Providing an up-to-date synthesis of the history of an extraordinary nation--one that has been shrouded in myths, many of its own making--France and Its Empire Since 1870 seeks both to understand these myths and to uncover the complicated and often contradictory realities that underpin them. It situates modern French history in transnational and global contexts and also integrates the themes of imperialism and immigration into the traditional narrative. Authors Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky begin with the premise that while France and the U.S. are sister republics, they also exhibit profound differences that are as compelling as their apparent similarities. The authors frame the book around the contested emergence of the French Republic--a form of government that finally appears to have a permanent status in France--but whose birth pangs were much more protracted than those of the American Republic. Presenting a lively and coherent narrative of the major developments in France's tumultuous history since 1870, the authors organize the chapters around the country's many turning points and confrontations. They also offer detailed analyses of politics, society, and culture, considering the diverse viewpoints of men and women from every background including the working class and the bourgeoisie, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims, Bretons and Algerians, rebellious youth, and gays and lesbians.

France and Its Empire Since 1870

History

Fishman, Sarah

Zaretsky, Robert

Conklin, Alice L.

Europe

Oxford University Press

A new history of modern France built around five innovative features that reviewers strongly support. The text will maintain the 'traditional' narrative that students need and integrate the themes of imperialism and immigration into the narrative, while situatiing French history in both transnational and global contexts. It will also integrate recent work in social, intellectual, and cultural history, which, as readers stressed, the three authors and their complementary strengths are ideally suited to accomplish. The book also includes ample illustrations, maps and vignettes that will make the book inviting to students and facilitate classroom discussion. There is no consensus concerning the text's chronology, owing to the fact that courses in modern French history do not have standard dates. Some courses cover 1789 to the present, others start in 1815, 1870, even 1914. The field of modern France is moving generally toward a greater emphasis on the twentieth century and on France's interaction with other parts of the globe.

Conklin, Alice

Providing an up-to-date synthesis of the history of an extraordinary nation--one that has been shrouded in myths, many of its own making--France and Its Empire Since 1870 seeks both to understand these myths and to uncover the complicated and often contradictory realities that underpin them. It situates modern French history in transnational and global contexts and also integrates the themes of imperialism and immigration into the traditional narrative. Authors Alice L. Conklin, Sarah Fishman, and Robert Zaretsky begin with the premise that while France and the U.S. are sister republics, they also exhibit profound differences that are as compelling as their apparent similarities. The authors frame the book around the contested emergence of the French Republic--a form of government that finally appears to have a permanent status in France--but whose birth pangs were much more protracted than those of the American Republic. Presenting a lively and coherent narrative of the major developments in France's tumultuous history since 1870, the authors organize the chapters around the country's many turning points and confrontations. They also offer detailed analyses of politics, society, and culture, considering the diverse viewpoints of men and women from every background including the working class and the bourgeoisie, immigrants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims, Bretons and Algerians, rebellious youth, and gays and lesbians.

A timely and nuanced book that sets the author's experience as a nursing home volunteer during the pandemic alongside the wisdom of great thinkers who confronted their own plagues. In any time of disruption or grief, many of us seek guidance in the work of great writers who endured similar circumstances. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, historian and biographer Robert Zaretsky did the same while also working as a volunteer in a nursing home in south Texas.&nbsp;In Victories Never Last Zaretsky weaves his reflections on the pandemic siege of his nursing home with the testimony of six writers on their own times of plague: Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, and Albert Camus, whose novel The Plague provides the title of this book. &nbsp; Zaretsky delves into these writers to uncover lessons that can provide deeper insight into our pandemic era. At the same time, he goes beyond the literature to invoke his own experience of the tragedy that enveloped his Texas nursing home, one which first took the form of chronic loneliness and then, inevitably, the deaths of many residents whom we come to know through Zaretsky's stories. In doing so, Zaretsky shows the power of great literature to connect directly to one's own life in a different moment and time. &nbsp; For all of us still struggling to comprehend this pandemic and its toll, Zaretsky serves as a thoughtful and down-to-earth guide to the many ways we can come to know and make peace with human suffering. &nbsp;

Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700) (Volume 2)

Known as the “patron saint of all outsiders,” Simone Weil (1909–43) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance.\nThough Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

