The 100 Best French History Books: From Revolution to Resistance
Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix
The 100 Best French History Books: From Revolution to Resistance list covers the entire history of France but with a focus on the revolution, revolutionary times, and the resistance. The books are organised in approximately chronological order.
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The 100 Best European History Books
1. France in the World: A New Global History
By Patrick Boucheron; Stephane Gerson | 70% Off
This dynamic collection presents a new way of writing national and global histories while developing our understanding of France in the world through short, provocative essays that range from prehistoric frescoes to Coco Chanel to the terrorist attacks of 2015.Bringing together an impressive group of established and up-and-coming ... More »
2. A Concise History of France
By Roger Price
This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive study of French history available ranging from the early middle ages to the present. Amongst its central themes are the relationships between state and society, the impact of war, competition for power, and the ways in which power has been used. ... More »
3. The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800
By David A. Bell | Used Price: 50% Off
Using eighteenth-century France as a case study, David Bell offers an important new argument about the origins of nationalism. Before the eighteenth century, the very idea of nation-building-a central component of nationalism-did not exist. During this period, leading French intellectual and political figures came to see perfect national ... More »
4. France in the Making 843-1180
Covering the centuries between the disintegration of the Carolingian empire and the rise of the French monarchy, this book traces the long period of gestation that ended with the emergence of the kingdom of France as a recognizable entity, both on the map of Europe and in the ... More »
5. France in the Middle Ages 987-1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc
By Georges Duby | Used Price: 90% Off
In this book, now available in paperback, he examines the history of France from the rise of the Capetians in the mid-tenth century to the execution of Joan of Arc in the mid-fifteenth. He takes the evolution of power and the emergence of the French state as his ... More »
6. Medieval Civilization 400-1500
By Jacques Le Goff; Julia Barrow | 90% Off
This one thousand year history of the civilization of western Europe has already been recognized in France as a scholarly contribution of the highest order and as a popular classic. Jacques Le Goff has written a book which will not only be read by generations of students and ... More »
7. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State
By Charles Tilly; Joseph R. Strayer
The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Written from the experience of a lifetime of teaching and research in the field, this short, clear book is ... More »
8. The State in Early Modern France
By James B. Collins | Used Price: 80% Off
A new edition of James Collins's acclaimed synthesis that challenged longstanding views of the origins of modern states and absolute monarchy through an analysis of early modern Europe's most important continental state. Incorporating recent scholarship on the French state and his own research, James Collins has revised the ... More »
9. Class and State in Ancien Regime France: The Road to Modernity?
By David Parker
Class and State in Early Modern France explores the economic, social, ideological and political foundations of French Absolutism. David Parker's challenging interpretation presents French Absolutism as a remarkably successful attempt to preserve the political and ideological structures of the traditional order. This reassessment runs contrary to much revisionist ... More »
10. French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, 1620-1629
By A. D. Lublinskaya; Brian Pearce | 70% Off
As an introduction to her detailed study Professor Lublinskaya presents a summary and critique of the whole 'general crisis' interpretation of seventeenth-century European history which is regularly a subject for heated debate among Western historians. However, it is as a specialist in the history of seventeenth-century France that ... More »
11. French Society: 1589 - 1715
By Sharon Kettering | Used Price: 90% Off
This book provides a "birds eye" view of social change in France during the "long seventeenth century" from 1589-1715. One of the most dynamic phases of French history, it covers the reigns of the first three Bourbon kings, Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV. The author explores ... More »
12. The Peasants of Languedoc
By Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie | 80% Off
Hailed as a pioneering work of "total history" when it was published in France in 1966, Le Roy Ladurie's volume combines elements of human geography, historical demography, economic history, and folk culture in a broad depiction of a great ... More »
13. France 1715-1804: Power and the People
By Gwynne Lewis | Used Price: 90% Off
Gwynne Lewis' history opens with a full analysis of all the components of traditional France, including political and religious structures, the seigneurial system, the bourgeoisie and the poor. Part two examines the meaning and challenge of the Enlightenment, with particular reference to women and the mass of the ... More »
14. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century
By Pierre Goubert | Used Price: 80% Off
Pierre Goubert is perhaps the foremost contemporary historian of the French peasantry, and in this book he synthesises the work of a lifetime to produce a vivid, readable, and uniquely accessible account of rural life in seventeenth-century France. Much of the very latest scholarship is incorporated in Professor ... More »
15. The Return of Martin Guerre
By Natalie Zemon Davis | Used Price: 90% Off
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse when, on a summer's day in 1560, a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and wife of Martin ... More »
