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Darcie Fontaine, "Modern France and the World" (Routledge, 2023)
01:10:45
An interview with Darcie Fontaine
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C
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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D
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network series in French Studies. I'm your host, Sarah Miles, and today I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming d' Arcy Fontaine to the podcast. She studies the modern French empire, particularly North Africa, though she's done work on a variety of topics, including transnational women's movements and Anti fascism and refugee politics. Her first monograph, Decolonizing Christianity, Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria, was published in 2016. She's also published pieces in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and French Politics, Culture and Society. Today we'll be talking about Darcy's new book, Modern France and the World, which was published with Rutledge this year. The book is a scholarly resource for students of modern France, examining how both local and international forces shaped the political, cultural, and economic history of the nation and its empire from the 18th century to the present. It provides a clear narrative overview of the evolution of modern France in relation to its presence on the world stage and integrates an array of primary and secondary source material that personally, I think will be really useful to teachers, students and scholars looking for a sort of all purpose and up to date guide to this history. So, Darcy, welcome to the podcast.
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C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
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D
Glad to have you. So, to get us started, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your own kind of background as a historian and how you came to the study of French history.
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C
Sure. So it really started for me my freshman year of college. I was at Trinity University in Texas and I took a class on the French Revolution with Gary Cates, who is one of the kind of the major historians of the French Revolution of his generation. And it really transformed the way I understood history. Coming out of high school, I hadn't really cared that much about it. And from that point on I was really interested in French history. I started taking French in college. I hadn't really done it before and ended up transferring schools to University of Denver my second year of college, which had just like an amazing array of women's and gender historians and an amazing study abroad program. So I spent a year in France in a French university. Like, really learn French.
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D
It's an intense experience.
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C
It is a very intense experience, especially because I'd only taken like two years of college French and then I'm like thrown in the middle of it.
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D
Okay, so your French gets better. You know, it's a problem.
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C
It's getting a lot better. Yeah. And I took history classes there and had kind of done some archival research and came back and wrote a senior thesis. Ended up like majoring also in French and English literature because I just have a lot of transfer credits from various places. And so I wrote a senior thesis in history about like French women in the 1930s and how they transitioned from like anti fascism to passive or from pacifism to anti fascism into like, full on engagement in the resistance. And I was writing a French thesis at the same time on French literature. And it was, it was just really useful to kind of think of all these things together. And then I worked for a while after I graduated and decided to apply to graduate school to kind of expand the history project I'd been doing on transnational women's Networks in the 1930s. Ended up at Rutgers, where I got to work with all these amazing women's and gender historians and various other people. And what was interesting is that I really worked on that project for like a year. Even went to Europe in the summer after my first year of my PhD to do research in archives in the Netherlands and Germany and France. Very clear that it wasn't really going anywhere or like where I thought it.
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D
Was going to go.
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C
And I came back and talked to my advisor, Bonnie Smith, and was just like, this project is falling apart. I have to do something.
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D
What do I do?
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C
Her response was amazing. She was like, oh, thank God, it was going to be the most boring dissertation. I was like, why didn't you tell me? She's like, sometimes you have to figure it out for yourself.
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D
Sometimes you have to figure it out for yourself. Right?
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C
Yeah. But then I had to kind of scramble to get a new dissertation topic because I was already like in my second year, end of my second year, and moving, and I was taking a class on African history and doing a project, missionaries and doing research at the New York Public Library and stumbled on this pamphlet about that was like denouncing all these Christians in the Algerian War. That ended up being my dissertation and first book topic. So a lot of it was like kind of happenstance. I happened to be in a place where things were happening and it sort of pushed me in different directions rather than like me deciding at the age of five I was a French historian or something.
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D
Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like maybe your kind of diverse research origin point also helped bring you to this book. Right. Which is very much not super specifically focused on one research topic. And this one might be maybe a little more unusual for listeners of the podcast that are used to kind of traditional research single topic monographs. So this is a textbook kind of providing an overview of modern France. So I'm wondering, how did you get interested in writing a textbook? What made you want to write this?
- [06:42]
C
Yeah, weirdly, yet another thing where it kind of fell in my lap. So I got an email from an editor at Routledge, Eve Setch, and she's like, I'm coming to Tampa. Do you want to meet? And I was like, okay. And she came to my office and essentially just asked me if I wanted to write this book. She was starting a new series that was like, Europe and the World. So each country, there's like a France in the world, Germany in the world, Britain in the world, that kind of thing. And so the topic and the, like, scope of the book were kind of already set out a little bit before I even started. And I thought about it for a little while, and I was like, actually, I do want to do this. I was in the middle of revising my monograph, getting it ready for publication, and I was just kind of, like, tired of thinking about that topic and also just teaching. It was like, oh, I don't really have a good textbook I can teach with when I teach modern France classes or even other kinds of classes. So what would it look like if I could make a textbook that I really want to use myself and that's useful in the classroom and perhaps for my friends and colleagues? And I'd also, in graduate school, I think, worked with a lot of professors who were writing textbooks. So Bonnie Smith is one of them. She's written a lot of textbooks. I help do research for some of these things. And so the idea of kind of incorporating scholarship into more public and broader audiences was always very familiar and something that I thought would be an interesting challenge. So I said yes. I had to write a proposal that was accepted by the board and kind of think through things that way. I initially said I would try to finish it by 2014. That did not happen for a wide variety of reasons, with kind of professional and personal catastrophes happening left and right. But I finally finished in 2019, and then Covid hit. It took quite a long time to get it, you know, to the point where it was ready for publication. And, yeah, 2023, here we are 10 years later with this book.
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D
So that's quite the process. I mean, I guess I'm wondering what your sort of research program looked like for writing this book. Right. Because I think, you know, all of us are a little more familiar with the. You know, come up with a research topic, you read your secondary sources, you go to the archives, you find things, you come back, you know, some version of process more or less streamlined for a kind of traditional monograph. But what does it mean to research and prepare for writing a textbook in this way?
