Why did I become an historian and an historian of France for that matter? And once an historian, why did I take on the subjects that I did? It’s not hard to put together answers to such questions, but it must be kept in mind that they are, like all historical explanations, retrospective constructions and to be regarded in just that light, not as truth, but as interpretation.
H-Diplo Essay 194
Essay Series on Learning the Scholar’s Craft: Reflections of Historians and International Relations Scholars
19 February 2020
Why History? Why France?[1]
https://hdiplo.org/to/E194
Series Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii
Essay by Philip Nord, Princeton University
Why did I become an historian and an historian of France for that matter? And once an historian, why did I take on the subjects that I did? It’s not hard to put together answers to such questions, but it must be kept in mind that they are, like all historical explanations, retrospective constructions and to be regarded in just that light, not as truth, but as interpretation.
I did not come to History right away. I grew up in Chicago, in the American Midwest, and the city was home to an Art Institute that housed one of the finest Impressionist collections in the world. My father was born in Berlin and left for the United States in 1937, fleeing from Hitler’s anti-Semitic persecutions. He had come from a well-to-do bourgeois family which had sent him as a young teen to summer school in England. There, he had learned English and a certain Anglophilia, which stuck with him all his life, and he always felt that knowledge of a foreign language was not just a useful skill but also, one never knew, a potential lifesaver. So, I too was sent as a young teen far away, to Switzerland as it happened, to learn a foreign tongue. I went twice, both times over the summer holidays, and on the second occasion, my mother met me, and we traveled together to Italy. She was from a middle-class Chicago family and was very much determined to leave behind the provincialism of her origins. She received a university education, the first in her family to do so, and made a career as a psychotherapist, along the way becoming a convinced Europhile. The Italy that I discovered on that first trip in her company was the Italy of the Renaissance. When I headed off to college in 1967, it was the history of art that I had on my mind.
That didn’t last long. I attended college in New York, at Columbia, and Columbia at that time was not a quiet place. Before classes began, first-year students were invited to attend seminars meant to give them an idea of the kind of education that lay ahead. I remember one such seminar dealing with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.[2] Columbia had a great books curriculum, and in those days Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto was counted among the Western tradition’s key texts. I read it three times in my first two years at university. The political education I got, however, entailed more than book learning. Columbia experienced a student strike in the spring of 1968, which brought an end to regular classes. There were local issues involved but national ones, too, like the war in Vietnam and civil rights. I was a spectator to the Columbia events more than a militant, but not my roommate, an African-American, who took part in the occupation of a building and ended up under arrest. Again, in 1970, there was a student strike to oppose the bombing of Cambodia, and this time, I was more involved, traipsing around New York soliciting signatures on protest petitions. The result of such experiences was two-fold. I had entered college as a conventional liberal in the American sense of the word. It would be wrong to say that I left as a radical, but I was anti-war, interested in Marxism, and for sure some variety of socialist. When it came to my studies, moreover, I wound up majoring in Government, the name that Political Science then went by at Columbia, because it, rather than art history, seemed the most promising intellectual path to an understanding of what was happening around me.
How I got from there to History is easy enough to explain. First, Political Science turned out to be something of a disappointment. The discipline I was exposed to at Columbia dealt more in concepts and models than in concrete detail and artful narrative. I liked political theory better but had little aptitude for it. My third year in college, I moved out of the dormitories into an apartment near campus. The previous occupants had also been students, and one left behind a book that I remember quite well picking up and reading in a casual way, Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture.[3] What caught my imagination was Gay’s endeavor to set the remarkable cultural efflorescence of the Weimar years in its political context, a context framed on the one side by the revolution of 1918-1919 and on the other by the Nazi seizure of power. The message was simple and direct. Culture did not stand apart from politics but was embedded in it, and historians like Peter Gay knew how to bring the two worlds into conversation. During my final year in college, I took a year-long course with Fritz Stern on European history since 1870. Stern, like Gay, was an historian who moved back and forth between politics and culture, drawing connections between the two, and he did so with a grace and ease that appealed to my sensibilities. It became clear to me that I had erred in majoring in Political Science and that History better suited my temperament (although, as will be seen, that’s not entirely true, for, aware of it or not, I continue to be drawn to the kinds of questions that political scientists ask). It did not occur to me at the time that the two figures who had played a part—secondary in Gay’s case and primary in Stern’s—in redirecting my interests were both themselves refugees from Hitler’s Germany whose families had emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s.