16. Work and Revolution in France
By William H. Sewell Jr. | 90% Off
Work and Revolution in France is particularly appropriate for students of French history interested in the crucial revolutions that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848. Sewell has reconstructed the artisans' world from the corporate communities of the old regime, through the revolutions in 1789 and 1830, to ... More »
17. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791
By Clare Haru Crowston | Used Price: 70% Off
Winner of the 2002 Berkshire Prize, presented by the Berkshire Conference of Women HistoriansFabricating Women examines the social institution of the seamstresses' guild in France from the time of Louis XIV to the Revolution. In contrast with previous scholarship on women and gender in the early modern period, ... More »
18. Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763
Banks defines and applies the concept of communications in a far broader context than previous historical studies of communication, encompassing a range of human activity from sailing routes, to mapping, to presses, to building roads and bridges. He employs a comparative analysis of early modern French imperialism, integrating ... More »
19. The Black Jacobins
By C.L.R. James | Used Price: 70% Off
The Black Jacobins is the authoritative history of the Haitian Revolution of 1794, the first revolution in the Third World."The prospect of a Black Republic is equally disturbing to the Spanish, the English and the Americans. Jefferson has promised that on the instant the French army has arrived ... More »
20. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
An acclaimed classic book, the 20th anniversary edition of The Middle Ground includes a new preface by the author. More »
21. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean
By David Barry Gaspar; David Patrick Geggus
"Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution." -Choice"[An] eminently original and intellectually exciting book." -William and Mary QuarterlyThis volume examines several slave societies in the Greater Caribbean to illustrate the pervasive and multi-layered impact of ... More »
22. The Making of Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution From Below
By Carolyn E. Fick | Used Price: 70% Off
In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands. The revolt of this underclass in 1791-the only successful ... More »
23. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
By Laurent Dubois | Used Price: 80% Off
The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the ... More »
24. France in the Enlightenment
By Daniel Roche | Used Price: 80% Off
A panorama of a whole civilization, a world on the verge of cataclysm, unfolds in this magisterial work by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century France. Since Tocqueville's account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French ... More »
25. The Enlightenment
What is the Enlightenment? A period rich with debates on the nature of man, truth and the place of God, with the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. But did the Enlightenment mean the same for men and women, for rich and poor, for Europeans and non-Europeans? ... More »
26. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader
By Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze | 50% Off
Emmanuel Eze collects into one convenient and controversial volume the most important and influential writings on race that the European Enlightenment produced. More »
27. Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity
By Darrin M. McMahon | Used Price: 60% Off
Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history--the Enlightenment--as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. In this groundbreaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the ... More »
28. Tocqueville: The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution
By Alexis de Tocqueville; Jon Elster; Arthur Goldhammer
This new translation of an undisputed classic aims to be both accurate and readable. Tocqueville's subtlety of style and profundity of thought offer a challenge to readers as well as to translators. As both a Tocqueville scholar and an award-winning translator, Arthur Goldhammer is uniquely qualified for the ... More »
29. The Coming of the French Revolution
By Georges Lefebvre | Used Price: 70% Off
The Coming of the French Revolution remains essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this great turning point in the formation of the modern world. First published in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and suppressed by the Vichy government, this classic work ... More »
30. The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s
By Isser Woloch | Used Price: 90% Off
"The New Regime is a refreshing departure from [the new revisionist] orthodoxy, Woloch takes a long view of the Revolution, from 1789 to the Restoration, even to 1830, so that the period of the Terror ceases to dominate. He sees the Revolution essentially as a constructive project, which ... More »
31. The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the storming of the Bastille to Napoleon
Writing for the present generation, Albert Soboul places the major events of the Revolution within the broader framework of the intellectual, political and socio-economic processes of the time, including the struggle for economic hegemony of the known world between Britain and France, and the intellectual and political influences ... More »
32. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution
By R. R. Palmer; Isser Woloch | 60% Off
The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative ... More »
33. Interpreting the French Revolution
By Francois Furet | Used Price: 80% Off
The French Revolution is an historical event unlike any other. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage. But after two centuries, this central event in French history has usually been thought of in much the ... More »
34. Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre
