The history of France in the modern period, from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, offers a dynamic, dramatic and multifaceted story. Political ruptures; social change; regional conflicts, world wars and military defeat; economic and cultural reach; values and identity; international influence; and the complexities of national goals in increasingly multilateral contexts, bear witness to the challenges and transformations of the time.
Encompassing political, social, cultural, economic, military and diplomatic themes, this series will adopt a broad-based approach to the investigation of France in the period from the Revolution of 1789 to the present.
Featuring original research and new interpretations from emerging and established scholars, within and outside France, it aims to be a reference point for engaging and innovative writing about France, the French and their history.
Edited
By Karine Varley
June 14, 2024
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 has traditionally been seen as a limited conflict between French and German forces. This edited volume challenges this view and shows that it was a war of ideas, values, and perceptions, which transformed the political, diplomatic, and military culture across ...
By Gino Raymond
February 20, 2024
This book focuses on the tension between the modernising thrust that places France on a trajectory of convergence with comparable liberal democracies and the defence of a national specificity that can act as a brake, complicating France’s relationship with its neighbours, its present and its past. ...
By Xavier Lafrance, Stephen Miller
November 03, 2023
Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses ...
By Federico Tomasello
July 31, 2023
Over the course of the 19th century, European societies started thinking of themselves as “civilisations of work.” In the wake of the political and industrial revolutions, labour as a human activity and condition gradually came to embody a general principle of order, progress, and governance. How ...
By Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon
July 31, 2023
In November 1942 Anglo-American forces landed in French North Africa, which soon afterwards broke with Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime in France and re-entered the war on the Allies’ side. On Christmas Eve the high commissioner Admiral François Darlan was assassinated in Algiers. Why? Like the press ...
By Sally Charnow
January 09, 2023
Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, the first critical biography of the leading French writer Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), explores his role in forging a modern French Jewish identity before and after the Second World War. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, ...
By Maude Williams, Bernard Wilkin
November 08, 2018
The collapse of the French army in 1940 is a well-researched topic in Second World War Studies but a surprising gap in the historiography emerges when it comes to the study of the French military prior to the German offensive of May 1940. Using various public and private sources in different ...