La Vie en bleu. France and the French since 1900

Everyone tries to pigeonhole France. The vast numbers who go there on holiday or who discuss the French from across the Channel and Atlantic produce judgements which express anything from adulation to ill-tempered irritation. France and the French, it seems, remain resolutely mysterious and inexplicable. Rod Kedward has spent his entire adult life immersed in the study of France. He knows Paris intimately but is just as much at home in the regions and la France profonde, the remote back country. Here he brings to life the great, and often terrible, dramas of modern France - the two cataclysmic wars, the Algerian disaster, the student and worker revolt of 1968 - but also explores the special worlds of the workplace, immigration, minorities, the role of women, and the relationship of politics to place, everyday life and collective memory. (...)