Bücher der Reihe Berghahn Monographs in French Studies

At the end of the twentieth century France found itself in the midst of another scandalous fin de sicle, awash with rumors and revelations of wrongdoing in high places. As the millennium expired, the Republic's servants, some sitting, others retired, received much condemnation, whether welcomed or resented. When taken together, surely les affaires now approximate in political significance (if not in noise or invective) those of the Dreyfus or Panama scandals a century ago? Yet the author argues this is not so. Today, treason has vanished and is slowly giving way to a transgression different in kind, but equivalent in gravamen: the crime against humanity. Corruption is far from disappearing, yet now it inspires resignation rather than indignation - and as such, it has lost its power to scandalize. Jankowski claims that such transformations tell a tale. The state that once aspired to pre-eminence as the sole magnet of loyalty, touchstone of probity, and guarantor of right, has yielded significant ground to the individual who is now more likely to elevate his own dignity and cry scandal on his own behalf. [In these times,] Individualism is de-politicizing the group and [ultimately] diluting the mystique of France, the nation-state par excellence.

In interwar France, there was a growing sense that organizationA" was the solution to the nation's perceived social, economic and political ills. This book examines the roots of this idea in the industrial rationalization movement and its manifestations in areas as diverse as domestic organization and economic planning.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the first oil price shock, and France's transition from Gaullist to centrist rule in 1974 coincided with the United States' attempt to redefine transatlantic relations. As the author argues, this was an important moment in which the French political elite responded with an unprecedented effort to construct an internationally influential and internally cohesive European entity. Based on extensive multi-archival research, this study combines analysis of French policy making with an inquiry into the evolution of political language, highlighting the significance of the new concept of a political European identity.

In interwar France, there was a growing sense that 'organization' was the solution to the nation's perceived social, economic and political ills. This book examines the roots of this idea in the industrial rationalization movement and its manifestations in areas as diverse as domestic organization and economic planning. In doing so, it shows how experts in fields ranging from engineering to the biological sciences shaped visions of a rational socio-economic order from the 1920s to Vichy and beyond.

In the second half of the twentieth century France played the greatest role - even greater than Germany's - in shaping what eventually became the European Union. By the early twenty-first century, however, in a hugely transformed Europe, this era had patently come to an end. This comprehensive history shows how France coupled the pursuit of power and the furtherance of European integration over a sixty-year period, from the close of the Second World War to the hesitation caused by the French electorate's referendum rejection of the European Union's constitutional treaty in 2005.

The greatest threat to the Western alliance in the 1960s did not come from an enemy, but from an ally. France, led by its mercurial leader General Charles de Gaulle, launched a global and comprehensive challenge to the United State's leadership of the Free World, tackling not only the political but also the military, economic, and monetary spheres. Successive American administrations fretted about de Gaulle, whom they viewed as an irresponsible nationalist at best and a threat to their presence in Europe at worst. Based on extensive international research, this book is an original analysis of France's ambitious grand strategy during the 1960s and why it eventually failed. De Gaulle's failed attempt to overcome the Cold War order reveals important insights about why the bipolar international system was able to survive for so long, and why the General's legacy remains significant to current French foreign policy.

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors - state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers - arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects', planners', and residents' understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the "e;right to comfort"e; as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.

Using Lyon as a lens for understanding the politics of revolutionary France, this book reveals the widespread enthusiasm for judicial change in Lyon at the time of the Revolution, as well as the conflicts that ensued between elected magistrates in the face of radical democratization.

Offers a study of the interaction of science, religion, politics and the culture of celebrity in twentieth-century Europe and America. This book looks at the career of physician Alexis Carrel, as a way of understanding the popularization of eugenics through religious faith, cultural despair and right-wing politics in the 1930s and 1940s.

Boul (contemporary French studies, Nottingham Trent U.) explores the two elements in order to bring to the surface internal tensions and desires with the 20th-century French philosopher and so make him more contradictorily real, and therefore accessible.

The banlieue, the mostly poor and working-class suburbs located on the outskirts of major cities in France, gained international media attention in late 2005 when riots broke out in some 250 such towns across the country. Pitting first- and second-generation immigrant teenagers against the police, the riots were an expression of the multiplicity of troubles that have plagued these districts for decades. This study provides an ethnographic account of life in a Parisian banlieue and examines how the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their collective life. The book focuses on the French ideal of integration and its consequences within the multicultural context of contemporary France. Based on research conducted in a state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, the book also provides a view on how the French state has used urban planning to shore up national priorities for social integration. Collective Terms proposes an alternative reading of French multiculturalism, suggesting fresh ways for thinking through the complex mix of race, class, nation, and culture that increasingly defines the modern urban experience.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this important book explores the role of France in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War and German unification. Most accounts concentrate on the role of the United States and look at these events through the bipolar prism of Soviet-American relations.

A Human Garden explains the longevity of the Ungemach Gardens, an experimental eugenic city that survived on the outskirts of Strasbourg from the 1920s to the 1980s. He reveals the inheritance of eugenics, examining ways in which eugenics have come to influence social, health, and educational policymaking in the post-war era.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by Franois Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.