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C
Yeah, so I started with the proposal where I outlined kind of the key framing, narratives, themes, structures of the book. I looked at all the Other comparable textbooks, thought about what I wanted to do differently, what worked, what didn't work in some of these other books, particularly for teaching, why I had never really incorporated some of them. Like some. My class in French history tended to start in the 18th century and go to the present over one semester. I knew other people who did it differently that was broken up in different ways. Sometimes they start in the 18th century, end in 1870, and have two semester courses or, like three quarter courses, different kinds of things. So I wanted to think about how I could structure a book that would actually be useful for all these different types of courses and how people were framing it in terms of timeline and so forth. So I ended up kind of developing, you know, 15 chapters. So that could be flexible. You could cover an entire semester. You could break it into two, you could break it into three. Fifteen is a pretty easy number to do that. And then I also wanted to think about, like, how people were structuring their courses. I tended to start in the 18th century, maybe a little bit earlier. And that, for me, kind of made a nice narrative arc for thinking about how to structure and do the, you know, kind of periodization of the book. So once I kind of had that idea, I started outlining how I would frame each chapter approach. Periodization, what themes, chronology. I had to make some sort of key decisions early on. Notably, I think the biggest one was not to frame the book around republicanism and just kind of only sort of structure things as, like, the Fourth Republic, the Fifth Republic, whatever it might be, but to kind of, if I was going to do, like, France and the empire. The whole point of this is to really integrate the empire into the metropolitan narrative. Then I needed to think about a periodization that actually captured the things that were happening in the Empire as well as in the Metropole. And that also, like, just kind of. Personally, I didn't want to rely on republicanism as the framing mechanism for the book. And there's several books that kind of do that. And I think they have positive and negative elements to it. But a lot of what I was trying to do is to kind of push back against some of the narratives that come with republicanism that have been kind of adopted into some of the standard textbooks somewhat uncritically, I thought. So that was, I think, kind of one of the first decisions that I had to make an example of this is. And I think it's chapter 13, right? The post World War II period. I start in 1945 and end in 1962. So that was a You know, as a historian of Algeria, I was like, you can't just stop in 1958 at the end of the Fourth Republic. And it's, it's done right. Yeah. So that's an example where like the empire itself really shaped the way I wanted to periodize and frame the chapter because I think it's more reflective of a kind of imperial narrative. And then I also, you know, kind of had to think carefully about how to approach the narrative and themes. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the book to reflect how I teach history. And I know that a lot of my friends and colleagues do that it needed to kind of try ambitiously to seamlessly incorporate the narratives of the metropolitan Empire. Should not be a political top down history, but include social history, cultural history, gender history, all of those kinds of things. So it was incredibly ambitious. Like I had this enormous vision for what could be in it. I knew it had to be very short and concise. So that was the plan and the proposal. Some things changed. I kept a lot of the structure and kind of ideas of it, but certainly in the process of writing I had to shift a few things around and then I had to read. So I think I developed these bibliographies for every chapter. I had this Google Docs that I sent around to friends and people were putting things in as they thought they were useful. And I was kind of like, what do you think I have to read on these topics? And I started really with French history, but then as well, I'm sure talk about later, I had to really expand it into many other fields that I was far less familiar with. The historiography of early America, you know, Atlantic slavery, which I knew a little bit about, but didn't really. Hadn't really fully thought about the historiography, you know, Indian Ocean world, lots of different things that I had to expand my reading knowledge pretty broadly. So once I kind of had the bibliographies in place, I started, you know, writing the chapters. And mostly that process involved like very detailed outlines. So I would, you know, start my reading and kind of think about what is, what do I. What key themes do I want to emphasize in this chapter? How do I want to structure it? When I did some of my first drafts, one of the things I noticed and that people were kind of commenting on when I would send drafts, is that I tended to start with a political history narrative where I was always like, here's the things that happened. And then try to like move, put things into that. Right.
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D
And kind of Complicating from there. But the initial starting point is this, like, traditional political narrative.
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C
Yeah. And one of my friends was like, well, that. That isn't what you said you wanted to do. Like, you have to kind of rethink that a little bit. And that was really helpful advice. So I was very consciously thinking about, you know, I want to get these things into the chapter, but it needs to have a narrative in such a way that it's not solely reliant on a political history narrative with the other elements kind of stuck in where they can fit. And I think that process just involved a lot of revision. So I would write things, write sections, write different pieces and move them around. And, you know, I think I probably rewrote this book, like, five or six times thinking about those. Those kinds of issues there. So that's. That was really the process, I think. You know, initial drafts, kind of thinking about what worked, what didn't, moving things around, cutting things out. We can talk a little more about that later. Because the initial manuscript was about 200,000 words, and I had to get it down to 120.
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D
Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like I could imagine the same book, but, like, 600 pages instead of 250 pages or whatever it is. Yeah.
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C
And I thought I was being, like, really concise and disciplined. I put myself, like, word counts for each chapter that I wanted to hit the target in the draft. They all. Many of them, exploded beyond that. Yeah, it was a very interesting process. I tend to be a kind of wordy writer anyway, so it made sense that I would write more and then cut back. But 70,000 words is a lot that's substantial.
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D
That's not just, like, editing some sentences out. That's like, some pretty substantial revision.
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C
Yeah, I think the revision was essential to the process. Like, it really had to go through these multiple drafts and multiple people commenting on it and multiple people thinking. Helping. Helping me think through what really needed to be in there and what I could cut out.
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D
Yeah. So it has come up a few different times in what you were just saying, but it sounds to me like Community was really, really important in actually producing this book, that you were not only thinking about Community and sort of other teachers you knew and other scholars you knew when you were thinking about the book also that they kind of helped you through editing it, through providing material for the bibliography, through kind of suggesting revisions and that whole process. Do you feel like that was kind of essential to not only why you made it, but how you made it?
- [16:08]
C
Absolutely. I definitely couldn't have done this. I mean, maybe I could have done it by myself, but it definitely would have looked very different. And, you know, it was like you said, every step of the way, from the earliest kind of conceptions of the book, to bibliographies, to people commenting on drafts, and also just talking through things with people. Like, sometimes I would kind of get stuck. And I was actually quite lucky to have several, you know, close friends and colleagues in French history and French imperial history who were willing to help me talk through some of these things. And even, particularly in fields that are kind of tangential to, you know, what we call French Empire history, just having people to help me think through what the historiographical stakes were like. I think there were two chapters that were particularly challenging to write. Chapter one, which is kind of the 18th century up until the start of the French Revolution, and then the chapter 14. So it's, I guess, the first and last chapters for kind of different reasons. The first chapter was hard because it really had to kind of deal with a lot of issues about slavery and indigenous labor and the early colonization of the Americas that I just like, did not know that field at all. And, you know, a lot of that has developed kind of in conversation with things in French history. But early America is its own thing with its own stakes. So having people in that field being able to help me, you know, think through the historiography, the big questions, what books to read, all of that was really useful. And then trying to, you know, create a narrative that kind of made sense within French history.
