Routledge Studies in the Modern History of France
About the Book Series
The history of France in the modern period, from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, offers a dynamic, dramatic and multifaceted story. Political ruptures; social change; regional conflicts, world wars and military defeat; economic and cultural reach; values and identity; international influence; and the complexities of national goals in increasingly multilateral contexts, bear witness to the challenges and transformations of the time.
Encompassing political, social, cultural, economic, military and diplomatic themes, this series will adopt a broad-based approach to the investigation of France in the period from the Revolution of 1789 to the present.
Featuring original research and new interpretations from emerging and established scholars, within and outside France, it aims to be a reference point for engaging and innovative writing about France, the French and their history.
In the Shadow of the Swastika: A Woman’s Perspective on Life in Occupied France, 1940
1st Edition
Edited
By James Smith Allen, Éliane Brault
January 22, 2026
Éliane Brault’s book tells a remarkable tale of betrayal and bravery on an unexpected scale. Its audience includes everyone fascinated by the drama of the German invasion and occupation of France in World War II. But only now, for the first time, is Brault’s moving story available in English ...
France Since the Liberation: Between Exceptionalism and Convergence
1st Edition
By Gino Raymond
December 26, 2025
This book focuses on the tension between the modernising thrust that places France on a trajectory of convergence with comparable liberal democracies and the defence of a national specificity that can act as a brake, complicating France’s relationship with its neighbours, its present and its past. ...
The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France: Primitive Accumulation and Markets from the Old Regime to the post-WWII Era
1st Edition
By Xavier Lafrance, Stephen Miller
June 27, 2025
Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses ...
Jewish Ideas of France: Migration, Diaspora, and Empire
1st Edition
Edited
By Meredith Scott, Nick Underwood
June 12, 2025
This innovative exploration of Jewish experiences in France and the Francophone world through nuanced questions and representations offers an intertwining of perspectives that challenge geographical, chronological, and theoretical boundaries. Engaging the transnational, it brings together studies ...
The Making of the Citizen-Worker: Labour and the Borders of Politics in Post-revolutionary France
1st Edition
By Federico Tomasello
April 14, 2025
Over the course of the 19th century, European societies started thinking of themselves as “civilisations of work.” In the wake of the political and industrial revolutions, labour as a human activity and condition gradually came to embody a general principle of order, progress, and governance. How ...
The Man Who Murdered Admiral Darlan: Vichy, the Allies and the Resistance in French North Africa
1st Edition
By Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon
January 30, 2025
In November 1942 Anglo-American forces landed in French North Africa, which soon afterwards broke with Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime in France and re-entered the war on the Allies’ side. On Christmas Eve the high commissioner Admiral François Darlan was assassinated in Algiers. Why? Like the press ...
Repeating Revolutions: The French Revolution and the Algerian War
1st Edition
By Timothy Scott Johnson
January 16, 2025
Repeating Revolutions examines how activists, intellectuals, social scientists, and historians looked to France’s Revolutionary past to negotiate Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s to the 1960s. The French Empire justified their claims over Algeria in part through messages of ...
The Franco-Prussian War: Turning-Points in European Experiences and Perceptions of Military Conflict
1st Edition
Edited
By Karine Varley
June 14, 2024
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 has traditionally been seen as a limited conflict between French and German forces. This edited volume challenges this view and shows that it was a war of ideas, values, and perceptions, which transformed the political, diplomatic, and military culture across ...
Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France
1st Edition
By Sally Charnow
January 09, 2023
Edmond Fleg and Jewish Minority Culture in Twentieth-Century France, the first critical biography of the leading French writer Edmond Fleg (1874–1963), explores his role in forging a modern French Jewish identity before and after the Second World War. Through his writings – plays, novels, poems, ...
French Soldiers' Morale in the Phoney War, 1939-1940
1st Edition
By Maude Williams, Bernard Wilkin
June 30, 2020
The collapse of the French army in 1940 is a well-researched topic in Second World War Studies but a surprising gap in the historiography emerges when it comes to the study of the French military prior to the German offensive of May 1940.Using various public and private sources in different ...