"Vichy will not go away. As I write, France is in the throes of the Paul Touvier affair. . . . The Touvier affair is just the most recent expression of what Henry Rousso has called the Vichy syndrome." So begins Robert Zaretsky's timely study of everyday life in France during the "dark years" of Vichy. While many studies of Vichy France have either focused on specific lives or ideas or covered the period in broad and synthetic terms, local studies such as this promise to nuance our understanding of wartime France. By concentrating on the city of Nîmes and the department of the Gard, Zaretsky moves beyond generalizations concerning resistance and collaboration to consider issues of historical continuity and change within a specific local context. In the words and acts of local French men and women, he finds the character of "mentalities" in the heart of our own century.The Gard is well chosen as the focus of this study. From the sixteenth century onward, the region had been a flash point between warring Catholics and Protestants. By the early twentieth century, that tension had eased but not disappeared. Zaretsky examines the dynamics between local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities, arguing that with the advent of Vichy—a regime that, if not clerical, was deeply deferential to the Catholic Church—tension and conflict resurfaced in the Gard. Nîmes at War is based on a wealth of archival materials—police and prefectoral reports, official departmental documents, local secular and religious newspapers, and letters intercepted by the regime's security apparatus—much of which has only recently been opened to researchers. Zaretsky's detailed narrative will undoubtedly provoke further reconsideration of the complex and ambiguous world of Vichy.

Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938–1944

Penn State University Press

"Vichy will not go away. As I write, France is in the throes of the Paul Touvier affair. . . . The Touvier affair is just the most recent expression of what Henry Rousso has called the Vichy syndrome." So begins Robert Zaretsky's timely study of everyday life in France during the "dark years" of Vichy. While many studies of Vichy France have either focused on specific lives or ideas or covered the period in broad and synthetic terms, local studies such as this promise to nuance our understanding of wartime France. By concentrating on the city of Nîmes and the department of the Gard, Zaretsky moves beyond generalizations concerning resistance and collaboration to consider issues of historical continuity and change within a specific local context. In the words and acts of local French men and women, he finds the character of "mentalities" in the heart of our own century.
The Gard is well chosen as the focus of this study. From the sixteenth century onward, the region had been a flash point between warring Catholics and Protestants. By the early twentieth century, that tension had eased but not disappeared. Zaretsky examines the dynamics between local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities, arguing that with the advent of Vichy—a regime that, if not clerical, was deeply deferential to the Catholic Church—tension and conflict resurfaced in the Gard. Nîmes at War is based on a wealth of archival materials—police and prefectoral reports, official departmental documents, local secular and religious newspapers, and letters intercepted by the regime's security apparatus—much of which has only recently been opened to researchers. Zaretsky's detailed narrative will undoubtedly provoke further reconsideration of the complex and ambiguous world of Vichy.

In this highly interesting book, Robert Zaretsky describes how French men and women in the department of the Gard lived the Vichy regime from day to day. It will be most useful to historians of France, but it will also be welcomed by scholars who deal with the Second World War, the history of the Jews, and the history of religion. It might well be used in undergraduate classes as a case study for popular opinion in modern France.-Patrice Higonnet, Harvard University "Vichy will not go away. As I write, France is in the throes of the Paul Touvier affair. . . . The Touvier affair is just the most recent expression of what Henry Rousso has called the Vichy syndrome." So begins Robert Zaretsky's timely study of everyday life in France during the "dark years" of Vichy. While many studies of Vichy France have either focused on specific lives or ideas or covered the period in broad and synthetic terms, local studies such as this promise to nuance our understanding of wartime France. By concentrating on the city of Nîmes and the department of the Gard, Zaretsky moves beyond generalizations concerning resistance and collaboration to consider issues of historical continuity and change within a specific local context. In the words and acts of local French men and women, he finds the character of "mentalities" in the heart of our own century.The Gard is well chosen as the focus of this study. From the sixteenth century onward, the region had been a flash point between warring Catholics and Protestants. By the early twentieth century, that tension had eased but not disappeared. Zaretsky examines the dynamics between local Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish communities, arguing that with the advent of Vichy-a regime that, if not clerical, was deeply deferential to the Catholic Church-tension and conflict resurfaced in the Gard. Nîmes at War is based on a wealth of archival materials-police and prefectoral reports, official departmental documents, local secular and religi

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers. In this lively and revealing book, Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers’ lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the other—and himself—illuminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers’ quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actions of the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosopher’s contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world.

The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

Scott, John T.

Professionals & Academics

Yale University Press

The dramatic collapse of the friendship between Rousseau and Hume, in the context of their grand intellectual quest to conquer the limits of human understanding. The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers. In this lively and revealing book, Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers’ lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the other—and himself—illuminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers’ quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actions of the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosopher’s contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world.

Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zaretsky, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Zaretsky, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Zaretsky, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

France and Its Empire Since 1870

France and Its Empire Since 1870

France and Its Empire Since 1870

Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas

Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938–1944

Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938–1944

Nîmes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Gard, 1938–1944

The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding

Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding