On France and Its Empire Since 1870

Alice Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky’s France and Its Empire Since 1870 is another textbook to add to the bookshelves of all French historians. Every textbook has something that it emphasizes, and this work attempts to emphasize France’s connections with its colonies and the world around it. Important factors in this textbook that are downplayed in others include the importance of immigration to twentieth-century France (which surprisingly had a higher immigration rate in 1931 than the United States!) and race in metropolitan France.

While the authors do a good job of including the colonial empire, this inclusion occasionally seems forced. For example, on the chapter on “The Republic Divided, 1885-95,” only four out of twenty-five pages are dedicated to the colonial empire. Understandably, attempting to include the empire and metropole in one text as ambitious, but the authors of this text are less successful at integrating these two things into one broad structure.

The book is more detailed and interesting than Jeremy Popkin’s A History of Modern France, but it is less detailed and interesting than Charles Sowerwine’s France Since 1870. However, it has a different orientation that Sowerwine’s text. Where Sowerwine found significance in writing about political history—often domestic—and cultural history, the authors of this text find the topics of gender and race more interesting. Popkin’s text, on the other hand, attempts to fit everything into one textbook with varying degrees of success. Although Conklin, Fishman, and Zaretsky’s book can stand alone, Popkin’s is more skeletal and would be greatly enriched by the inclusion of supplementary reading.

Although the version of the text that I read (the first edition) is “outdated,” the sources used and the synthesis of scholarship felt quite up-to-date. Perhaps it is not as cutting-edge of the second edition of the book, but the authors did an excellent job of taking advantage of every source in the past decade. Overall, the text is an enjoyable and informative read