| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 318 words from this article are provided below; about 616 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Jean-François Chanet. Vers l'armée nouvelle: République conservatrice et réforme militaire 1871–1879. (Histoire.) Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. 2006. Pp. 320. €22.00.
In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, France had to overhaul its army while simultaneously erecting the scaffolding of a republic that, in the view of Adolphe Thiers, would be conservative or would not exist. One thing that guaranteed the conservatism of la Troisième, Jean-François Chanet notes, was that the army was at the center of France's nation-building project: the revival of nation-state and army were simultaneous and inter-related activities (p. 107). In this way, Chanet carries forward the nation-building theme explored in Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976). But while other authors have written about the organization of what contemporaries were already referring to as l'armée nouvelle, Chanet places the army at the center of the republican national project. "Everything has been said on the birth of the Third (Republic)," he writes. "What remains to be discovered is the institutional, material, symbolic place of the army in the town" (p. 16).	1
The resurrection and resurgence of French military institutions had to be a top-down enterprise imposed by legislators on the French people because of what Chanet identifies as the central paradox of French civil-military relations and the role of the soldier in society: for much of the nineteenth century, the French were considered Europe's quintessential soldiers. Unfortunately, French fascination for military events and notorious hair-trigger chauvinism went unmatched by a popular taste for soldiering. This aloof, detached variety of French militarism—perhaps the only variety in Europe of the time—meant that in 1870–1871, France was outmaneuvered, overwhelmed, and thoroughly dishonored by a country more or less its own size, whose army had truly become the school of the nation in the course of the nineteenth century.	. . .

There are about 616 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.