So, History it was to be, but whose? International, even transnational history is now much in vogue, but that was not the case back in the seventies when I was starting out. There were scholars of diplomacy and military affairs who worked across borders, but I wasn’t then much interested in those subjects, even though I became more drawn to them in later years. No, the way to go was national history, or so I thought at the time, but that left open the question of which nation to study. I was at that juncture in my life in flight from “America.” I had left home for New York and never looked back. In college, I spent one summer working in Chicago but otherwise contrived to remain on the East Coast. The reason in part was that home was a troubled place. My parents divorced in 1966, and their parting was acrimonious. Life in Chicago meant negotiating my way through the claims of hostile parties, and I wanted to avoid that. But New York was not just a refuge. It was, as I experienced it, an outpost of European culture. Just south of Columbia was a movie house, the Thalia, which in summertime ran double bills that changed every day. I became a regular. The movies on offer were not the usual American fare, shoot ‘em ups and Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies, but art films, the work of Bergman, Fellini, and the French New Wave. It’s not just that I developed a taste for this brand of cinema but that I became scornful of the American movies, trying the patience of the woman I was then dating (to whom I’m now married) whose tastes were more ecumenical than my own.
She, Deborah, was an English major, a devotee of the Victorian novel and of the work of Charles Dickens, and I might well have followed her into the study of things English. We were both in the same year in college, and after graduation, I went to Oxford to study for two years on a graduate fellowship, and she went to Leicester, the two of us commuting on the weekends to spend time together. The political tone of the college I was attached to was socialist in a searching sort of way that suited me, and I liked the people, the ex-colonials, like myself, whom I met at Oxford—fellow Americans, Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders—and the Midlands people whom I met at Leicester who were unpretentious and direct. But I did not find English political history compelling. It struck me as all too tame, and I had an appetite for headier stuff, for the violent seesaw of revolution and dictatorship.
It’s a puzzle then why I didn’t settle on German history. I returned from England in 1973 to begin doctoral studies at Columbia. I had hoped to take a German history seminar with Fritz Stern, but he was on leave, and I had to look elsewhere for courses. It wasn’t just accident, however, that steered me away from German history but also personal motives. Like many middle-class Germans of his era, my father, though chased out of Germany, remained attached to his homeland, to the Germany of Goethe and Schiller. For my mother, on the other hand, Germany was the enemy fought in the Second World War, the land of Nazism and the Holocaust. This was a fight I didn’t want to get in the middle of, and so German history, though it would always remain close to my preoccupations, was ruled out as a primary subject.
It should not be thought, however, that I came to French history faute de mieux. As a teen, I had been an avid novel reader. I read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and Balzac’s Père Goriot on my own in high school. A professor assigned Flaubert’s Sentimental Education my first year in college. It was during the Columbia strike. The class was meeting off campus, and the teacher, a specialist in French literature, wanted us to study something appropriate to the moment. I read the novels in a literalist way as stories of young men who had come to the big city in pursuit of ambition and love. The irony and critical-mindedness of the texts were lost on me. But I did come away with one conclusion that the events of 1968 seemed to confirm: that, like New York, Paris was a place of excitement where important things happened. So, I was, as many Americans of my generation, susceptible to the romance of France. It helped that I had spent those summers in Switzerland, which left me with a reasonable command of the French language. It helped too that I had a French language teacher in high school, a Viennese woman who had fled to the U.S. in the wake of the Anschluss, whose enthusiasm for France gave a boost to my own. Thus, when I first encountered History in Fritz Stern’s course my final year in college, it was the French, as much as the German or British part of the story, that grabbed my attention. Students were required to write two essays for the class, and I settled on French themes: Jean Jaurès and the Dreyfus Affair and Léon Blum and the Spanish Civil War. I found the kind of socialism espoused by Jaurès and Blum attractive, more ethical in orientation than materialist, and I wanted to know how believers in a revolutionary socialist future conducted themselves in the rough-and-tumble here-and-now of democratic politics. Then came graduate school at Columbia. Stern was on leave, and I found myself instead in seminars taught by Arno Mayer and Robert Paxton, two very different kinds of scholars, but each a model in his own way. Mayer was charismatic and full of big ideas, Paxton rigorous and principled, and both pointed me toward France once and for all.