By Jonathan I. Israel | Used Price: 60% Off
Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers--that the Revolution was caused by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social ... More »
35. The Family Romance of the French Revolution
By Lynn Hunt | Used Price: 90% Off
This latest work from an author known for her contributions to the new cultural history is a multidisciplinary investigation of the foundations of modern politics. "Family Romance" was coined by Freud to describe the fantasy of being freed from one's family and joining one of higher social standing. ... More »
36. The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern
By Carla Hesse | Used Price: 70% Off
The French Revolution created a new cultural world that freed women from the constraints of corporate privilege, aristocratic salons, and patriarchal censorship, even though it failed to grant them legal equality. Women burst into print in unprecedented numbers and became active participants in the great political, ethical, and ... More »
37. Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism
In the wake of the Terror, France's political and intellectual elites set out to refound the Republic and, in so doing, reimagined the nature of the political order. They argued vigorously over imperial expansion, constitutional power, personal liberty, and public morality. In Reimagining Politics after the Terror, Andrew ... More »
38. France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics
By James F. McMillan | Used Price: 80% Off
France and Women, 1789-1914 is the first book to offer an authoritative account of women's history throughout the nineteenth century. James McMillan, author of the seminal work Housewife or Harlot, offers a major reinterpretation of the French past in relation to gender throughout these tumultuous decades of revolution ... More »
39. A Social History of France, 1789-1914
By Peter McPhee
This volume provides an authoritative synthesis of recent work on the social history of France and is now thoroughly revised and updated to cover 1789-1914. Peter McPhee offers both a readable narrative and a distinctive, coherent argument about this cen More »
40. Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship
By Isser Woloch | Used Price: 80% Off
A great historian explains how Napoleon forged a dictatorship and explores the dilemmas of collaboration, personal and political. The Eighteenth Brumaire, November 9, 1799: with France in political and economic turmoil, a group of disaffected politicians enlisted the talented general Napoleon Bonaparte to lead a coup d'etat and ... More »
41. The Constitutional Monarchy in France, 1814-48
By Pamela M. Pilbeam | Used Price: 70% Off
Historians in France assume that the restoration of Monarchy after the defeat of Napoleon was doomed. The first compact recent history of the period in English, this book reveals that although the French experimented with two Monarchies and a Republic (1814 - 48), there was substantial stability. The ... More »
42. The Republican Experiment, 1848-1852
By Maurice Agulhon | Used Price: 90% Off
Before 1848, France had been ruled by the 'July Monarchy', a liberal regime without democratic participation. After 1852, France was to be ruled by the Second Empire, an anti-liberal regime with some democratic participation. In the intervening period, the Second Republic boldly attempted to combine liberty with democracy ... More »
43. The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France
By Philip Nord | Used Price: 80% Off
France in the mid-nineteenth century was shaken by a surge of civic activism, the "resurrection of civil society" But unlike similar developments throughout Europe, this civic mobilization culminated in the establishment of democratic institutions. How, Philip Nord asks, did France effect a successful transition from Louis-Napoleon's authoritarian Second ... More »
44. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune
In this important contribution both to the study of social protest and to French social history, Roger Gould breaks with previous accounts that portray the Paris Commune of 1871 as a continuation of the class struggles of the 1848 Revolution. Focusing on the collective identities framing conflict during ... More »
45. The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852-1871
By Alain Plessis | Used Price: 50% Off
The Second Empire lasted longer than any French regime since 1789, yet most historical accounts of the government of Napoleon III have been overshadowed by the knowledge of its disastrous and tragic end. As Professor Plessis shows in this detailed thermatic study, such an approach ignores the major ... More »
46. Lourdes: Body And Spirit in the Secular Age
By Ruth Harris | Used Price: 80% Off
Lourdes was at the very center of 19th century debates on religion, science, and medicine. Both the Church and secularists championed the "miracle" town as crucial in shaping how society should think about the mind, body, and spirit. Since the "visions" of Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 transformed the ... More »
47. The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century
By John Merriman | Used Price: 50% Off
This imaginative study recaptures 100 years in the life of Limoges, France's first socialist city, at a time when Limoges rode high on the crest of every wave of social, political, and industrial change. The story of this single city is the story of urban transformation and political ... More »
48. France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society
This thoroughly revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text surveys the cultural, social and political history of France from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune through to Emmanuel Macron's presidency. Incorporating the newest interpretations of past events, Sowerwine seamlessly integrates culture, gender, ... More »
49. The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914