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D
Right, right. Well, it's a topic that has really massive stakes too. Right. Like it matters a lot how we're presenting enslavement and how we're presenting different forms of slavery and what that looks like in different cases and contexts.
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C
Yeah, absolutely.
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D
Makes a big difference if you're going to make a two sentence summary of something.
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C
Yeah, I think like that being the first chapter of the book, it had to kind of set the tone for how this was going to work in the rest of the chapters. And then I think chapter 14 was particularly hard because it was the 1970s and 80s, which is a period that there's very little historical scholarship on in terms of monographs, like research monographs, like, you know, there's really only a handful.
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D
That you can go to.
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C
So I had to really think more interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarily, that's a word read sociology, anthropology, you know, different kinds of cultural studies. I spent. I was writing that chapter, actually I was in Paris. I was just sitting at the bnf, just ordering books left and right, wandering the shelves, trying to figure out how are people writing about some of these topics. I learned so much in that chapter, writing that chapter, and a lot of it, too, is going back to the community. It was like I wasn't sure what needed to be included because I didn't have a very clear historical narrative. So I had to go talk to people. So I'm talking to people who grew up in France in the 70s and 80s and thinking about what was your experience? Like, what kinds of things happened? What do you remember? November. And that was really helpful for me just to think about, like, what I could include, what, you know, things I hadn't thought about including. It was. I had a conversation with Sandrine Sanos about radio and tv where she was just talking about, like, how. How people watch TV in the 80s, what kinds of radio stations. And, you know, that's the thing. Like, I didn't. I never really thought that much about. But then it kind of, you know, served as this catalyst for how radio stations, with the commercialization of radio, what kinds of genres, how does rap develop, how does Rye develop? These things that actually become quite important to the community, but that I would never, I think, find in a normal textbook or research monograph that I was looking at.
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D
Right, right. Well, it's a very different project because on the one hand, you have a lot of issues that you're dealing with throughout the book that are big historiographical debates. You have to sort of decide where you're going to settle, how you're going to present it. But in the case of the 70s and the 80s, that's something where maybe we don't quite yet have a precise historical narrative. So it's not really a question of challenging or revising or kind of correcting that narrative. It's just, what is it? Right. What are we trying to do to actually decide what is important from that period.
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C
Yeah. And, you know, a lot of the really good historical work on that period really deals with, like, Republicanism, neo Republicanism from Chirac and that kind of thing, and how that ended up kind of shaping the more contemporary debates about immigration, Islamic secularization, those kinds of things, and all that's really, really important and useful work. But a lot of the stuff, I think that is some of the most interesting things that I read were things about gender, about debates around, you know, the family and. And how those things are shaped about homosexuality and laws, about gay marriage and PACs and those kinds of things that, you know, had always been on the periphery of my mind, but really thinking about this is what was happening and how. How can we think about that in the broader context?
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D
Right, right. And kind of picks up those themes of social history and kind of everyday life that are really constant throughout the rest of the book as well. Right, yeah. So what did you feel like was missing from other French history textbooks that you say that you weren't necessarily using them in your own classes. And I don't know of a ton of people who use kind of a traditional. Like, this is the book that you go to if you teach a modern France class. So what did you feel like was kind of the gap that you wanted to address if we're going to use that framework? Or what did you want to introduce into that conversation?
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C
Yeah, a lot of that was thinking about how I teach. So I taught for 12 years at the University of South Florida, which is a big public university. We have 50,000 students, most of them coming in from a wide variety of backgrounds. So teaching a French history survey, which I did several times, you really had to start from the basics. People didn't know a lot about French history, or they came to it with a few assumptions, and you kind of have to work from there. So I was thinking a lot about that, like, what do I need to do with my students to kind of make them understand what's happening here and what's interesting and important about this history. But then I teach a lot of survey classes, so I teach the Modern Europe survey, a global history survey, history of the Holocaust, things like that. And that was really useful, too, because teaching a survey, you have to really think big, especially when you're doing global history. Instead of getting kind of bogged down and. And minutiae, you have to find patterns and you have to explain patterns and talk about circulation and how ideas and people and things, you know, move around and change over time. So all of that was. Was really essential to thinking about what a textbook could be for French history. And like you said, like, I don't know that many people who actually have used a textbook. The ones that exist, I think, have partly some periodization problems. Like a textbook that starts in 1870 would be useless for a class that Begins in the 18th century in many ways, because you can't really, you know, ask students to buy a $40 textbook that only covers half the class. And I think some of the other textbooks were either, like, too straightforward. Political history. They had kind of some older books that were a more working Class narrative, but really ignored gender history and cultural history. Others that were a little too conceptual or the chapters were framed in such a way that it didn't quite meet the demands that I had for. For what needed to be included in the textbook. So, yeah, that's. I think that's why I had such an ambitious agenda that it needs to be, you know, it needs to cover these things, but it also needs to include the empire. It needs to do social history, it needs to have history of ideas, you know, cultural history. But. But all those things, you know, kind of. And this is the way I am as a historian too. What my kind of perspective is, is that they need to be integrated with one another. I was very interested in cultural history, both in terms of, like, cultural objects and art and music and literature and all that kind of thing, but also the way that discourses and meaning are developed. Right. So what does it mean to think about republicanism and to think about these ideas as discourses that people were using? But then I've always, you know, kind of emphasized in my own research that, yes, these ideas are important, but, like, how did people understand them? How do they affect people's lives? So those are kind of the. Some of the bigger tensions that I was trying to think about. Both, you know, provide these cultural objects that in teaching are incredibly useful. Like when I'm teaching any kind of European history or any class really, we're, you know, using the primary and secondary sources, but we're constantly looking at images and analyzing them. We're, you know, watching films, we're reading novels in part just to give students a sense of how people in that period understood the world around them. So that's, that's part of the element, too, of cultural history. Like, I wanted to have these kind of cultural touchstones that people could easily access outside the textbook as well. If you were supplementing something, you could bring in a novel that's referenced or talk about different images and films and so forth. That might be useful to expand upon certain elements that did not get a ton of coverage in the textbook itself.
