New Books In French Studies

Emile Chabal’s A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge University Press, 2015) is an in-depth analysis of the languages and preoccupations of French civil society and political culture from the 1970s to the present. Picking up where many historical studies leave off, the book pursues the legacies of the period of France’s Trente Glorieuses, including a number of critical political shifts and turning points during the last four decades. A study focused on French elites, the book moves from consideration of the contributions of intellectuals, academics, and journalists, to the ways that changing ideas and vocabularies played out in the everyday life of French politics. Concerned with the broad consensual middle ground of French politics since the 1970s, the book is divided into two parts: the first examines French neo-republicanism in the wake of De Gaulle, while the second looks at a range of liberal critiques of the varieties of that republicanism. Seeki