France S Long Reconstruction

Postwar recovery required a transformation of France, but what form it should take remained a question. Herrick Chapman charts the course of France’s reconstruction from 1944 to 1962, offering insights into the ways the expansion of state power produced fierce controversies at home and unintended consequences abroad in France’s crumbling empire.

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 heart of French political combat until the Algerian War ended, over a decade later. Herrick Chapman charts the course of France's long reconstruction from 1944 to 1962, offering fresh insights into the ways the expansion of state power, intended to spearhead recovery, produced fierce controversies at home and unintended consequences abroad in France's crumbling empire. Abetted after Liberation by a new elite of technocratic experts, the burgeoning French state infiltrated areas of economic and social life traditionally free from government intervention. Politicians and intellectuals wrestled with how to reconcile state-directed modernization with the need to renew democratic participation and bolster civil society after years spent under the Nazi and Vichy yokes. But rather than resolving the tension, the conflict between top-down technocrats and grassroots democrats became institutionalized as a way of framing the problems facing Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. Uniquely among European countries, France pursued domestic recovery while simultaneously fighting full-scale colonial wars. France's Long Reconstruction shows how the Algerian War led to the further consolidation of state authority and cemented repressive immigration policies that now appear shortsighted and counterproductive.--

This book reveals how France reinvented itself in the aftermath of World War Two. After foreign military interventions, the French political and intellectual elites embraced regime change and launched an urgent programme of nation building. They rebuilt French national identity with whatever material was available, and created a vibrant new cultural and intellectual life. The cost to subordinated groups, however, especially women, still casts a long shadow over French values and attitudes. In this, perhaps, there are lessons and implications for other countries, struggling to rebuild themselves after conflict.

After the Ruins uses both official and unofficial records to explore a relatively ignored aspect of recent rural history: how the fields, farms, villages and market towns of Northern France were restored during the 1920s in the aftermath of the Great War. The book contains illustrations and many detailed maps and makes use of both official reports and unofficial critical commentaries.

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Although the Legitimists were highly visible participants in the intellectual, social, and political life of nineteenth-century France, they have received little scholarly attention. In Legitimism and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852-1883, Steven D. Kale argues against dismissing the Legitimists as mere anachronisms and analyzes their efforts to define the conditions for a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. More broadly, Kales study presents an intellectual and social history of the French Legitimist movement. Kale examines the social composition of the Legitimist party and outlines the qualities the Legitimists considered necessary for the creation of an appropriate ruling class for nineteenth-century France

Moliére's anticlerical comedy Tartuffe is the unique prism through which Sheryl Kroen views postrevolutionary France in the years of the Restoration. Following the lead of the French men and women who turned to this play in the 1820s to make sense of their world, Kroen exposes the crisis of legitimacy defining the regime in these years and demonstrates how the people of the time made steps toward a democratic resolution to this crisis. Moving from the town squares, where state and ecclesiastical officials orchestrated their public spectacles in favor of the monarchy, to the theaters, where the French used Tartuffe to mock the restored monarch and the church, this cultural history of the Restoration offers a rich and colorful portrait of a period in which critical legacies of the revolutionary period were played out and cemented. While most historians have characterized the Restoration as a period of reaction and reversal, Kroen offers convincing evidence that the Restoration was a critical bridge between the emerging practices of the Old Regime, the Revolution, and the post-1830 politics of protest. She re-creates the atmosphere of Restoration France and at the same time brings major nineteenth-century themes into focus: memory and commemoration, public and private spheres, politics and religion, anticlericalism, and the formation of democratic ideologies and practices.