France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic

To study modern Europe is, for better or for worse, to study the history of state formation. The story of how states emerged as unitary administrative entities and expanded into vast repositories of people, ideas and political power lies at the heart of modern European history. There was nothing inevitable about this process. Until at least the end of the nineteenth century, alternative models of sovereignty existed to compete with the national state. But two world wars and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 cast the state as the pre-eminent actor of European politics by the 1950s. Even the tidal wave of neo-liberal and anti-statist ideology that has buffeted Europe in the past four decades has failed to dislodge the state from its perch. European states today are larger, more complex and more unwieldy than ever before. One of the consequences of this triumph of the state has been a tendency, particularly in the social sciences, to take its form for granted. But, in fact, there is very little consistency in the contours and foundational myths of European states. The histories of the Spanish, Italian, British, Czech, Polish and Russian states have little in common, except a desire to bring order to fragmented societies and economies. Even France, which has been celebrating its statist credentials since the days of Colbert and Louis XIV, was not predestined to become a unitary state.