 33 b&w photos, 5 maps. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
Kedward's work as a historian has dealt mainly with the heroism and tragedy of the French Resistance, but his new volume does for France since 1900 what Tony Judt has done for Europe since World War II: it provides a sweeping narration of an extraordinarily complex, agitated, often ferocious, and profoundly confusing period of history. He looks at it from the perspective of a man sympathetic to social democracy but fully aware of the ideological pitfalls along the whole spectrum of French politics. He knows the relevance of culture (high and low) to French public life, and his portraits of French leaders are fair. The most engaging parts of the book, though, are those that deal with France during and after the late 1960s. Kedward is fully the master of his subject, and yet, like all good "French experts," he is baffled by the everlasting battle between continuity (an often exasperating continuity) and change — change imposed from above, from abroad, or, more rarely, from below.
Library Journal
Academics will welcome this sweeping, highly readable, and complex narrative of 20th-century French history and culture. Kedward (emeritus, Univ. of Sussex, UK; Resistance in Vichy France) attempts to give coherence to the conflicts and debates of the period by highlighting the continuing tensions and polarities that have engaged France and the French during three periods: 1900-31, 1931-68, and 1968-present. Skillfully interwoven within his primarily political and chronological focus is a discussion of social and cultural life: the role, place, and perception of workers, peasants, intellectuals, women, and immigrants. Nor does he ignore the "larger France"-the debate over colonial developments and decolonization-as a factor in shaping debates over French national identity. Kedward sees the events of 1968 as especially pivotal in ending older ideological debates and introducing new social movements centering on women, youth, education, culture, and diversity. He presents these new issues in the context of the struggle of the people to be heard and included-an especially timely discussion given the recent riots in and around Paris. Recommended for academic libraries.-Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Plus ca change, plus ca change: The France of 2005 is far different from the France of a century before, though both agree that anything that is not French is suspect. Thus, writes historian Kedward (Emeritus Professor, History/Univ. of Sussex) toward the end of this long, overstuffed book on the big shifts France has seen over the last hundred years, whereas the left had acquired great power in the early 20th century by posing an alternative, and opposition, to clerical control of public education, a century later "the political right was now the democratic center of hostility to Islamic intrusion in the state classroom." Whether of the left or right, the challenge was to offer a "unitary republican identity" against the centrifugal forces of regional and cultural identity. As Kedward writes, the nature of that identity, and of the republic, was of central concern to the French of the Belle Epoque and pre-WWI generation; then as now, France was a nation fond of and not self-conscious about arguing with itself, assembling august bodies of intellectuals and politicians to ponder such issues as good government and national identity. Critic Julien Benda's assault on the "treason of the clerks" that this accommodation to power represented foreshadowed a second era, that of ideology. Here Kedward depicts the growth of mass parties of the left and right, offering useful notes on the nature of, for instance, the Vichy government: "There was no comparable ‘final solution' in Vichy's own antisemitic agenda," he observes, but neither was there meaningful resistance on Vichy's part to the program the Germans imposed. The age of ideology, by Kedward's account, gave way after May 1968 and its stunningrevolt to the present era, one of preoccupation with identity; the eminent historian Braudel may have argued that to be French was to be multicultural, but the National Front had a much different view. Which one will prevail remains to be seen. A revealing and nuanced view of recent French history.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781585677337
  • Publisher: Overlook Press, The
  • Publication date: 2/2/2006
  • Pages: 712
  • Product dimensions: 6.24 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.90 (d)

Table of Contents

1 The use and abuse of reason, 1900-1906 11
2 New forces : socialism and syndicalism, 1900-1909 30
3 New forces : nationalism and patriotism, 1900-1914 44
4 Total war, 1914-18 62
5 The republic at war and peace, 1914-1920s 88
6 A distinctive society, 1920-1931 112
7 Manipulating crisis, 1920s-1934 151
8 Confrontations, 1934-1936 167
9 Popular front, 1936-1938 184
10 Not another war? : shattered illusions, 1930s-1940 219
11 Occupied France (1) : Vichy and collaboration, 1940-1944 245
12 Occupied France (2) : resistance and liberation, 1940-1944 272
13 Ending war...not in Indo-China or Algeria, 1944-1962 310
14 The chequered imperative of change, 1940s-1958 349
15 De Gaulle's ascendancy, 1950s-1968 384
16 May-June, 1968 416
17 Whose new society? : 1960s-1979 437
18 Ideological rupture and retreat, 1970s-1984 476
19 Pressures for consensus, 1980s-1993 509
20 The challenge of plurality, 1990s-2000s (1) 551
21 Political oscillation, 1990s-2000s (2) 582
22 Memory and identity, 1990s-2000s (3) 621
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