Originally published in 1984. In The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914, Lenard Berlanstein examines how technological advances, expanding industrialization, bureaucratization, and urban growth affected the lives of the working poor and near poor of one of the world's most influential cities during an era of intense social and ... More »
50. The Paris Commune 1871
By Robert Tombs | Used Price: 80% Off
The Paris Commune was the biggest and last popular revolution in western Europe - ending the cycle of revolutions that started in 1789. The Parisians, reeling from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War set up their own revolutionary administration. Government troops eventually retook the city and took a terrible ... More »
51. Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune
One of the most dramatic chapters in the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the Commune of 1871 was an eclectic revolutionary government that held power in Paris across eight weeks between 18 March and 28 May. Its brief rule ended in 'Bloody Week' - the brutal massacre of as ... More »
52. Birth of the Intellectuals: 1880-1900
By Christophe Charle | Used Price: 70% Off
Who exactly are the 'intellectuals'? This term is so widely used today that we forget that it is a recent invention, dating from the late nineteenth century.In Birth of the Intellectuals, the renowned historian and sociologist Christophe Charle shows that the term 'intellectuals' first appeared at ... More »
53. The Dreyfus Affair in French Society and Politics
By Eric Cahm | Used Price: 80% Off
The Dreyfus affair remains one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in modern times. Eric Cahm's study does justice to the human drama, whilst also throwing light on the wider society and politics of the Third Republic in the traumatic years after the Franco-Prussian War. This wide-ranging ... More »
54. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914
By Eugen Weber | Used Price: 60% Off
France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often ... More »
55. Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of its Time
By F. F. Ridley
A comprehensive study of the ideas and practice of the French Labour Movement between 1900 and 1914. Part one sets the syndicalist movement against its historical background, pointing to the forces which helped to shape the attitudes of the French worker, French political culture, economic developments, the influence ... More »
56. 14-18: Understanding the Great War
By Annette Becker; Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau
A bold new assessment of how the violence, racist nationalism, and grief aroused in 1914-18 changed the course of historyTo many, the years of the Great War seemed to signal Europe's collective suicide. A century later, the conflict continues to dominate the imagination of the West--not least because ... More »
57. The Great War: 1914-1918
By Marc Ferro | Used Price: 90% Off
Ferro's The Great War is a French classic (translated here into English). In it, he re-examines the war in the context of global imperialism, looks at the influence of socialist and labour movements in home countries and pay particular attention to the role of non-Europeans in the conflict. More »
58. Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914-1947
By Paul V. Dutton | Used Price: 80% Off
This is the first comprehensive analysis of public and private welfare in France available in English or French. It argues that France simultaneously pursued two different paths toward universal social protection. Family welfare embraced an industrial model in which class distinctions and employer control predominated. By contrast, protection ... More »
59. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927
By Mary Louise Roberts | Used Price: 90% Off
In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked ... More »
60. The Rise of the Paris Red Belt
By Tyler Stovall | Used Price: 90% Off
From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of ... More »
61. The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940
After the devastation of the First World War, France welcomed immigrants on an unprecedented scale. To manage these new residents, the French government devised Europe's first guest worker program, then encouraged family settlements and finally cracked down on all foreigners on the eve of the Second World War. ... More »
62. The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934-38
By Julian Jackson | Used Price: 70% Off
This is the first full-length study in English of the Popular Front, the left-wing coalition which emerged in France during the 1930s in response to the threat of fascism and which went on to win the elections of 1936, giving France her first socialist premier, Léon Blum. After ... More »
63. French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933-1939
By Robert Soucy | Used Price: 90% Off
Did fascism have a significant following in France in the 1930s? Were its supporters predominantly from the political right or left? This provocative book, in conjunction with its acclaimed predecessor, French Fascism: The First Wave, demolishes the notion that fascism never took hold in France. Robert Soucy argues ... More »
64. France since the Popular Front: Government and People 1936-1996
By Maurice Larkin | Used Price: 90% Off
This book is a comprehensive but readable history of contemporary France that sets the changing fortunes of people and government in a broad, international context. Larkin looks at the country's economic performance and social and political record, comparing them with those of its European neighbors, and assesses its ... More »
65. Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars
The surveillance of immigrants and potential terrorists preoccupies leaders throughout the industrialized world. Yet these concerns are hardly new. Policing Paris examines a critical moment in the history of immigration control and political surveillance. Drawing on massive police archives and other materials, Clifford Rosenberg shows how in the ... More »
66. Strange Defeat
By Marc Bloch | Used Price: 80% Off