- [24:55]
D
Yeah, no, and I think you do that really, really well. And it was something that struck me as I was reading, which is that you regularly mention these kinds of cultural objects, whether it's literature or films. You know, you have a whole section on, like, the most prominent of the avant garde films of the 1960s, or Zola or Hugo or some of these more well known texts. But it's always enough that it places it in context, but not so much that I as a teacher would look at that and say, okay, well, now I can't assign it because that's the whole book, right? That's sort of. You've revealed everything there is to reveal. And so I was kind of thinking in relation to that were these. Mostly you give, for example, at the beginning of the chapter on World War II in the Shoah, you give the example of the diary by Helene Barre Hebert, who's a young French Jewish girl who kind of kept a diary. And I was just thinking when I was reading, that's a great source. That would be a phenomenal way to kind of let students read an actual primary source. They would be able to slot it directly into the chapter, have a sense of where it's going. And it just made a ton of sense to me sort of as a teaching tool. So were these things that you were already teaching with that you then incorporated into the writing of the book or things that you sort of learned about for the book and were thinking, oh, somebody else could teach with this. Or maybe a little of both.
- [26:06]
C
Some of both. So I had started writing the chapters. I started with the chapter on World War I because for some reason, like, I love doing work on World War I. So for me it was a really easy place to start. I knew the literature super well and World War I and the interwar period and 20th century is the field I work in. So I kind of started there and moved on and then went back and did the stuff I didn't know so well. This is once again Sandrine. I'm probably going to mention her 10 times because she was a real key element in helping me think through a lot of things. After she read a few drafts of the initial chapters that I had written, she had noted I had used these kind of cultural references in the introduction. It was inconsistent. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. And she's like, why don't you try doing that with every chapter? Like, find something, you know, a novel, a film, something that like, you feel like is representative of the themes that you want to cover. That way there's some consistency over the whole book about, you know, what it, what an introduction is, how it kind of unfolds, the narrative of the chapter. So once I kind of had that in mind, then it was a really fun process of trying to think through, like, what. What did I want to use? And I tried to do a balance of, you know, kind of talking about pretty well known sources like, you know, Zola Les Mis, things like that, you know, that are kind of representative of these different periods and discuss some of the issues. But then, like you said, the journal was interesting. I hadn't used the journal in teaching. I had only kind of recently found it. But I thought it was a really great example because everybody knows Anne Frank, Dyer van Frank. And it's kind of like, well, we have. We have parallel experiences here that this is a book about French history, but it's also about France and the world. It's thinking about how these different influences are shaping and comparatively engaging with the rest of the world at the same time. So I really liked that example in part because it's similar in the sense you have the German Dutch Jewish girl writing in the Netherlands, and then you have a French Jewish girl writing in France, and they have both very different experiences of the early occupation, and then they have the same experience in the camps. So there's something really nice about the parallel that worked there.
- [28:26]
D
Yeah. And I think throughout, to your point about sort of integrating different, maybe European touchstones, that people are going to know more if they're coming into a modern France class and going back to what you were saying before about kind of moving away from the republican narrative of France and maybe more towards a narrative rooted in the Empire and France's global history. You know, one thing that I think I found also really impressive with this work is that you. You really integrate that global history of France into the kind of story of domestic politics. Right. It's not just this is what's happening in the hexagon, and then there's a subsection where I'm also going to talk about something else. Right. These things are sort of co constitutive of how the history of France is. Is understood in the book or explained in the book. So I was wondering sort of why, like, why that was important to you writ large, sort of following historiographical trends or following your own research and maybe how you understand global history. Maybe those are two separate questions we can get to the second one after the first one.
- [29:20]
C
I think as a historian of empire, I was kind of trained in this period of, you know, the global turn or whatever. Invited Ben in the early 2000, late 90s, early 2000s, it just seemed natural and normal to me that this is the way we have to talk about France now. Like, I often. One of the interesting things, too, that kind of happened as I was writing the textbook is I was working a lot with high school teachers, whether in like, the AP curriculum or various other things that were happening in Florida, and thinking about how, like, The. The way we teach at the college level, the kinds of, you know, courses we adapt, the expectations of, you know, readings and scholarship are, you know, trickled down into the high school curriculum. And lower than that, in part because of textbooks. Right. Because the teachers who are teaching these classes are kind of using the narrative of these textbooks to frame their curriculum. And it's not even, you know, even an AP system, which has many flaws for all kinds of things, but it's really a curriculum based on the scholarship. So the people who are working to develop it, the development committee, curriculum development committees, are college professors who, you know, are up to date with the kinds of narratives. And so I think that one of the key things that was becoming clear, you know, in that period was the way that the kind of global turn in historiography, the research monographs and so forth, was starting to trickle down into the textbooks. So that, you know, was. Was part of the impetus here to think through. You know, we were kind of trained in that generation that read Cooper Stoller and was like, you know, the Empire and the Metropole should be, you know, discussed together. And it seems kind of natural, specifically in, like, certain fields, like, you know, the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. How do we talk about those things in relationship to each other in these kinds of broad survey. In their surveys and narratives, which, you know, it kind of is generally accepted, I think, within the scholarship itself, that. That these two things are connected. Right.
- [31:22]
D
Not just parallel, but actually intertwined.
- [31:24]
C
Yeah, but how. How does. Is that actually reflected in these, you know, kind of synthetic narratives, which wasn't really the case. So that. That wasn't kind of the. Just the basis for the book itself. Like, it has to. I have to think carefully about, you know, what it means to say that these things are intimately connected and constantly intertwined, that it can't just be, you know, like, here's what happened in France. Here's a parallel story of something that happened in the Empire, but they actually relate to each other. How are things happening in the Empire and the Metropole? Shaping events and so forth elsewhere. So I think I was pretty successful at that. There's definitely moments where I could have done a bit better, I think, where things are a little bit separate. But it was quite challenging to do that because I think that it happens in the historiography in a lot of ways. But to really kind of incorporate all of this material into a narrative that makes sense as a French history narrative was quite a challenge. And then in terms of global history, I think that's Also, it also felt very natural for me because I was trained in graduate school really as a global historian doing global and comparative history. And that's the way that I teach typically as well. And I think that what's kind of different, what's useful about that. I've been teaching a lot of graduate courses in global and world history. A lot of it's like, approaches and methodologies, like how do we understand what these fields are? What do they actually look like? How do you teach that? Which is one of the challenges. But our graduate students, most of them became teachers and often high school teachers teaching world history. So it was important for them to kind of know what the stakes were before they went into the classroom to teach these things. And then teaching. I developed a big undergrad survey which was global history since 1750. Lots of potential problems.
