France achieved national unity much later than is commonly supposed. For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them. The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

By the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870--71), Germany occupied one-third of French territory, thousands of Alsatians and Lorrainers had flooded into France, and 140,000 French soldiers had died. France's crushing defeat in the most significant European armed conflict between the Napoleonic wars and World War I cast long shadows over military garrisons, meeting halls, and kitchen tables throughout the nation. Until now, no study has adequately addressed the complex, lasting effects of the war on the lives of ordinary French men and women. In this stimulating new book, Rachel Chrastil provides a lively history of French provincial citizens after the Franco-Prussian War as they came to terms with defeat and began to prepare themselves for a seemingly inevitable future conflict. Chrastil provides the first examination of the problems facing provincial France following the war and the negotiations between the state and citizen organizations over the best ways to resolve these issues. She also reinterprets postwar commemorative practices as an aspect of civil society, rather than as an issue of collective memory. By the 1880s, Chrastil shows, the Franco-Prussian War had receded far enough into the past for French citizens to reassess their roles during the war and reorient themselves toward the future. Believing that they had failed in their duties during the Franco-Prussian War, many French men and women argued that citizens could and should take responsibility for the nation's war effort, even before hostilities began. To this end, they joined the Red Cross, gymnastics clubs, and commemorative organizations like the Souvenir Français, especially in areas of the country that had faced occupation and that anticipated future invasion. Using extensive archival and published sources, Chrastil deftly traces the evolution of these private or semiprivate associations and the ways in which those associations affected the relationship of citizens with the French state. Through a novel interpretation of these civilian groups, Chrastil asserts that the associations encouraged French citizens to accept and even to prolong World War I.

Men stayed on the farms, and women departed for the mills.

The period 1870 - 1914 in France saw the consolidation of republican government and the recovery of national self-confidence. Though political crises such as the Dreyfus Affair threatened to tear it apart, the Republic established firm parliamentary rule, built up an Empire and an army which was to see it through the Great War. The new edition of this key text - first published as The Third Republic From 1870 to 1914 - offers a clear introduction to the period and incorporates the latest research.

In France's Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village's battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873-1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

Wawro describes the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1, that violently changed the course of European history.

In 1870 Bismarck ordered the Prussian Army to invade France, inciting one of the most dramatic conflicts in European history. It transformed not only the states-system of the Continent but the whole climate of European moral and political thought. The overwhelming triumph of German military might, evoking general admiration and imitation, introduced an era of power politics, which was to reach its disastrous climax in 1914. First published in 1961 and now with a new introduction, The Franco-Prussian War is acknowledged as the definitive history of one of the most dramatic and decisive conflicts in the history of Europe.

This work of historical sociology revisits and analyses the earlier part of the Third Republic (1870-1914), when France granted citizenship rights to Indians in Pondicherry. It explores the nature of this colonial citizenship and enables comparisons with British India, especially the Madras Presidency, as well as the rest of the French empire, as a means of demonstrating how unique the practice of granting such rights was. The difficulties of implementing a new political culture based on the language of rights and participatory political institutions were not so much rooted in a lack of assimilation into the French culture on the part of the Indian population; rather, they were the result of political infighting and long-term conflicts over status, both in relation to caste and class, and between inclusive and exclusive visions of French citizenship.

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)