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Non Fiction April 2008 |
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It’s an astonishing fact: there are more historians who specialize in France in the United States than in... France! How can we explain this overrepresentation? France as seen by the United States seems both foreign and familiar. It is precisely this mirror relationship that two historians, Stéphane Gerson and Laura Lee Downs, have examined in Why France? American Historians Reflect on an Enduring Fascination (recently published by Cornell University Press).
As a topic of study, France has undergone many transformations in the American intellectual field. It is a crystallization of major themes of interest on campuses today: immigration and citizenship (linked to post-colonialism), religion and secularism (at the crossroads of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), gender studies and France in a time of globalization.
For all these reasons, it seemed useful to us to offer a selection of historical works published recently in France that reveal the major trends in research. What do we find at the moment in the History section of French bookstores? What are French historians studying-and what should American historians read? What would merit being translated into English for a broader public?
To begin with, we offer a collective work that assembles 150 historians and myriad approaches. It is the Dictionnaire de l’histoire de France edited by Jean-François Sirinelli published by Larousse. It will be of great interest to anyone who regularly needs to consult a reference work of contemporary historiography. A sort of travel guide for an adventure through time... Jean-Francois Sirinelli is also the co-author of an other book published by PUF in 2006 : Culture de masse et culture médiatique en Europe et dans les Amériques, 1860-1940, a study of the explosion of mass culture in Europe and in America since the mid nineteenth century.
Next, we have two works in very different genres that do not address the same audiences at all but focus on a specific period of French history: World War I and the 1980s. The first is a graphic novel of a collective effort. 20 contemporary artists illustrated 20 letters from soldiers in Verdun-called Paroles de poilus, published by Soleil Productions/Radio France. The other is an essay of cultural history that chronicles the end of ideologies and the advent of economic liberalism at the end of the eighties. It is called La décennie. Le grand cauchemar des années 1980 by François Cusset.
Moreover, two scholarly works investigate multicultural France, lingering on France’s history of immigration and the debates it has incited. On the one hand, Histoire de l’Islam et des musulmans en France du Moyen-Âge à nos jours by Mohammed Arkoun, published by Albin Michel, captures the metamorphoses of Muslim “otherness” throughout time, starting with the Battle of Poitiers. On the other hand, Histoire des étrangers et de l’immigration en France by Yves Lequin, published by Larousse, puts the old and current debates about immigration in perspective.
In another genre very prized by Anglo-Saxon readers, we find the monograph of a famous Frenchman, revisited thanks to Anglo-American archives (from the Secret Service). It is Présumé Jean Moulin by Jacques Baynac, published by Grasset. The essay concentrates on the years 1940-1943 during which the hero developed a strategy of active resistance to the Nazi occupier in France.
Two other books consider new themes in the history in France. The first one addresses the question of gender throughout history, with a collective work on gender and conflict: Genre et événement, Du masculin et du féminin en histoire des crises et des conflits. The second addresses the question of the black minority during Hitler's time, with a book by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch: Des victimes oubliées du nazisme: Les noirs et l'Allemagne dans la première moitié du Xxeme Siècle.
And, last but not least, a somewhat original essay, written in a resolutely personal tone for what would appear to be an impossible task: telling the history of the world in 140 pages. That is the wager of Michel Bounan’s La folle histoire du monde, published by Allia. While the author tells the story of Western Progress, he does so from the unusual perspective of ancient civilizations that have been destroyed or colonized (notably, Native American, African, and Pacific Island peoples). The demonstration is at once entertaining and poignant. What if writing history today meant writing the end of history?
We hope you enjoyed this selection,
Bonne lecture! Happy reading!
The Book Office in New York
Special thanks to Amy Chen and Amaury Laporte