| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Julian Wright. The Regionalist Movement in France 1890–1914: Jean Charles-Brun and French Political Thought. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 286.

The triple legacy of royal absolutism, Jacobinism, and Bonapartism, it has often been noted, combined to make postrevolutionary France the most centralized state in modern Europe, with authority radiating out from Paris to a society divided into homogenous departments, with virtually no "intermediary bodies" between the individual and the state. Such extreme centralization has not always gone unchallenged, and Julian Wright claims that an overly "Jacobin," Parisian-based historiography has obscured the parallel development of a federalist, "Girondin" tradition from the 1790s to the decentralizing reforms of the Fifth Republic. Rejecting the usual French association of federalism and regionalism with reaction and counter revolution, Wright argues that the regionalists of the Third Republic were neither monarchists nor proto-fascists but rather moderate republicans seeking to bring reconciliation and regeneration to a polarized French nation through the revitalization of local and regional institutions. Wright's study examines the political thought and action of one such regionalist, the Occitan teacher, poet, and journalist Jean Charles-Brun, in the quarter-century prior to the outbreak of the Great War.

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