- [33:19]
D
Yeah, there's a couple topics in that period.
- [33:22]
C
Yeah. But it was such a great class to work on because it was a 2000 level survey. And a lot of the classes that I've taught over the decade and so forth that I was at USF were for future teachers. Most of our survey classes were required for social science education majors, including the Modern Europe survey and the global history survey and these things. So the Global History survey had to serve every single. It was a required class for the social science education majors. So I had to think about, like, what do we want this class to be? What am I teaching them to teach to future students? And then we kind of had a plan in my department six or seven years ago that our 2000 level survey classes would mainly deal with primary sources. That we would teach them how to analyze primary sources, not rely on textbooks, but really kind of focus on primary sources. So I had to just start gathering primary sources, you know, develop the big themes, think about, you know, global history is really about movement and circulation versus, you know, kind of world history being about big patterns and so forth. But I liked, I liked the global aspect of it more because you could focus on, you know, individual stories, you could, you know, look at specific places, but then trace connections rather than just being like, big picture. Here's what's happening in Europe, here's what's happening in Asia, here's what's happening xyz, but instead try to kind of integrate those things that you see, see movement. And I think a lot of that, you know, kind of training and just the way that I think about history has definitely made its way into the textbook because, you know, it is thinking about, like, if something happens here, what's parallel to that, that's happening in the empire. An example of that is like the. The Paris Commune. Right. So we know the Paris Commune. That's a really interesting story in and of itself. But there's uprisings in Martinique in the same period and there's uprising, the. The Makrani uprising in Algeria and Kabilia, where, you know, most people don't know about those, but they, you know, had a very, you know, comparable disastrous impact on those communities. People, you know, kind of violent repression in every single case, people shipped off to prison colonies left and right, people imprisoned. And each of those events and its, you know, unique location shaped what happened in those spaces. But at the same time, it's like, you know, it kind of feels like 1968. Like what's happening in 1870, 1871. That's really, you know, causing so much tension and upheaval and part of it's, you know, like nationalism and regime change and those kinds of things. But it's useful to think through those questions.
- [35:57]
B
I think a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, especially these days. Eight different settings, adjustable intensity, plus it's heated and it just feels so good. Yes, a massage chair might seem a bit extravagant, but when it can come with a car, suddenly it seems quite practical. The Volkswagen Tiguan, packed with premium features like available massaging front seats. It only feels extravagant.
- [36:28]
D
Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new. Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you. Yeah, no, I was really struck by that example too. I sort of mentioned. I know got through the whole section on the French Revolution and like, as you say, the sort of. Amongst historians understanding Saint Domingue and the French Revolution together is roughly the way that we kind of tend to teach it these days. But I had not heard about the revolts in Martinique and the sort of parallel to the Communes. That was a great story to sort of suggest, as you say, not just something else that happens to be happening at the same time, but actually something that is kind of socially, culturally, politically intertwined with what's happening in the Metropole.
- [37:26]
C
Yeah.
- [37:27]
D
So what do you think, sort of changes about our interpretation of the history of modern France by looking at it from this global lens, Are there sort of major things that you see as shifting our perspective by looking at it from this angle?
- [37:42]
C
Yeah, I think you kind of previously asked or asked me a question about religion and how my own research integrated into the textbook. And I think religion's a great example of this. So many of the kind of standard narratives that kind of took on the republican framing, kind of uncritically adopted the idea that secularization is republican. And it's also like a sign of progress. Right. Where some of the older historiography and the Enlightenment, it dealt with that. And then the kind of post 1905 Republican model just kind of took that on. And I think that was. I really noticed that when I was doing my dissertation research and the, you know, the. The literature in English on French history really did not deal with religion well for a long time. So that was one of the things that I thought about a lot when I was working on my own dissertation and book, first book, and then have worked a lot with historians of religion, both in the European context, but also in Africa and in imperial contexts, and done a lot of panels at places like African Studies or Middle East Studies and thinking about religion. And once you get into the empire, religion becomes so important to the story. Like, you can't just say, like, well, the, you know, Republicans just kind of stamped out Catholicism.
- [39:02]
D
We're moving on. It's all good.
- [39:03]
C
And then you're like, but from the perspective of the empire, it's so essential to understanding how these power relations were shaped and what missionaries did and how the state related to religion. Like, all the kind of narratives about republicanism and secularization in the metropole fall apart in the empire. So that's an example where I was like, oh, things really look very different when you're kind of looking outward in. I also think the kind of experience or the question of social history. Right. Becomes really important at that point. It's like, so if I am kind of taking seriously this idea that I want to understand what happened to people on the ground, then I have to think a lot more carefully about the kinds of narratives that are, you know, being expounded from the metropole. But then what does it actually look like on the ground in the empire? And I think that's. That's also turns out to be a pretty different proposition. And I. I am 100% sure that there's probably too much Algeria still in this book. I cut a lot of it out, but it's still like the. The place that's kind of foremost in my mind when I'm thinking through these kinds of questions, because it's. It is so important in many ways. To the history of 19th and 20th century France. But it's both, on the one hand, the kind of problematic idea that Algeria is France. I didn't want to unproblematically just accept that, but I also wanted to think about what did it mean for the French to say that and for the French to enact that. It was a myth that had enormous power for 100, you know, 50 years, one might say. So what does that actually mean? And in contrast to some of the other colonies, like, what made Algeria into this particular space of conflict and violence through that?
