As the twentieth century began, France was an empire, in control of 10 percent of the world's surface. To its imperial possessions it offered entry into the ideal of the Republic through assimilation, although the Republic was never as unbounded as it liked to portray itself and always resistant to the claims of its North African Muslim subjects, to whom assimilation through full citizenship was denied. The Republic saw its authority as resting on more than the mere numbers of democratic acclaim. It was a moral and even an epistemic project, a vehicle of Enlightenment reason and French--that is, universal--civilization. And Africans, indeed all the world's citizens, were potential beneficiaries of France's "civilizing mission." Kedward cites Ferdinand Buisson, Sorbonne professor and advocate of the republican tradition of secular rationalism, who in 1903 was promising Tunisians, living as they were on "this African extension of the soil of France," that secularism would soon be coming to them too. But Kedward also recovers a less brittle strain of republican self-conception, represented by Socialist Jean Jaurès. Jaurès accepted the Republic as "the definitive form of French life" but urged extension of its values beyond politics to economic and social relations: "The workshop, work itself, production, property: these must be organized according to republican principles." This Jaurèsian view is a touchstone in Kedward's account, and the spirit of Jaurès--assassinated in 1914--hovers over the book.

With World War I, the Republic was both affirmed and perturbed. At the war's end, although the Republic could lay claim to the nation, that nation was itself divided. Some saw the war as a victory of republican ideals; others viewed it as pointless, a grotesque unmasking of republican and bourgeois hypocrisy. These divisions redoubled as the country's population changed. Already a destination for Italians, Belgians, Poles, Czechs and Russians, France in the postwar years experienced further waves of immigration, so that by the early 1930s "the French working class, alongside the world of the arts and the intellect, was the most cosmopolitan in Europe." But 3 million adult immigrants remained outside the pale of citizenship. With neither the vote nor security, they manned expanding factories in areas like Boulogne-Billancourt and elsewhere; they tenanted the slums of Bobigny and Saint-Denis. Yet while the Republic ruled over an increasingly diverse society, it continued to claim to speak as if for a homogeneous community and entrenched its assimilationist ideals.

Economic depression made the Republic the focus of sharpening ideological conflict between left and right during the 1930s, in ways that evoked memories of the Dreyfus Affair--a clash, precisely, over who was truly French and what kinds of loyalties this entailed, with the right wishing to exclude Jews and communists, the left wanting to expel Catholics and capitalists. The electoral victory of the Popular Front in 1936 brought the left to power, only to face a country in which half of the citizenry had a very different France in mind. But, as Kedward tries to show, the divisions and conflicts of these years in fact ultimately broadened and opened new possibilities for the French.

Whereas Stanley Hoffmann and his followers take Vichy and the Resistance as the pivot that turned the republican stalemate of prewar France into the modernizing drive of postwar France, Kedward contends that the Popular Front experience was equally determining. The Popular Front embarked on "government interventionism on a scale not seen in peacetime," and in just two years had vivid achievements to show for it. Under the owlish Léon Blum, a Jewish Socialist vilified by the anti-Semitic right and inspired by the vision of men like Jaurès, the Republic moved from a purely political definition toward "a social democracy of humanist conviction": Laws were enacted for collective bargaining, the forty-hour week and paid holidays; the school-leaving age was raised; right-wing militias were disbanded; the armaments industry was nationalized; grain prices were raised; and for the first time women were appointed as ministers.

But within a few years the Republic, as ideological project and as territorial state, had collapsed in the debacle of 1940--the "strange defeat" inflicted by the Germans. Kedward details the range of French responses to the division of France into Occupied and Vichy sectors: While some signed on to Pétain cults, others dissented, resisted or took up arms in revolt (distinctions Kedward insists on, as a counter to the myths of resistance and collaboration that dominated postwar France). Such acts were invariably local in scale and diverse in character: There "was no photo-fit resister"--indeed, people in the Resistance "were constantly surprised to find who their contacts and co-resisters were," especially since they were often foreigners, refugees and immigrants.

Yet again, the obsession with unity meant that after the war these new identities were slighted, as older, more purely ideological definitions were asserted. Immediately after the war, a hardened Nationality Code was introduced: "Failure to assimilate" was made a reason for exclusion, while the return to Jacobin centralism squeezed out other forms of civil dissent and refused to recognize actual social differences. Reinvigorated Jacobinism also defined France's attitude to its colonies. Liberation at home in 1944 and the restoration of the Republic came with reaffirmation of empire and oppression abroad--in pointed contrast to Britain, where victory in Europe brought an acknowledgment of the imperative to withdraw from empire. After 1944 the Republic's fate was threaded to the empire in ways that unraveled both. As Kedward underlines, on the very day the war ended, May 8, 1945, the French began to crush Algerian nationalist protests in Sétif and Guelma with bloody force; tens of thousands of Algerian civilians were killed. The end of the war in Europe did not in fact mean the end of war for France--campaigns in Indochina (1946-54) and then Algeria (1954-62) followed, keeping France at war in its colonies for virtually two decades.

Only with the arrival in power in 1958 of de Gaulle, a man whose nationalist credentials could not be doubted and who was able to sidestep the prevailing ideologies, was the republican state rescued from its colonial illusions. De Gaulle took charge when the prosperity of what came to be called "les trentes glorieuses"--the three decades that transformed France's economy and society--was flowing, and in a France that had seen more than twenty governments come and go since the end of the war. He swiftly inverted the previous relationship between Republic and nation, gave primacy to the nation and made the Republic a vehicle for national grandeur. De Gaulle's skill was to plant himself above interests and ideology so as to personify principles and values, to which he lent popular prestige by recourse to referendums and plebiscites--instruments whose dangers and rewards are never entirely predictable in France.

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