Portraits of France and the French: a review of three weighty contributions

Research-based books on France as a whole are like the buses I used to wait for in London: none for ages, then three come along at once! If this coincidence can largely be explained by the respective priorities of the editors involved, it also stems from recent events in France that have made the production of collective volumes on this country, and its politics appear timely to publishers and, indeed, to a wide range of academics, students and other potential readers. The election of Emmanuel Macron as President in 2017, together with the opposition his governments has subsequently met, has contributed strongly to this definition of timeliness. More fundamentally, as these three books all testify, the French ‘model’ and its challenges still seem to possess a number of singularities, ones which a sizeable chunk of social science continues to take a profound interest in for reasons of generic analytical ambition.