Now, France, like all nations for that matter, is a house of many mansions, and which France I found myself studying changed more than once over the course of time. Looking backward, it seems to me that my intellectual concerns broke down into successive clusters, four principal ones to date, though no doubt that is imposing an order on the past, in this case my own, which was not at all so neat in its unfolding.
I started off as a social historian. Of course, I had intended at the outset to study French socialism, but Arno Mayer, then engrossed in the “problem of the lower middle class,” proposed that I look into shopkeepers. This I did in a seminar paper I wrote for him, which became the jumping off point for my dissertation research. I ended up writing on a small-business protest movement, a kind of poujadisme avant la lettre that gathered momentum in late nineteenth-century Paris. The movement originated in the 1880s in the city’s core, commercial arrondissements and spread out from there. It began as a reflex of protest, disgruntled shopkeepers petitioning public authorities for protection against department-store competition and for tax redress, but over the course of the 1890s, it took on a political coloration, which was right-wing in character. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the movement made common cause with anti-Dreyfusard Nationalists. Contemporaries in fact blamed the shopkeeper vote for the victory of Nationalism at the polls in the Paris municipal elections of 1900, which proved to be a turning point in the city’s politics. Paris, the city of revolution par excellence in the nineteenth century, became a bastion of the Right in the twentieth, and it was the grievances of petit-bourgeois voters that had made the difference, or so I argued. When the dissertation at last became a book in 1986, the title I settled on, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment, reflected this interpretive angle.[4] The book, I believe, still has resonance today as we steer our way through a new era of populist ressentiment.
The project had several virtues from my point of view. The 1970s was the glory decade of social history, the study of subaltern groups—workers, peasants, slaves—whose activism made ‘history from below,’ as the tag line of the era had it. In casting my lot with social history, I was taking part in a historiographical movement, one shaped by a generation of scholars, myself included, still working under the influence of ’68. But I was also practicing social history with a difference. Many of my contemporaries had opted to work on the Left, on working-class activism and the forward march of labor, but I had looked in the opposite direction, at the birth of the twentieth-century Right and at the social constituencies attracted to it. It is obvious, I think, that the rise of Nazism was very much on my mind as I pursued the project, but so too were contemporary events. Tax protest was in the news in the 1970s. Think of syndicalist leader Gérard Nicoud’s artisan defense league, the CID-UNATI. In America, this was the decade of Howard Jarvis’s Proposition 13 campaign to cap property taxes in California, a tax protest movement that provided a backdrop to the rise of Reaganism. Now, this was not the sort of project to foster sentiments of Francophilia, but it did familiarize me with the history and topography of Paris, deepening an attachment to the city that has not flagged with time. On a practical note, it brought me in contact with Professor Philippe Vigier, then based in Nanterre, and an associated team of researchers—Alain Faure, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, and Andrew Lincoln among them—, who were working on similar themes, and they afforded me a welcome entry into the world of European academe as well as friendship and guidance through the archives. Once again on a practical note, the petit commerce project helped to land me a job at Princeton and, when the research was published, to persuade my senior colleagues to promote me to tenure, which happened in 1988. I have taught at Princeton ever since, and the department has always remained, as I found it then, a site of collegiality and intellectual nurturance.
By that time, I had embarked on a second research project. I had thought about sticking with petit commerce and carrying the story into the interwar decades but was advised that it was in my professional interest to strike out in a new direction. The small shopkeeper movement had defined itself against the department store but also against the so-called big shots gathered in an already established business association, the Union nationale du commerce et de l’industrie, which represented commercial interests in the textile and luxury goods sectors. The UNCI had made a name for itself at the time of the Paris Commune, attempting without success to negotiate a settlement between the revolutionaries and Adolphe Thiers’s Versaillais. It had been joined in the effort by Freemasons and the so-called Ligue d’union républicaine whose membership included a number of up-and-coming politicos—Georges Clemenceau, for example—who in younger days had distinguished themselves as sometimes rowdy opponents of the Second Empire. I wrote an essay on the conciliation campaign, which was published in 1987.[5] It was not widely read, but the exercise was a help to me for a number of reasons. France’s Party of Order held no charms for me, but I had never been much of a revolutionary either, and for that very reason the Commune posed a problem. I might sympathize, but I could not embrace it without reservation. The Party of Conciliation, however, pointed to a third way that even in the most polarized of moments strove to carve out a democratic middle path between revolution and reaction. The conciliators themselves were a mixed crew, businessmen and lawyers militating alongside Latin Quarter radicals, but on the whole they tended to a certain idealism, associating themselves in both word and deed with the progressive causes of the day—
feminism, pacifism, cooperation. They were also to a man (and they were all men) partisans of the republican idea. In the Party of Conciliation then, I encountered a political current that I found congenial as well as helpful in finding my political bearings in a present when revolution still seemed to be on the agenda for some in my generation but not for me. Not least of all, I landed on a research theme: the study of republican politics in the decades leading up to the Third Republic, accessed not through elections and voting behavior, but from the ground up, in the context of the associational and institutional matrix that gave rise to democratic commitment in the first place.
The research took the form of a book, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France, published in 1995.[6] The whole project had paid rich dividends, both personal and intellectual. Maurice Agulhon had spent a year on leave in Princeton in the 1980s, and I had gotten to know him then. As my research interests turned toward republican politics, I found myself drawn into Agulhon’s orbit, and over time, I came to know a number of his students, Jacqueline Lalouette among them, who became friends and provided much needed research advice. Here was a community of scholars I felt at home in, and here was a France that, unlike the France of the anti-Dreyfusards, I could sympathize with. Now, a number of points bear making about the “Republic” I was drawn to. It was not a model of fixed contours but a regime in motion, born out of an anti-authoritarian movement that had cut its teeth in opposition to the Second Empire and, once the Empire was gone, to the regime of Moral Order that succeeded it in the 1870s. The movement retained a glimmer and then some of the utopian impulse that had fired up so many of its acolytes in the days of the Party of Conciliation. And it embodied certain principles, although not in a rigid way. Laïcité, for instance, was a core value, but in the Republic’s first years secular commitment did not prohibit the inclusion of “duties toward God” in school manuals. In fact, as I discovered, the republican creed attracted many with deep spiritual commitments, among them liberal Protestants and Jews, who looked to craft religious forms consonant with democratic principle and at the same time to find ways to bring to bear the values they had learned in church or synagogue on public life. Through the study of republican politics then, I found a way to look at Judaism, not just from the perspective of its anti-Semitic enemies, but in its own right as a source of democratic conviction.
