"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 work asserts that fascism was an important part of the mainstream of European history, not just a temporary development in Germany and Italy but a significant aspect of French culture as well. Neither right nor left, fascism united antibourgeois, antiliberal nationalism, and revolutionary syndicalist thought, each of which joined in reflecting the political culture inherited from eighteenth-century France. From the first, Sternhell's argument generated strong feelings among people who wished to forget the Vichy years, and his themes drew enormous public attention in 1994, as Paul Touvier was condemned for crimes against humanity and a new biography probed President Mitterand's Vichy connections. The author's new preface speaks to the debates of 1994 and reinforces the necessity of acknowledging the past, as President Chirac has recently done on France's behalf.

He then addresses the period between 1968 and 1981, when the idea of revolution came under attack, and the impact of Francois Furet's revisionist historiography of the French Revolution, which decisively undermined the very idea of revolution in France.

Examining the democratic-socialist politics of the Second Republic, Edward Berenson delves into the largely unexplored content of the Montagnards' ideology and traces its diffusion and reception in the populist religious culture of rural France. This book shows how the urbanbased Montagnards were able to appeal to rural Frenchmen by advocating doctrines grounded in the ideals and morality of early Christianity. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Originally published in New York by Oxford University Press, 1986.

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 a brief narrative history of the Popular Front the book is organised thematically around the main historiographical debates to which the Popular Front has given rise. Among the issues considered are the origins of the strikes of 1936, the reasons for the failure of the Popular Front economic policy, the relationship between culture and politics in France in the 1930s and the causes of France's policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The book views the Popular Front at three levels - as a mass movement, political coalition and government - and argues that it must not be seen just as a narrowly political phenomenon but as a political, social and cultural explosion which attempted to break down the barriers between all areas of human activity in the highly compartmentalised society of France in the 1930s. Even if the Popular Front ultimately failed in this aim it has acquired legendary status in France, and the epilogue to the book briefly examines the 'myth' of the Popular Front from 1936 to the present day.

Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault - the currency of these names in the world of modern thought is widespread. But all too often in the English-speaking world their work and ideas are considered without reference to the context in which they were produced, and this is the gap that this new study sets out to fill. The major revaluation of what constituted the 'political', set in train by the 1968 events is a key theme here, and the work of the best-known French intellectual figures of the time both illuminates and is illuminated by it. But it is not just a new reading of already familiar figures that the reader will find in this work. Writers little-known in the English-speaking world, or hitherto not extensively treated in English, receive similar contextualising attention, so that the recent upsurge in sociology or the impact of a dissident Marxist such as Henri Lefebvre take their place alongside better-known figures in the first book-length English-language survey of one of the most exciting, and often bewildering, periods in European intellectual history.