A renowned historian and Resistance fighter - later executed by the Nazis - analyzes at first hand why France fell in 1940. Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat during the three months following the fall of France, after he returned home from military service. In the midst of his ... More »
67. In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942-1944
This is a study of the Maquis in southern France, the Resisters who took to the woods and hills in the struggle against the German Occupation in the Second World War. H. R. Kedward's detailed and perceptive account explores what participation in the Maquis meant for those involved ... More »
68. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944
By Robert O. Paxton | Used Price: 80% Off
Robert O. Paxton's classic study both revolutionised and reinvigorated the study of the Vichy period in French history. Paxton demonstrated that Petain's regime actions went beyond what they were pressured to do by the Nazis. More »
69. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944
By Henri Rousso | Used Price: 70% Off
From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation-a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding-has dealt with les ... More »
70. Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France
By Miranda Pollard | Used Price: 90% Off
In Reign of Virtue, Miranda Pollard explores the effects of military defeat and Nazi occupation on French articulations of gender in wartime France. Drawing on governmental archives, historical texts, and propaganda, Pollard explores what most historians have ignored: the many ways in which Vichy's politicians used gendered ... More »
71. The French Resistance
"Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and will not go out." As Charles de Gaulle ended his radio address to the French nation in June 1940, listeners must have felt a surge of patriotism tinged with uncertainty. Who would keep the flame burning through dark ... More »
72. France Since 1945
By Robert Gildea | Used Price: 90% Off
The last fifty years of French history have seen immense challenges for the French: constructing a new European order, building a modern economy, searching for a stable political system. It has also been a time of anxiety and doubt. The French have had to come to terms with ... More »
73. Social Change in Modern France: Towards a Cultural Anthropology of the Fifth Republic
By Henri Mendras; Alistair Cole | 90% Off
Social Change in Modern France is a concise and lucid account of the profound transformations that have reshaped French society over the past thirty years. The authors show how the characteristic institutions of the Third Republic have been weakened, destroyed, or severely altered in the face of a ... More »
74. The Republic of de Gaulle 1958-1969
By Serge Berstein | Used Price: 50% Off
The Republic of De Gaulle covers the momentous eleven-year ascendancy of Charles de Gaulle as President of the newly established Fifth Republic. Serge Berstein analyzes important constitutional, political and socio-economic changes and De Gaulle's remarkable foreign policy. He concludes with an examination of De Gaulle's eventual fall, with ... More »
75. The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle's Foreign Policy
De Gaulle was the first major Western leader to pursue a foreign policy designed consistently to break the vicious circle of the Cold War and the straitjacket of the nuclear balance of terror between Russia and the United States. At the same time, he sought to establish in ... More »
76. The Wars of French Decolonization
By Anthony Clayton | Used Price: 60% Off
This ambitious survey draws together the two major wars of decolonization fought by France in Indochina and Algeria (as well as the lesser but far from insignificant military operations in Madagascar, Tunisia and Morocco) into a single integrated account. It examines traditional French attitudes to empire, and how ... More »
77. The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
By Todd Shepard | Used Price: 70% Off
In this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life. For more than a century, Algeria had ... More »
78. A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962
By Alistair Horne | Used Price: 80% Off
The brutal French colonial war in Algeria was fought from 1954 to 1962. A Savage War for Peace is the most authoritative book on this subject. More »
79. Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina
By Bernard B. Fall; Fredrik Logevall | 50% Off
First published in 1961 by Stackpole Books, Street without Joy is a classic of military history. Journalist and scholar Bernard Fall vividly captured the sights, sounds, and smells of the brutal- and politically complicated-conflict between the French and the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina. The French fought ... More »
80. A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930
By Alice Conklin | Used Price: 60% Off
This book addresses a central but often ignored question in the history of modern France and modern colonialism: How did the Third Republic, highly regarded for its professed democratic values, allow itself to be seduced by the insidious and persistent appeal of a "civilizing" ideology with distinct racist ... More »
81. The French Welfare State: Surviving Social and Ideological Change
By John Ambler | Used Price: 70% Off
Little noticed by much of the world, France, during the 1960s and 1970s, developed into one of the most generous welfare states in the world. This book describes and explains this spectacular growth, and examines some of the problems that have emerged in its wake. The distinguished contributors ... More »
82. A Small City in France
By Francoise Gaspard; Eugen Weber; Arthur Goldhammer
The picturesque town of Dreux, 60 miles west of Paris, quietly entered history in 1821, when Victor Hugo won the hand of his beloved there. Another century and a half would pass before the town made history again, but this time there was nothing quiet about it. In ... More »
83. France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era
