This study is a scholarly biography of one of France's foremost political leaders. In a career which ran from the 1880s to the 1930s, one of the most formative periods of modern French history, Poincaré held the principal offices of state. He played crucial roles in France's entry into the Great War, the organisation of the war effort, the peace settlement, the reparations question, the occupation of the Ruhr and the reorganisation of French finances in the 1920s. His life and work is surrounded by controversy and myth, from 'Poincaré-la-guerre' to 'Poincaré-le-franc', which this book dissects. Using a host of new archival material, Professor Keiger explores the historiography of the man and his times and reveals, somewhat surprisingly, how animal rights and feminism could be as important to him as party politics and public finance.

The book describes the life of Henri Poincaré, his work style and in detail most of his unique achievements in mathematics and physics. Apart from biographical details, attention is given to Poincaré's contributions to automorphic functions, differential equations and dynamical systems, celestial mechanics, mathematical physics in particular the theory of the electron and relativity, topology (analysis situs). A chapter on philosophy explains Poincaré's conventionalism in mathematics and his view of conventionalism in physics; the latter has a very different character. In the foundations of mathematics his position is between intuitionism and axiomatics. One of the purposes of the book is to show how Poincaré reached his fundamentally new results in many different fields, how he thought and how one should read him. One of the new aspects is the description of two large fields of his attention: dynamical systems as presented in his book on `new methods for celestial mechanics' and his theoretical physics papers. At the same time it will be made clear how analysis and geometry are intertwined in Poincaré's thinking and work.In dynamical systems this becomes clear in his description of invariant manifolds, his association of differential equation flow with mappings and his fixed points theory. There is no comparable book on Poincaré, presenting such a relatively complete vision of his life and achievements. There exist some older biographies in the French language, but they pay only restricted attention to his actual work. The reader can obtain from this book many insights in the working of a very original mind while at the same time learning about fundamental results for modern science

The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l'homme is a significant new volume from Norman Ingram, addressing the history of the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), an organisation founded in 1898 at the height of the Dreyfus Affair and which lay at the very centre of French Republican politics in the era of the two world wars. Ingram posits that the Ligue's inability to resolve the question of war guilt from the Great War was what led to its decline by 1937, well before the Nazi invasion of May 1940. As well as developing our understanding of how the issue of war origins and war guilt transfixed the LDH from 1914 down to the Second World War, this volume also explores the aetiology of French pacifism, expanding on the differences between French and Anglo-American pacifism. It argues that from 1916 onwards, one can see a principled dissent from the Union sacrée war effort that occurred within mainstream French Republicanism and not on the syndicalist or anarchist fringes. Based on substantial research in a large number of French archives, primarily in the papers of the LDH which were repatriated to France from the former Soviet Union in late 2001, but also on considerable new research in the German archives, the book proposes a new explanatory model to help us understand some of the choices made in Vichy France, moving beyond the usual triptych of collaboration, resistance or accommodation.

An explanation of France's deflationary policy during the Depression.