Charles Sowerwine's history of the French Republic from the Franco-Prussian War until the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 is a wonderful book for anyone seeking a broad overview of recent French history. Covering over 135 years of political and cultural history in one book means that you will be left with many unanswered questions, but that is to be expected. Sowerwine provides a high altitude view of the modern French Republic and its problems from the Paris Commune and the Third Republic until the modern day Fifth Republic created by Charles DeGaulle in the wake of the Algerian War.

The major (minor?) problems with the book are a rather brief, unenlightening chapter on World War I and a tendency (particularly in the later chapters) of the author to insert himself into the work. While the scope of his book is too broad to allow in depth coverage of any decade, the first world war and the Treaty of Versailles were so pivotal that they really deserve more coverage than the author provides.

As an explanation of French politics and culture, France Since 1870 is a marvelous introduction which I can highly recommend. This is a great place to start your studies in the history of modern France. After Sowerwine's book, you will inevitably want to delve deeper into such a complex country. ( )

France Since 1870 is a political and cultural history of France from the Franco-Prussian War to about 2000. It's often assigned as a survey text in undergraduate French history courses. It's notable for its inclusion of not only political, but cultural and woman's history. I read it in conjunction with a class taught by John Merriman of Yale University: HIST 276: France Since 1871, a 24 lecture, 20 hour class freely available online.

This is an excellent book and I recommend it highly. It's about 75% political history, some of which is great, some of which is mind numbing lists of statistics. The cultural history chapters are superb, covering things such as French New Wave cinema, literature, art, post-modernism, existentialism, Anarchism, Feminism. Major political episodes are explained such as the Dryfus Affair, WWI and Vichy France, Vietnam, Algiers, May 68. These are all things I knew about on the fringe but never understood in context of France's development, now they make much more sense. As an Introduction to French history this book along with Merriman's class lectures are among the best available.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )