The cult of the modern : trans-Mediterranean France and the construction of French modernity / Gavin Murray-Miller.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Cult of the Modern focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria and examines the role that ideas of modernity and modernization played in both national and colonial programs during the years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. Gavin Murray-Miller rethinks the subject by examining the idiomatic use of modernity in French cultural and political discourse. The Cult of the Modern argues that the modern French republic is a product of nineteenth-century colonialism rather than a creation of the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. This analysis contests the predominant Parisian and metropolitan contexts that have traditionally framed French modernity studies, noting the important role that colonial Algeria and the administration of Muslim subjects played in shaping understandings of modern identity and governance among nineteenth-century politicians and intellectuals.

In synthesizing the narratives of continental France and colonial North Africa, Murray-Miller proposes a new framework for nineteenth-century French political and cultural history, bringing into sharp relief the diverse ways in which the French nation was imagined and represented throughout the country's turbulent postrevolutionary history, as well as the implications for prevailing understandings of France today.

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CHOICE Review

This study of France and Algeria under the Second Empire of Napoleon III examines the contested role of "modernity" as a source of political legitimacy. Murray-Miller (modern European history, Cardiff Univ., UK) begins by noting the perception of many 19th-century Frenchmen that new technologies and practices had made the "modern" era qualitatively different from "traditional" society, and that the Bonapartist regime, lacking traditional legitimacy, sought to legitimize itself through appeals to modernization and progress. Similarly, he observes that the republican and liberal opposition united around a "progressive" agenda, rejecting the extremes of mob rule and plutocracy and linking the project of nation-building to the spread of modernity from the cities into the countryside. Murray-Miller creatively engages with Eugen Weber's thesis of "internal colonialism," drawing parallels between French colonialism in Algeria and efforts to transform the French countryside and its "primitive" inhabitants. By placing Algeria at the center of Second Empire political debates, the author highlights the contradictions within Bonapartist and Republican narratives of civilization and progress. Napoleon III's dreams of an "Arab kingdom" foundered on the impossibility of reconciling settler and indigenous interests, while the Republican narrative of "spreading civilization" ultimately endorsed settler racism. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --David Allen Harvey, New College of Florida