Why France?

Laura Lee Downs is Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Divisions in the French and British Metalworking Industries (also from Cornell), Childhood in the Promised Land: Working Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, and Writing Gender History. Stéphane Gerson is Associate Professor of French and French Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, also from Cornell. Roger Chartier is a member of the Collége de France, Professor of History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the author of many books, including The Order of Books and Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations.

Why France? is a mirror of intelligence in which France may see itself reflected.- Jean-Frederic Schaub (Rue 89) An entertaining and thought-provoking series of meditations... The tales from the archive become new ways to understand how individual scholarship is shaped by and can in turn shape intellectual trends.- Jeffrey Jackson (Modern and Contemporary France) France, eternal and changing, is examined without concessions, especially in its relationship with the U.S. A beautiful, two-way history lesson.- Laurent Theis (Le Point) These historians are not afraid to open up and reveal their sensibility, even their sensuality. They express the richness of their historical vocation and the gains of a self-discovery that is made possible or intensified by distance and alterity. Their confidences, sometimes colored by tenderness, express candidly an attachment to France that changes form across time.- Alain Corbin (Le Monde) These lively, funny, insightful essays, caught between the objective approach of historical reality and a fuzzier, unstable sentimental perspective, make up a photo album of postwar France.- Rogert Maggiori (Liberation) This eminently readable book is a must-read for all teachers of French civilization.- Tom Conner (French Review)