Eugen WeberRecensioni

Interesting subject, but very dry.

I tried to read this a couple of times but just couldn't get past the first third. There's simply much too much information crammed into such a short book that it leaves no room for interpretation or for a coherent narrative to emerge. It might serve scholars as a timeline of apocalyptic-inspired events, but it's just a trudge to a lay reader like me.

Un monde en sans cesse disparition, évolution, effondrement et foisonnement, un monde moderne, terriblement vivant.

This is a very carefully composed and meticulously researched work on the transition from the traditional to the modern way of life in rural France between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War.

France underwent this sort of transition much later than England, and the book has some parallels to books on earlier phases of English culture (Thompson's Customs in Common and Laslett's The World We Have Lost, in particular) despite the fact that they deal with the 17th and 18th Centuries. In addition, England (proper, omitting Wales and Cornwall) never had as great a gulf between the culture and language of the cities and towns, a national culture, and that of the countryside.

The other linkage to be made, in the latter part of the book, is with Hobsbawm's The Invention of Tradition.

(As a plus, it pointed me in the direction if the original text and subtext of ”Les Filles des Forges".)

Well worth the investment of reading.

The behavior of France in World War II always perplexed me. It appeared the French simply said, "C'est la vie", and all but invited the Germans to walk right on in without much of a fight. It has forever tainted France, to the point where I have travelled worldwide and have heard jokes about the lack of resolve for Frenchmen.

Yet, for almost 120 years, France was a mighty war power. Napoleon set in bootprints the path his countrymen would take, and it carried into the mid-nineteenth century where France was considered the greatest military power on the continent (not the Brits, who focused on industry and empire consolidation). Mon dieu, what happened?

The Crimean War happened. The Franco-Prussian War happened. World War I happened. By the time the 1930s came around, France had enough of war and the senseless slaughter of seemingly every other generation of young men. While this doesn't excuse their limp response to Hitler, it does explain the background leading to the beginning of WWII.

Eugen Weber does a good job of understanding that the basic reader will be opening the book with the same question I had, and he takes the reader briskly through history and the results. Still, the results leave one saddened...Great Britain also had the disastrous Crimean War and the Boer War, plus the generation lost in the Great War. Yet, the Brits never gave up, even with the bombing that cost them more civilian lives than the French endured from the Nazis.

So, perhaps, in the end, one thinks that maybe the backbone of a nation is its leaders...England had Churchill and the good fortune to have a King whose brother might have brought the nation to surrender. France had destroyed its monarchy long ago and seemingly any sense of leadership. Maybe it's easy for me to sit back and decide what history should have been without having experienced the trauma preceding the fact. Still, it doesn't excuse the Vichy Regime and the handing over of France's Jewish population.

For shame, my father's people, for shame.

Book Season = Spring (April in Paris might help)

The closing of a century is a time of change in history and culture. This was never more true than at the end of the nineteenth century; the era now known as the "fin de siecle". Eugen Weber focuses on France in this fine history of that era. It is a history organized topically rather than chronologically. Thus Weber offers discussion of the lives of people, their way of living and the impact of technological changes. The change in political and educational patterns highlight how the old morphs into the new even in this area. Anyone interested in the arts is treated to a discussion of decadence which opens the book. There is the naturalism of writers like Zola, but also the neurosis of the age with hints of Freud and Nietzsche. Even sports is not neglected in this eclectic and always fascinating picture of the end of a century.½

I purchased this as a supplementary read for one of my literature classes. I found it to contain good information, but I would not recommend it to the casual reader.

Eugen Weber appropriately begins his book on apocalypses with a discussion of chronologies and the fin de siecle for, as he discusses, time is a social construct and the nature of fin de siecles is dependent upon this. The differing perspectives of time and the way we view historical events is the jumping off point for his discussion of the views and beliefs of people over the years regarding the end times. It is the book of Revelation and the "dark and bloody" apocaplypse that is described there that captured my imagination and was a starting point for a tour through history of the varying adpatations and expectations of humans regarding Apocalypses over the centuries. These views continue into our own violent and bloody century (both current and immediately preceding) where there are groups like the "Millenium Watch Institute" that keeps "an eye out for signs of the Coming" (p 209). Whether considered as "a growth industry" or a phenomenon of one of many belief systems, Armageddon has been a concept that has captured the imagination of humans for ages. Eugen Weber shares some insights on the history of this and other apocalyptic ideas in this fascinating and informative book.

With the very question of the future of the influence of the Western tradition under question, this selection of readings, intended as a college supplementary reader, is a useful reference.

1710 Action Francaise: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France, by Eugen Weber (read 1 May 1982) For a time this book was heavy going, but the last half of the book was really good. Charles Maurras was born Apr 20, 1868, and died Nov 16, 1952. While an agnostic, he was reconciled to the Church on his deathbed. The movement (Action Francaise) began in 1899 as a result of the Dreyfus Affair and ended with France's liberation in 1944. This book, by a California professor born in 1925 in Romania, does not give a very clear reason for the papal condemnation--he did not have access to the Vatican archives. The book's account of politics in France after 1919 is fascinating, including of course its account of Feb 16, 1934, and of Vichy. This was an excellent book on an intriguing subject.

clearly inferior to his older works; not really an interesting read

The first section of this book is a completely brilliant survey of sources showing French rural life pre-1870. The same method (endless accretion of detail, beautifully managed) didn't work quite so well for the period of change. But the whole book full of insight not only into its immediate topic, but into understanding more fully processes of change, as well as the sheer dreadfulness of poverty-stricken lives.

2844 The Hollow Years: Europe in the 1930's, by Eugen Weber (read 27 Feb 1996) I found this book unfocused and more intent on painting a picture by scraps of information than telling a straightforward chronological account . I guess I was expecting something more like D. W. Brogan's masterpiece--France Under the Republic--but this book was not like that at all. There were of course interesting things, and depressing things: like the aversion to bathing in French convents. However in general I thought the Church was depicted as quite vigorous in the 1930's. But France is a sad story, ending so dismally in 1940.