- [40:53]
D
Yeah, and I think that's part of why also this sort of global framing, rather than just an imperial framing. Not that imperial framing in and of itself is not also really useful, but I think that is part of what makes this really helpful because I think it gives us a bigger way of talking about the influence that it's not just kind of what is the colonial administration's relationship to a place, but rather what are the variety of ways in which the world appears in France, and France kind of acts on the world. One question I might have is that you sort of frame, maybe not intentionally or maybe not explicitly, but the way that you talk about this in some places in the book, Europe doesn't end up being the world. There's kind of like the globe. And then also you talk about Europe as kind of a separate category. So I don't know if that was like an intentional choice on your part or maybe a sort of reflection of the ways in which the historiography tends to talk about this.
- [41:43]
C
Yeah, I think a lot of it was the historiography. And I think, like, if I did another revision, one of the peer reviewers had said something about that there wasn't enough about the European Union in it. And I'm like, that's probably true, like thinking about what France's thinks about itself in relationship to Europe. And I think one of the kind of issues that I found, and it was so amazing, I will say, the experience of just getting to read so much historiography and think about how different fields are developing the key arguments and themes. But one of the challenges was diplomatic history, which has, I think, greatly improved recently. But it's particularly like us in the world. Like, that's an amazing field. That's really kind of a lot of interesting themes. The kind of French diplomatic history has really only started to, you know, to develop. So a lot of. A lot of it felt very, you know, kind of old school diplomatic history. In a way, that was helpful for me to Get a sense of these different treaties and negotiations and so forth. But I didn't really feel like I had a good grasp on some of these, you know, kind of bigger questions or I had to read widely outside French history to kind of get a sense of it. And so I think you're right. Like, there's. There's a way that Europe is kind of treated as its own thing, like France and Europe. Europe. Xyz. And there are spaces where I think I did a better job. It's weird. The chapter I think I'm most proud of maybe is the Napoleon chapter, because previous to that, I just didn't care. I have to teach Napoleon.
- [43:15]
D
But it was like, it gets covered, but it's not.
- [43:18]
C
Yeah. So having to kind of delve into this and be like, how do I approach the Napoleonic wars in a way that's reflective of the way I want to do the rest of the textbook was really amazing. And, you know, I learned so much in that chapter. And a lot of it was just. Even the social history of what was the experience of being a soldier or being, you know, cantiniere and different kinds of things in the Napoleonic armies versus being occupied by the Napoleonic armies. How did what, you know, what is the influence that happened out of all this, you know, kind of violence? So that was a way. A place where I think, you know, kind of that's mostly a European story for the most part when it's told, but it's also not a European story. Like, one of the other amazing things I learned in that is, like, Napoleon sending, you know, generals out to go recapture India, or they were going to conquer Australia, like, 1804. And I was like, what in the world is that?
- [44:10]
D
Ambitious project.
- [44:11]
C
Yeah. Obviously failed a lot of. A lot of failure. I mean, that's the other thing that I think is interesting about Napoleonic history that I hadn't really grappled with is, like, it's really a story of failure, you know, reaching these high points and then, like, utter collapse of something. So that's. That's useful. I mean, I think both. Both for me as a historian to think through those kinds of questions. And then also, you know, I think a better job of integrating the European and global story in that. And I think that's one of the other. I was rereading a chapter fairly recently, and I was like, oh, this is, like, still too. Too much political history. It's like. It's about, you know, treaties and these kinds of things that I find very boring myself. So I can't imagine the student will find it enthralling either. But who knows? Maybe they will.
- [45:01]
D
Some people really like it. You know, they're historians of that. So whatever works for people. So it sounds like maybe diplomatic history was a little difficult for you. Maybe you became convinced of the interestingness of the Napoleonic wars, but were not there originally? Are there other fields or topics that you maybe were apprehensive about learning about going into, or found kind of harder to grasp or were less familiar with?
- [45:22]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think what was fun and interesting about writing this book was that every chapter was so different. So I had to kind of grapple with the existing narratives and historiography of whatever it was, and then kind of think through how to expand on a little bit more. I think one of the chapters that I found most challenging was the chapter about the development of French socialism in relationship to regime of Louis Philippe and different kinds of things in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, even. Just hadn't had a lot of exposure to that literature. I taught it in survey classes, and I'd done some reading in the basic field when I did my PhD exams, but it was a field that I really had to kind of carefully parse. Who are these different socialists? What are their ideas? How do they compare to each other? How do they differ from each other? What's the impact that they have over both the short term and the longer term? And. And that was another thing where you can see it in the revisions, because I wrote that chapter and then later had to kind of write the commune chapters and think about what's the relationship between these things? How does this story play out over the long term in terms of the political left, both as an idea and as a political force in these different periods in history? So that was something where I really had to do a lot of work and something that was unfamiliar. Same thing, I think, with the, you know, kind of like 1960s and 1970s and 80s. It's really a lot of intellectual history and, you know, kind of thinking through. You have all these different movements that emerge. Which ones do I need to highlight? And that I found that really challenging to think through. Like, obviously, you can, I think, see my. My own kind of personal agenda and a lot of that where I'm, you know, kind of interested in women's role in May 68 and what happens in the aftermath and the development of women's movements and, you know, protests against abort and all that kind of stuff. And I think that that is a key part of that chapter, but it's an idea that I try to develop over the entire book. Right. Thinking about how women's contested position as citizens of the nation, subjects of the nation, nationality, laws, reproductive questions, all these kinds of things become central to the way that I learned history. I learned French history because I was trained as a gender historian. But I think that they very often kind of fall to. To the side when we're talking about these big political narratives. So all of that, you know, just kind of delving into these. These smaller questions, I guess. But I think that, for me, have a really important impact on. On the bigger picture. Was. Was immensely challenging, but I think rewarding.
- [48:05]
D
Yeah, I think I see a lot of this book, the benefit of this book, too, as being sort of something that opens the door, right. Like, you never. You never leave the reader hanging. You don't just say, like, a name and call it good and move on. There's always at least some indication of who the person is and the kind of relationship to the story. But it's so clear that there's so much more you could do with any given chapter or any given section or any given couple of sentences, realistically. Right. You have enough about the early socialists that you could decide to do more on Fourier or, you know, you talk about the movement like Simone de Beauvoir and the movement for women's suffrage and abortion rights and these kinds of things. And there's enough that students would understand, but there's also sort of so much. So many more places to go.
- [48:46]
C
Right.