As for intellectual dividends, they were of two kinds. I noticed on the membership rolls of the Ligue d’union républicaine the name of Gustave Manet, the brother of the painter Édouard. I wondered whether the two Manets shared the same politics and wrote an article on the subject, making the case that they did.[7] The article in time metamorphosed into a chapter in The Republican Moment and then into a book in its own right, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2000).[8] The connections between art and politics had been a long-standing passion, and now at last and to my delight I had found a way to explore the subject at length. Second of all, my research made clear to me just how critical associational life had been to sustaining the republican movement of the 1860s and 1870s, made up as it was of a web of interconnecting lodges, leagues, and unions. There appeared to be a correlation between the intensity of associational activism and the advance of democratic values and institutions. This way of looking at things appealed to me for a number of reasons, historiographical and contemporary. The “individualist” French, it turned out, were not so averse to sustained collective action as they were often made out to be. As for the present day, the idea of civil society was very much in vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as “civil societies” in Latin America and the Soviet bloc mobilized against authoritarian regimes, preparing the way, in the hopeful lingo of the social science of the day, for “transitions to democracy.” I received indispensable help navigating through the social science literature on “transitology” from a colleague in Princeton’s Political Science department, Nancy Bermeo, a specialist in Iberian and Latin American affairs who had published a first book on the transition to democracy in Portugal in the 1970s. She and I struck up a collaboration which resulted in an edited volume exploring in comparative perspective the connections, often more complicated and tortuous than I had at first imagined, between civil society and democratic politics: Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (2000).[9]
In retrospect, I think I understand how I got from here to a third cluster of interests, but at the time the direction I was heading did not seem at all clear to me. The Republican Moment whetted my interest in the relationship between religion and politics. Life in 1990s America (and elsewhere) made manifest just how critical this issue was to the contemporary world. I had worked on French Protestants and Jews, but what about Catholics? A review of the literature revealed that there had been a powerful and impactful mobilization of the Catholic milieu in France, beginning in the interwar decades and culminating in Vatican II, which fed first into Catholic Action and then into Christian Democracy. As I was opening up this line of inquiry, I became department chair, a post I would occupy from 1995 to 2001. The experience sparked an interest in how institutions were run, which took scholarly form in a mini-research project on Sciences Po. I had come to the subject thanks in part to the counsels of a French colleague, Claire Andrieu, who had an intimate familiarity with the world of la haute function publique and of the archival sources, the Sciences Po archive included, that afforded access to it. I looked at the same period I had looked at in the Catholic mobilization piece, from the thirties to the postwar era. It was an instructive perspective that revealed a Sciences Po leadership determined to update the institution they led, an incremental process already begun before the war that then gathered steam under Vichy and culminated in the school’s remaking at the Liberation. In conversation with yet another French colleague, Annette Becker, I had occasion to talk about what I was working on, and she suggested that I have a look at the archives of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer was a perfect choice: a player in the interwar Catholic renaissance, a cultural impresario in the Vichy years, and an audiovisual pioneer in the decades after the war, in all a figure whose career spanned the entire length of the period I had become interested in.
Three articles came out of these explorations and a common set of themes.[10] Starting in the 1930s, there had been significant efforts to overhaul France’s institutions to meet the political and economic challenges of the twentieth century. These efforts were orchestrated, not just by leftists as might be expected but by thinkers and militants—Catholics, technocrats, non-conformists of various hues—who originated from less-examined locales on the political spectrum. They affected institutions, like Sciences Po, which dealt with administrative and technical matters, but cultural institutions as well from radio to theater to cinema. What’s more, they met with snowballing success. The Liberation was a hinge moment in the process. It was then that a new institutional order was consolidated (much of which remains in place down to the present day), but Vichy too had played a part and one more important than a walk-on’s.
All the pieces came together in a book, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era, which was published in 2010.[11] Four points bear making about the book in the present context. The first has to do with periodization. I learned from a Princeton colleague, Sheldon Garon, that Japanese historians had been exploring already for some time the continuities—and discontinuities—that linked the 1930s to the 1950s and that they had even invented a term for the period, the transwar. It was a useful concept, one that I was happy to borrow, and it was a catchy one too at a moment when everything “trans” seemed to be in fashion. The transwar approach also allowed me to revisit a subject first examined in depth by my supervisor Robert Paxton. Paxton’s blockbuster book on Vichy France after all had included Old Guard and New Order in the title, an evocation at one and the same time of Vichy’s connections to a traditionalist past and of its less trumpeted but nonetheless consequential modernizing impulses.[12] I wanted to build on Paxton’s findings, looking less outward from Vichy than backward from the Liberation moment. Third, I was very much conscious as I wrote of what was happening in the political world around me. It required no special perspicacity to note that the anti-statist turn of the 1980s, which had so transformed Anglo-American politics, was much more muted in continental Europe. Yet, why was this so? Was it just because the Left was so much stronger in France than, say, in Great Britain? It struck me that the staying power of the postwar settlement in France owed more than a little to the breadth of its base, which drew on the support not just of the usual suspects on the Left but also of an array of more conservative interests—Catholic, technocratic, non-conformist, and Gaullist. There were forms of conservatism then that did not hate the welfare state but had in fact aided in its construction. American conservatives might do well to take note, not that I expected any such thing to happen. Finally, the picture of the French 1950s that emerged from my research, modernizing but also religion-soaked and moralistic, resonated with the fifties I had known growing up in the United States.
One final point: as I reflected on the Christian world of 1950s France, it appeared to me as a community, energized to be sure, but not always at ease with its recent past, and this observation has pointed me in yet one more direction. Christian résistants had experienced the horrors of deportation, and newsreels and photographs attested that yet more terrible things had happened in the East. There were Christians in the postwar years, just a handful at first though their number would grow, who had begun to meditate on the role that Christianity—and France—had played in the destruction of European Jewry, and they entered into dialogue, often painful and full of misunderstanding, with their Jewish confreres. Here was a theme close to home: the hesitant, difficult emergence of a new kind of ecumenicism, born out of memories of deportation and the Shoah, out of memories shared and yet so very different. It is a theme whose exploration has shaped a new project. Almost 160,000 French people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to the Reich during the Second World War. The experience of deportation cast a long shadow over French life afterward, and many parties—Catholics and Jews, but also Communists, Gaullists, and others—competed to shape how that experience was remembered. It is that competition and the outpouring of books, movies, and memorials it gave rise to that is the subject of the book I am now completing, After the Deportation: Memorial Battles in Postwar France, which is scheduled to appear later this year.
It is tempting to think of historical research as a solitary enterprise, the lone scholar in a library or archive wrestling mano a mano with the resistant traces of the past. A different picture, I trust, emerges from the preceding pages. Certain themes crop up again and again in the work I do: the relationship between culture and politics, how social movements inflect public life, how democratic institutions take root and evolve, the fate of Judaism in the contemporary world. It is not an arbitrary selection but one shaped by family inheritance, personal experience, and encounters, whether immediate or mediated, with events in an unfolding historical present. At every turn, moreover, there were others—family, friends, teachers, and colleagues—who guided me along the way. The historian is embedded, and the work he or she does, however isolating it sometimes feels, is always collective.
Yet why France? I have no French ancestry; I am not a foodie or a fashionista. But I do like novels and painting, and it’s hard to beat Stendhal and Manet. I now live in a suburb, but I started off as a city-dweller, and every time I take the train from Princeton to New York, I get a jolt of energy, just as I do when I fly from Newark to Paris. I was shaken up by the events of ‘68, but I have found a political home that suits me, one part idée républicaine, one part social democracy à la Jaurès and Blum. There is nothing remarkable here. More than one American Francophile would say similar things. I would just add this: that as I got to know a France I liked, I also got a clearer idea of what there was in American life that I liked (I don’t shun the American cinema anymore as I foolishly did in days gone by). I had been in flight from home, but over time I have ceased to be, and that too is thanks to France.
Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1981. He is the author of several works on the history of modern France, including most recently: France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton University Press, 2010) and France 1940: Defending the Republic (Yale University Press, 2015).
[1] A French language version of this essay was first published as “Pourquoi l’histoire? Pourquoi la France?” in Philippe Gumplowicz, Alain Rauwel, and Philippe Salvadori, eds., Faiseurs d’histoire. Pour une histoire indisciplinée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), 191-205. It appears here in its English version with the kind permission of Gumplowicz, Rauwel, and Salvadori.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Gallagher (New York: Grove, 1963).
[3] Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968).
[4] Philip Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
[5] Nord, “The Party of Conciliation and the Paris Commune,” French Historical Studies 15 (Spring 1987), 1-35.
[6] Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[7] Nord, “Manet and Radical Politics,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (Winter 1989), 447-480.
[8] Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2000).
[9] Bermeo and Nord, Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
[10] Nord, “Reform, Conservation, and Adaptation: Sciences-Po, from the Popular Front to the Liberation,” in Sudhir Hazareesingh, ed., The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 115-146; “Catholic Culture in Interwar France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 21 (Fall 2003): 1-20; “Pierre Schaeffer and Jeune France: Cultural Politics in the Vichy Years,” French Historical Studies 30 (Fall 2007): 685-709.
[11] Nord, France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[12]Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972).