| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Gabrielle Hecht. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II. (Inside Technology.) Cambridge: MIT Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 453. $40.00

Historians have generally found it easier to proclaim that broad patterns of power and knowledge shape diverse aspects of human experience than actually to demonstrate the ways in which such processes are played out in the details of everyday life. In her excellent study of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in France in the 1950s and 1960s, Gabrielle Hecht delivers such an integrated study of ideology and practice, moving in a seamless narrative from grand conceptions of technology to the responses of villagers to the construction of a nuclear power plant, from French nationalism to the details of reactor design, and from the decision to develop the force de frappe to struggles among competing labor unions. 1

Hecht's effort "to trace the social, political, and cultural life of reactors as artifacts" is rooted in the literature relating technology to culture and politics, but unlike many scholars in this field, she views this process as a two-way street in which the impact of ideology and power on the development and understanding of technology is matched by the formative role of technology in construction of intellectual and political structures. Thus, the technical design of a reactor might be shaped by a desire to reestablish French "radiance" at the same time that the supposed potential of nuclear energy shaped abstract conceptions of "Frenchness." . . .

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