By Philip Nord | Used Price: 70% Off
France's New Deal is an in-depth and important look at the remaking of the French state after World War II, a time when the nation was endowed with brand-new institutions for managing its economy and culture. Yet, as Philip Nord reveals, the significant process of state rebuilding did ... More »
84. When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968
By Andrew Feenberg; Jim Freedman | 60% Off
Offers a complete survey of the French May Events of 1968 through narrative, analysis, and documents.More than a history, this book is a passionate reliving of the French May Events of 1968. The authors, ardent participants in the movement in Paris, documented the unfolding events as they pelted ... More »
85. The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968
By Michael Seidman | Used Price: 80% Off
The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement ... More »
86. 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies
By Richard Vinen | Used Price: 70% Off
Now in paperback, a major history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale.The year 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary-around ten million ... More »
87. Immigrants and Intellectuals: May 68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in France
The first book to tell the full story of immigrants' impact on the New Left, this record focuses on their place in French history and considers the Left's evolution from 1961 to 1983. Touching upon a variety of topics-including the use of migrant ... More »
88. May '68 and Its Afterlives
By Kristin Ross | Used Price: 80% Off
During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector ... More »
89. Women's Rights and Women's Lives in France 1944-68
By Claire Duchen | Used Price: 90% Off
Claire Duchen explores women's everyday lives in France between the liberation and May '68 and considers the tensions created by competing visions of womanhood. More »
90. Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France
Challenging the conventional wisdom that French environmentalism can be dated only to the post-1945 period, Caroline Ford argues that a broadly shared environmental consciousness emerged in France much earlier. Natural Interests unearths the distinctive features of French environmentalism, in which a large and varied cast of social actors ... More »
91. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man
By Joan Scott | Used Price: 80% Off
When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, ... More »
92. Marxism and the French Left
By Tony Judt
Unlike most books, which treat labor, Socialist and Communist history separately and view French Marxism as a self-contained philosophical phenomenon, Marxism and the French Left offers a refreshingly different approach to the subject. Judt emphasizes the complex and interwoven themes that unify the topics of his essays to ... More »
93. Unions, Change and Crisis: French and Italian Union Strategy and the Political Economy, 1945-1980
By Peter Lange; George Ross; Maurizio Vannicelli
First published in 1982, Unions, Change and Crisis represents the first detailed, comparative, historical and theoretically grounded study of two of the major trade union movements of Europe. It brings together the results of the first part of the first major study from Harvard University's Centre for European ... More »
94. Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France
By Zeev Sternhell | Used Price: 70% Off
Few books on European history in recent memory have caused such controversy and commotion wrote Robert Wohl in 1991 in a major review of Neither Right nor Left. Listed by Le Monde as one of the forty most important books published in France during the 1980s, this explosive ... More »
95. Can Islam Be French?: Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State
By John R. Bowen | Used Price: 70% Off
Can Islam Be French? is an anthropological examination of how Muslims are responding to the conditions of life in France. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of ... More »
96. Political Traditions in Modern France
By Sudhir Hazareesingh | Under $1.00
This engaging new account of French politics takes an unconventional approach to its turbulent subject. Rather than seeing a political history of rupture and fragmentation, Hazareesingh emphasizes continuity, and shows how opposing parties and movements throughout French history have been brought together by ideas. Treating French political history ... More »
97. Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS
In Paris in 1954, a young man named André Baudry founded Arcadie, an organization for "homophiles" that would become the largest of its kind that has ever existed in France, lasting nearly thirty years. In addition to acting as the only public voice for French gays prior to ... More »
98. British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East
This book examines the connections between the British Empire and French colonialism in war, peace and the various stages of competitive cooperation between, in which the two empires were often frères ennemis. It argues that in crucial ways the British and French colonial empires influenced each other. Chapters ... More »
99. France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic
At the end of World War II, France's greatest challenge was to repair a civil society torn asunder by Nazi occupation and total war. Recovery required the nation's complete economic and social transformation. But just what form this "new France" should take remained the burning question at the ... More »
100. Remaking The Hexagon: The New France In The New Europe
By Gregory Flynn; Yves Meny | 90% Off
In this volume, distinguished French and U.S. historians, economists, and political scientists explore the dimensions of France's current crisis of identity. Although every European nation has been adjusting to the dramatic transformations on the continent since the end of the Cold War, France's struggle to adapt has been ... More »
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