In this invaluable reference work, the world’s foremost authorities on France’s political, social, cultural, and intellectual history explore the history and meaning of the French Republic and the challenges it has faced. Founded in 1792, the French Republic has been defined and redefined by a succession of regimes and institutions, a multiplicity of symbols, and a plurality of meanings, ideas, and values. Although constantly in flux, the Republic has nonetheless produced a set of core ideals and practices fundamental to modern France's political culture and democratic life. Based on the influential Dictionnaire critique de la république, published in France in 2002, The French Republic provides an encyclopedic survey of French republicanism since the Enlightenment. Divided into three sections—Time and History, Principles and Values, and Dilemmas and Debates—The French Republic begins by examining each of France’s five Republics and its two authoritarian interludes, the Second Empire and Vichy. It then offers thematic essays on such topics as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; laicity; citizenship; the press; immigration; decolonization; anti-Semitism; gender; the family; cultural policy; and the Muslim headscarf debates. Each essay includes a brief guide to further reading. This volume features updated translations of some of the most important essays from the French edition, as well as twenty-two newly commissioned English-language essays, for a total of forty entries. Taken together, they provide a state-of-the art appraisal of French republicanism and its role in shaping contemporary France’s public and private life.

In Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sancton examines how the French left perceived and used the image of the United States against the backdrop of major historical developments in both countries between the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Along the way, he weaves in the voices of scores of French observers—including those of everyday French citizens as well as those of prominent thinkers and politicians such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, and Georges Clemenceau—as they looked to the democratic ideals of their American counterparts in the face of rising authoritarianism on the European continent. Louis Napoleon’s bloody coup in December 1851 disbanded France’s Second Republic and ushered in an era of increased political oppression, effectively forging together a disparate group of dissidents who embraced the tradition of the French Revolution and advocated for popular government. As they pursued their opposition to the Bonapartist regime, the French left looked to the American example as both a democratic model and a source of ideological support in favor of political liberty. During the 1850s, however, the left grew increasingly wary of the United States, as slavery, rapacious expansionism, and sectional frictions tarnished its image and diminished its usefulness. The Civil War, Sancton argues, marked a critical turning point. While Napoleon III considered joint Anglo-French recognition of the Confederacy and launched an ill-fated invasion of Mexico, his opponents on the left feared the collapse of the great American experiment in democracy and popular government. The Emancipation Proclamation, the Union victory, and Lincoln’s assassination ignited powerful pro-American sentiment among the French left that galvanized their opposition to the imperial regime. After the fall of the Second Empire and the founding of the conservative Third Republic in 1870, the relevance of the American example waned. Moderate republicans no longer needed the American model, while the more progressive left became increasingly radicalized following the bloody repression of the Commune in 1871. Sancton argues that the corruption and excesses of Gilded Age America established the groundwork for the anti-American fervor that came to characterize the French left throughout much of the twentieth century. Sweet Land of Liberty counters the long-held assumption that French workers, despite the distress caused by a severe cotton famine in the South, steadfastly supported the North during the Civil War out of a sense of solidarity with American slaves and lofty ideas of liberty. On the contrary, many workers backed the South, hoped for an end to fighting, and urged French government intervention. More broadly, Sancton’s analysis shows that the American example, though useful to the left, proved ill-adapted to French republican traditions rooted in the Great Revolution of 1789. For all the ritual evocations of Lafayette and the “traditional Franco-American friendship,” the two republics evolved in disparate ways as each endured social turmoil and political upheaval during the second half of the nineteenth century.

No history of the European imagination, and no understanding of America's meaning, would be complete without a record of the ideas, fantasies, and misconceptions the Old World has formed about the New. Europe's fascination with America forms a contradictory pattern of hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, yearnings and forebodings. America and Americans--according to one of their more indulgent European critics--have long been considered "a fairlyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters." In The Old World's New World, award-winning historian C. Vann Woodward has written a brilliant study of how Europeans have seen and discussed America over the last two centuries. Woodward shows how the character and the image of America in European writings often depended more upon Old World politics and ideology than upon New World realities. America has been seen both as human happiness resulting from the elimination of monarchy, aristocracy, and priesthood, and as social chaos and human misery caused by their removal. It was proof that democracy was the best form of government, or that mankind was incapable of self government. America was regularly used both as an inspiration for revolutionaries and as a stern warning against radicals of all kinds. Americans have been seen as uniformly materialistic, hot in pursuit of dollars: "Such unity of purpose," wrote Mrs. Trollope, "can, I believe, be found nowhere else except, perhaps, in an ants' nest." And they have been admired for their industry--one young Russian Communist visited New York in 1925 and wrote that America is "where the 'future,' at least in terms of industrialization, is being realized." Decade after decade, America has been hailed for its youth, and lambasted for its immaturity. It has been looked to as a model of liberty, and attacked for maintaining the tyranny of the majority. But always it has been a metaphor for the possibilities of human society--possibilities both bright and foreboding. After a year of heady talk of a "New World Order," of American victory in the Cold War, of a new American Century, The Old World's New World provides a thoughtful and sobering perspective on how America has been seen in centuries past. C. Vann Woodward is one of America's foremost living historians. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Parkman prizes--and he has served as president of the American Historical Association as well as the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. With this new book, he further enhances his reputation while making his vast learning accessible to a general audience.