History and Geopolitics All books
Jean-Pierre Rioux
They Taught Me the History of France
After his defence of French history, Jean-Pierre Rioux identifies his influences and his “masters”, thereby shedding light on his intellectual commitments, and painting the portrait of a generation. An ode to the greater and lesser figures of French history.
Jean-Pierre Rioux
A Short History of France
Who are the French and what are their goals? A French historian provides the answer as he revisits his country’s history.
Peter Reichel
Germany and its Memories
How has Germany absorbed the heritage of National Socialism? What became of the Nazi buildings in Munich and Berlin? Have they been destroyed, rebuilt or abandoned? What is the significance of the present state of the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück? Does their condition signify an active desire to commemorate the past, or rather of a wish to make it commonplace? Peter Reichel draws on examples from one city after another, and sometimes in one neighbourhood after another, to highlight the hesitations and the contradictions of a nation confronted with a past that will not, or should not, go away.
Peter Reichel
The Fascination of Nazism
All authoritative regimes look to dominate and effectively use art, culture, and the media. Each tool of popular influence is merged together to create and enforce a mythology. But no regime ever went as far as Nazism, no doubt because the Nazis were the first to understand mass culture. Peter Reichel unveils the unrivaled skill with which they knew how to create a world of illusions that allowed them to drag the Germans to disaster. Peter Reichel is a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Hamburg.
Philippe Ratte
De Gaulle and the Republic
A decisive speech for the history of France. A history lesson from an exceptional moment of founding and reform. An analysis of the founding of the Fifth Republic. A close look at what Gaullism was.
Jean-Bernard Raimond
The Choice of Gorbachev
Who is Michel Gorbachev really? Is he communism's gravedigger or simply an apparatchik worried about postponing his disappearance from the political scene? Or is he one of history's free and tragic heroes, who found himself transported in spite of himself by the collapse of the world that had made him powerful? Jean Bernard Raimond is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and served as the Ambassador to France in Moscow.
Yves Pouliquen
When the Académie Française almost Disappeared From the French Revolution to the Empire
The history of the Académie Française under the Revolution and the Empire
Jeremy Popkin
Revolutionary News The Press In France, 1789-1799
The French Revolution invented a written press of a radically new type, one that was able to transmit to the French...
Mario Polèse, Richard Shearmur, Laurent Terral
French Territorial Equality Paris and the rest of the country
How in less than half a century France restored territorial equilibrium between Paris and the rest of the country
Michel Pinault
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
This is the first biography of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the founder of French nuclear research and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935. For many, he represents the political commitment of French intellectuals in the struggle against Fascism in the twentieth century. His life illustrates the transition from traditional science, limited to the world of academia, to Big Science, with major national and international repercussions. Michel Pinault holds an agrégation and a doctorate in history from the University of Paris I.
Béatrice Philippe
The Jews and French Identity
How Jews in France successfully integrated without denying their identity
Jean-Pierre Pharabod
UFWs Unidentified Flying Weapons
Most reported sightings of UFOs turn out to be errors, optical illusions, hallucinations, and even practical jokes. But five per cent of all reported cases are more difficult to dismiss. According to the author, the unidentified objects may be clandestine terrestrial aircraft prototypes or secret weapons launched by the major industrialised nations, particularly the United States. Should the mysterious sightings be attributed to UFOs or to UFWs (Unidentified Flying Weapons)?
Michelle Perrot, Wassyla Tamzali
Conversations
Two eminent intellectuals, a historian and a writer, both very involved in feminism, conversing on important issues faced by French and Algerian societies today.
Colonel Passy
Colonel Passy Memoirs of the Chief of the Secret Services of a Liberated France
These two volumes constitute a new edition of Colonel Passys memoirs, which were first published by Plon in a three-volune limited edition (Deuxième Bureau-Londres; 10 Duke Street-Londres; Missions Secrètes en France). The new edition has been presented and annotated by historian Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, a specialist in the period. André Dewawrin, alias Colonel Passy, headed the Bureau de Contre-espionnage, de Renseignement et dAction (BCRA) of the Free French in London, from 1940 to 1944. He became General Koenigs chief of staff, in 1944. A former student at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, he headed the department of research and study for the French Ministry of Defence after the war.
Nicolas Offenstadt
Shot at Dawn : The Executed of the Great War And the Collective Memory (1914-1999)
Why were some soldiers tried and executed by their own military authorities during World War I? Using previously unpublished source material, the author has been able to throw light on one of the most sombre episodes of the Great War. Besides reviewing the history of the events themselves, the author also examines the struggle with the military authorities to clear the soldiers names, beginning in the period between the two world wars. By the 1960s, the public image of the executed soldiers had begun to change. It would culminate in the British campaign to grant them an official pardon and in the French decision to remember them a ceremony. How, he asks, did these changes come about? Nicolas Offenstadt is a graduate of the Institut des Etudes Politiques, in Paris. He holds an agrégation in history and is a member of the Thiers Foundation.
Nicolas Offenstadt
1914-18 Today The Great War in Contemporary France
A complete history of the “memory” of the Great War in the contemporary mind