- [48:46]
D
That I feel like this is a great kind of way for people to pick and choose the things that they're going to get excited by. If they really like treaties, they can go find the treaties, right? They can go sort of pick out those other places that work for them.
- [48:55]
C
Yeah, hopefully. Hopefully there's, you know, the. We all kind of teach differently and approach history differently. Partly just our own personal taste and what we, you know, like to do in the classroom. So I was hoping that it would be kind of that. That there's all of this here. And it also needed a book that. To be a book that, you know, was not just for Americans, but that it's, you know, being kind of marketed to the entire Anglophone world. So how do the British teach this subject differently? How do the Canadians? How do the Australians? Like, there's these kinds of questions, I think, that are useful to think through that. How. How does this, you know, impact the. The way that we all teach? And also just the way that we, you know, kind of understand history There's a lot of, you know, even as I'm sure you know, doing Algeria, there's just a very different way that Americans study the Algerian war versus how the French study the Algerian war versus how the British study the Algerian war. So it's really useful to get that sense as well that, like, there's going to be these different, you know, framings that might not work for everybody or that we want to highlight certain elements of the story versus others. I mean, like, one of the things that got cut out that, you know, I was kind of sad about, but it was. I had a whole section about Lord and the apparition of the virgin Mary in 1858. And I think it was a really useful example both to think about religion. And I had spent, you know, quite a lot of the previous two chapters talking about the ways that Catholics were decrying the feminization of religion and the, you know, the kind of Mary cult was developing out of this, which was, for me, as a, you know, story of religion, really interesting topic. But then you could also talk about modern tourism and you could talk about all these different kinds of things that were other elements of this chapter. So in the end, I think there's like one sentence that talks about it as opposed to like three or four paragraphs that I'd written. But it's also something I spend like a whole class on when I teach, like talking about what this means on the, you know, kind of the apparitions and the broader context and the way the Catholic Church is, is transforming in this period and what that actually means in different places. So I could develop it like that's a thing where I could, you know, it's mentioned in the textbook. And then I can be like, okay, well, how do we in the classroom expand on that and think through the implications for whatever themes, you know, we might be highlighting.
- [51:03]
D
Right, right, right. So anybody sort of depending on their interests or their sort of specialization as a scholar, could pull out little pieces and sort of slot it from the book into the bigger lecture, more kind of specific topics that they want to look at. Did it make you think about sort of causality and long term change differently to try to put this narrative together? Because I'm just thinking like, there's a lot of different ways in which you have these themes that link really across the whole book. And as you were saying about sort of women's movements in 68, right. That this is not, not something that pops up once and then goes away again. These are kind of long term connections. That you're making between Republicanism and Natalism and Post World War II concerns about the economy and also abortion rights. There's like all these kind of connections that you're making throughout the book that make these more thematic considerations all interrelated. And it struck me that that's a very, maybe not a fundamentally different, but a much more kind of nuanced and complicated way of thinking about, about causation between historical events and kind of different segments of historical experience than we might do when we're writing a monograph.
- [52:09]
C
Yeah, and I think that's absolutely true. That, I think, was something that really emerged in the revision process where I was like, okay, I have these chapters. What are the things? I had some ideas about what these framing concepts and narratives would be, but once I kind of had the chapter drafts, I was like, oh, okay, this is connected to this. This connected to this. I have to go back and kind of show, show the longer term process of the way these things worked. Like, I think women's rights is a great example of that. Another one is immigration. Like, I, you know, had studied immigration to a certain extent, but really hadn't thought about immigration as, you know, this really central element and thinking about, like, what is, what do these nationality laws do? Like, how is, you know, and part of this is teaching the broader European context where you have to spend a lot of time trying to explain nationalism in the nation state, you know, to undergrads who are like, what in the world is happening in the night 19th century? And so it's, I mean, part of that's my sensibility where I'm like, I have to try. And, you know, I think about this as a very abstract space, the nation, right. So it has to be constantly framed and constantly reframed depending on the political context. So that's one of those areas where I had that, you know, that big arching theme over the whole book, which is the nation. Like, how does France define the nation? How it does, does it do it within? How does it do it in response to the empire, in response to other places? But what does that mean for people, like actual individual people? What does that mean for those who are in France, Whether it's women, Jean de Couleurs, different groups, but also immigrants, how are they once again kind of pushing back on that republican idea that France is very assimilationist and everybody has to do that, but then looking over time and being like, it's much more complicated than that, that and just sort of understanding the experience of immigrants who are coming in in different waves and what that means both in terms of, you know, citizenship, labor, the economy, you know, xenophobia, anti Semitism, all those kinds of things. And that's another area, too, where Algeria is such an interesting kind of contrast to the Metropole. You know, despite this claim about it being the same space, very, very different experiences of immigration and assimilation and so forth in there. So, yeah, I think that there are many of those themes that I think hopefully develop and kind of show both continuity and change, but in a more complicated way that it's like it's a constant response to the events on the ground and the people coming in and the economic and political situation, rather than France is assimilationist. They've always done great by immigrants. Kind of narrative of.
- [54:51]
D
Right, right, right. Sort of showing the complexity of it over time, but also the different, very contextually specific things that change how people are responding to it or kind of imagining what immigration means in those moments. Yeah, so one thing that I found really striking, so I was, you know, you expect to see a little bit of sort of discussion of historiography in a textbook, and I think you do it quite well here. But there was also a lot of discussion of. Of not a lot, but several mentions of basically the development of professional history in France. So you talk about national museums under, I think, Napoleon iii, the foundation of the Ecole des Chartes, and the ways in which the French are writing and imagining their own history. So I'd be curious to know a little bit about sort of what drove you to keep those. Of all the things that you cut. Right. What made those stay. And then also sort of how you understand the discussion of historiography more broadly, which you do have several sort of powerful places where you talk about Weber and peasants and the Frenchmen of kind of major debates in some of this historiography as well.
