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Stephane Gerson, Place and Locality in Modern France, French History, Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2015, Pages 399–401, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/crv044
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Over the past two decades, historians of modern France have fashioned a rich field of research around localities, regions and provinces. Like their colleagues in German or Spanish history, they have departed from nation-centric narratives to showcase the vibrancy of the local as a political reference, a locus of identification or loyalty and a commercial or tourism-centred investment. Many have taken issue with accounts of modernization in which the local existed in opposition to the nation and ultimately succumbed to its overwhelming force. They have shown that the local acquired a new resonance and played new social functions from the nineteenth century on.
While this field of research continues to grow, there is a need for new directions of study now that the revisionist position has become dominant. Place and Locality in Modern France , a collection of eighteen essays, thus arrives at an opportune moment. Its editors, Philip Whalen and Patrick Young, should be commended for inviting contributors who are for the most part at the start of their careers and represent several disciplines (political science, French and art history in addition to history). In doing so, they provide an overview of current research while pointing toward new areas of study.
