Explore the vast range of titles available.

In the years between the world wars, French intellectuals, politicians, and military leaders came to see certain encounters-between human and machine, organic and artificial, national and international culture-as premonitions of a future that was alternately unsettling and utopian. Skyscrapers, airplanes, and gas masks were seen as traces in the present of a future world, its technologies, and its possible transformations. InFuture Tense, Roxanne Panchasi illuminates both the anxieties and the hopes of a period when many French people-traumatized by what their country had already suffered-seemed determined to anticipate and shape the future. Future Tense, which features many compelling illustrations, depicts experts proposing the prosthetic enhancement of the nation's bodies and homes; architects discussing whether skyscrapers should be banned from Paris; military strategists creating a massive fortification network, the Maginot Line; and French delegates to the League of Nations declaring their opposition to the artificial international language Esperanto. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Panchasi explores representations of the body, the city, and territorial security, as well as changing understandings of a French civilization many believed to be threatened by Americanization. Panchasi makes clear that memories of the past-and even nostalgia for what might be lost in the future-were crucial features of the culture of anticipation that emerged in the interwar period.

The most up-to-date and comprehensive English-language study of its kind, From victory to Vichy explores the political mobilisation of the two largest French veterans’ associations during the interwar years, the Union fédérale (UF) and the Union nationale des combattants (UNC). Drawing on extensive research into the associations’ organisation, policies and tactics, this study argues that French veterans were more of a threat to democracy than previous scholarship has allowed. As France descended into crisis, the UF and the UNC sought to extend their influence into the non-veteran milieu through public demonstrations, propaganda campaigns and the foundation of auxiliary groups. Despite shifting policies and independent initiatives, by the end of the 1930s the UF and the UNC had come together in a campaign for authoritarian political reform, leaving them perfectly placed to become the ‘eyes and ears’ of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime. Offering an original contribution to the history of late Third Republican political culture, From victory to Vichy will appeal to students and scholars of modern France and Europe.

The Great War that engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1918 was a catastrophe for France. French soil was the site of most of the fighting on the Western Front. French dead were more than 1.3 million, the permanently disabled another 1.1 million, overwhelmingly men in their twenties and thirties. The decade and a half before the war had been years of plenty, a time of increasing prosperity and confidence remembered as the Belle Epoque or the good old days. The two decades that followed its end were years of want, loss, misery, and fear. In 1914, France went to war convinced of victory. In 1939, France went to war dreading defeat. To explain the burden of winning the Great War and embracing the collapse that followed, Benjamin Martin examines the national mood and daily life of France in July 1914 and August 1939, the months that preceded the two world wars. He presents two titans: Georges Clemenceau, defiant and steadfast, who rallied a dejected nation in 1918, and Edouard Daladier,hesitant and irresolute, who espoused appeasement in 1938 though comprehending its implications. He explores novels by a constellation of celebrated French writers who treated the Great War and its social impact, from Colette to Irène Némirovsky, from François Mauriac to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And he devotes special attention to Roger Martin du Gard, the1937 Nobel Laureate, whose roman-fleuve The Thibaults is an unrivaled depiction of social unraveling and disillusionment. For many in France, the legacy of the Great War was the vow to avoid any future war no matter what the cost. They cowered behind the Maginot Line, the fortifications along the eastern border designed to halt any future German invasion. Others knew that cost would be too great and defended the \"Descartes Line\": liberty and truth, the declared values of French civilization. In his distinctive and vividly compelling prose, Martin recounts this struggle for the soul of France.

Extrait : \"En pleine affaire Dreyfus, alors que font rage les emeutes antisemites en France et en Algerie, Georges Clemenceau va a la rencontre d'enfants d'Israel ecarteles entre Orient et Occident.\"

The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 investigates the political and social imaginaries of \"terrorism\" in the early twentieth century. Chris Millington traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organized international movements. Through a close analysis of a series of terrorist incidents and representations thereof in public discourse and the press, the book argues that contemporary ideas of terrorism in France as \"unFrench\"—that is, contrary to the ideas and values, however defined, that make up \"Frenchness\"—emerged in the interwar years and subsequently took root long before the terrorist campaigns of Algerian nationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Millington conceptualizes \"terrorism\" not only as the act itself, but also as a political and cultural construction of violence composed from a variety of discourses and deployed in particular circumstances by commentators, witnesses, and perpetrators. In doing so, he argues that the political and cultural battles inherent to perceptions of terrorism lay bare numerous concerns, not least anxieties over immigration, antiparliamentarianism, representations of gender, and the future of European peace.

Découvrez enfin tout ce qu'il faut savoir sur la bataille de France en moins d'une heure! Au matin du 10 mai 1940 débute la deuxième opération terrestre la plus importante de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. L'enjeu pour Hitler est capital: assurer la prédominance de l'Allemagne en Europe en envahissant la France, la Belgique, les Pays-Bas et le Luxembourg. La drôle de guerre vient tout juste de se terminer. Tout en nous plongeant au cœur de ce conflit majeur, ce livre n'omet aucun détail. Vous y trouverez: des explications sur les origines de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le profil des acteurs qui ont activement participé à cet épisode tels que notamment Gerd von Rundstedt et Maxime Weygand, mais aussi les stratégies mises en œuvre et les répercussions de la bataille. Ce livre vous permettra d'en savoir plus sur: • Le contexte politique et social de l'époque • Les acteurs majeurs du conflit • Le déroulement de la bataille et sa chronologie (cartes à l'appui) • Les raisons de la victoire allemande • Les répercussions de la bataille Le mot de l'éditeur: « Dans ce numéro de la collection « 50MINUTES|Grandes Batailles », Vincent Straga nous plonge au cœur des opérations qui ont mené à l'invasion allemande en France, en Belgique, aux Pays-Bas et au Luxembourg. L'issue est désastreuse et voit ces pays subir l'occupation. Mais comment cela a-t-il été possible? » Stéphanie Dagrain À PROPOS DE LA SÉRIE 50MINUTES | Grandes Batailles La série « Grandes Batailles » de la collection « 50MINUTES » aborde plus de cinquante conflits qui ont bouleversé notre histoire. Chaque livre a été pensé pour les lecteurs curieux qui veulent tout savoir sur une bataille, tout en allant à l'essentiel, et ce en moins d'une heure. Nos auteurs combinent les faits, les analyses et les nouvelles perspectives pour rendre accessibles des siècles d'histoire.

The National Book Award–winning historian's \"vivid and moving\" eyewitness account of the fall of France to Hitler's Third Reich at the outset of WWII ( The New York Times).   As an international war correspondent and radio commentator during World War II, William L. Shirer didn't just research the fall of France. He was there. In just six weeks, he watched the Third Reich topple one of the world's oldest military powers—and institute a rule of terror and paranoia. Based on in-person conversations with the leaders, diplomats, generals, and ordinary citizens who both shaped the events and lived through them, Shirer constructs a compelling account of historical events without losing sight of the human experience.   From the heroic efforts of the Freedom Fighters to the tactical military misjudgments that caused the fall and the daily realities of life for French citizens under Nazi rule, this fascinating and exhaustively documented account brings this significant episode of history to life.   \"This is a companion effort to Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, also voluminous but very readable, reflecting once again both Shirer's own experience and an enormous mass of historical material well digested and assimilated.\" — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

The Anglo-Saxon view of Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) is based on John Maynard Keynes's misjudged caricature, that he had imposed a treaty that was harsh and oppressive of Germany. French critics' view, however, is that he had been too lenient, and left Germany in a position to challenge the treaty. In fact the treaty was a just settlement, and it could have been maintained. The failure was not in the terms of the treaty but in the subsequent failure to insist on maintaining them in the face of German resistance.

Antoine Prost's contributions to French history have enabled us to understand the failure of fascism in France and why the Republic survived the humiliation of occupation and collaboration in the Second World War. He is the pre-eminent historian of civil society in France. For the first time his seminal articles have been translated into English and collected in this single volume. Beginning with his classic account of war memorials, through his pioneering study of the people of a popular quarter of Paris in 1936, and of the troubled history of commemorating the Algerian war, this book expertly takes us through republican representations of war and peace, urban spaces and social identity, and discourse and social conflict in republican France. Amongst this range of topics, Prost considers the notion of social class and deference, the multiple uses of myth, the secularization of religious imagery, the centrality of primary schools in French political culture, and insults as staples of French political rhetoric. Included here are his famous essays 'Verdun' and 'War Memorials of the Great War', which have been hailed as indispensable additions to the study of European cultural history. Also notable is his fascinating investigation of rites de passage in Orléans, which artfully reveals how complex and semiologically rich rites de passage can be.This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain a firm understanding of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century France and of the work of one of the most influential cultural historians of our day.