- [55:50]
C
Yeah, so this comes from teaching as well. So I teach a lot of historiography classes, theory and methods, for both undergrads and graduate students. Like, for years, I taught the sort of introductory historiography seminar for our graduate students and thinking through how we talk about these different fields and the development of these fields and change over time. So a lot of it was like I was deeply enmeshed in these kinds of questions. And also I was a student of Bonnie Smith. So the gender of history, such a foundational text for me. And thinking through, you know, the professionalization of history in this moment in the 19th century and positivism and how, you know, these contestations over, you know, what should be included in history. How we approach history are really central to that moment. But also kind of emerge out of these concerns about the nation and, you know, development of institutions like archives and so forth that can them achieve that. So part of it, I think, is that that's just like, always kind of present in my head. But it's interesting too, because a couple years ago, we kind of totally revamped our undergraduate Theory and Methods and historiography class in my department. And it was in the middle of COVID and we were kind of moving online and had to reshape the curriculum for different reasons. But a group of five of us got together over the summer and, like, totally revised this class. And I think it works really well now. But, you know, it's an introductory class. All our history majors have to take it. We try to get them to do it early so that it prepares them for their upper division classes. But it's really about, like, what. What is academic history? What is historiography? How do you analyze primary sources? How do you find them? How do you do that with secondary sources? And obviously, the. I think the thing that's most complicated is historiography. Like, how do you wrap your head around this kind of abstract concept that, you know, these conversations are taking place. And you kind of have to identify different people's perspectives and what your own contribution might be when you're, you know, writing argumentative historical texts. And we developed a unit kind of at the end of this class about how. How academic history trickles down into other spaces. So we talk about public history and we talk about, you know, kind of curriculum in schools. And we have a whole section about textbook textbooks where, you know, we have them read different textbooks from topics in American history in different periods of time to see how, you know, the Cold War is being framed or how slavery is being framed and these. These different moments to get them to see that, you know, textbooks inherently have, you know, arguments and political narratives. And they're. They're working toward different things. And they're not just a recitation of facts that we all agree on. And to kind of push them even further, we had them read a chapter of my textbook. And the exercise they had to do was identify, like, two kinds of. Of explicit discussions of historiography. But also, like, where do you see historiography buried in other places? Like, you might not have automatically thought that it was this. And so the chapter we give them is usually the first chapter because it's kind of easier to deal with. And there's multiple places where I talk about the Enlightenment, the way historians have treated the Enlightenment and how that, you know, there's different debates within that, or a discussion about slavery and what it means in the French Empire. And then, you know, I'm like, the thing is, like, choosing where you start is a historiographical argument, right? Choosing what narratives should be included, which ones should be excluded. All of that is historiography. And part of the exercise, I think, is to really ask the students to read textbooks critically, to think about, you know, what it means to shape a narrative in a textbook that, you know, up until that point, they had all just assumed were all true and all agreed. So I think that also has been kind of deeply embedded in my head. And one of the other things that was happening as I was writing this book was a lot of people in my department kind of people were like. And even administrators were like, don't write this book. It's going to derail your monograph. You won't get tenure. You're going to be too preoccupied by it. And the way that my university kind of deals with textbooks is that you put them in your teaching section. Like, if you apply for tenure, they fall into teaching. Even if I tried to make an argument that this was a research monogr think it would be accepted at my university because. And it's not a research monograph, but, like, would it be considered as part of my research activity, I guess, at usf? No, like, it wouldn't have been, I think, because in a lot of other fields, a textbook is like a chemistry textbook. There's not a lot of historiographical debate. Right, right, right.
- [60:25]
D
And I was explaining this to a.
- [60:26]
C
Friend in France a couple years ago, and he was just like, outraged. He was like, no, this whole, like, what you're doing is such a major historiographical intervention. You have to frame it that way that it's. That it's more than just a, like, textbook. And I think that, you know, the. The more that we can kind of self consciously recognize those things in our own writing and in textbooks, the better it is. Which is why I think that there's both, you know, as you said, like, kind of these explicit discussions about historiography, but then also just, you know, trying to make it of kind of clear, even though it's not always clear, that everything about this is a historiographical intervention. Like, every choice that I made about what to include, what not to include, how the narratives work is embedded in the historiography and the debates that exist in the field. So I don't know that students will recognize that unless they're like, I'm forcing them to think about it, but the scholars will.
- [61:20]
D
Right.
- [61:21]
C
People are saying like, oh, that's Todd Shepard's book. Oh, that's out of Jodi Serkis book. Oh, that's Carolyn Eichner.
- [61:27]
D
Whatever.
- [61:28]
C
Different things and different arguments that people have been making find their way in there.
- [61:33]
D
Yeah, No, I thought that was actually really fascinating. I'm sort of a junior scholar who grew up reading all these. Grew up in the field in the metaphorical sense. But I've read all these books, and so I was reading, going through all the chapters and like, oh, okay, I see where this is happening. I see where this debate has come through. And I think to your point about sort of not explicit historiographical debates, too, I noted to myself what I call these kind of, like, power sentences where you'd have. Have things that were very clearly a stake you were claiming, but you maybe didn't have the space to be as explicit about it. So in the chapter about Vichy, you talk about Laval and the sort of move towards deportation of the French Jews, and you say very explicitly that this sort of moved towards the Vichy regime's direct and willing participation in genocide. And that is very clearly for anybody who sort of of in this world, it's very clearly a point you're making that is about historiography. But for undergraduate students reading it, it may sort of impart a message, but it's not going to be as clearly about historiography or about these kind of, like, scholarly debates.
- [62:35]
C
Yeah, that. Actually, that World War II chapter, I think, was the. The one that was the most challenging to think through how to address historiography. That was. I think that was like, one of the early fields that I studied in French history. So I know that literature super, super well, and I teach the Holocaust and, you know, in kind of a. A broader context. And so that was part of it, too. Like, I was. I was teaching the Holocaust as I was writing that chapter and thinking about, like, how when I'm teaching, you know, you have a whole semester, you can really go into these historiographical debates and, like, talk about how people frame xyz, what different kinds of sources they're using to address these questions. And here I just really couldn't do that. Like, I had to both, you know, kind of, like you said, stake a claim about where I was, my position in the historiography, but also kind of try and explain how and why the French field developed in the way that it did. Like, what was the myth of Vichy? How did the myth of the Resistance develop? And how have historians addressed them in different ways over time? That chapter I'm just still not happy with. I think that there's a better way.
- [63:38]
D
I'm sure there's a thousand different versions that you could write about it.
- [63:40]
C
Yeah, certain things. And I think was challenging to edit. And I will say I had an amazing. I had to hire an editor at one point because I, you know, when. When I had to cut the manuscript down, my. My father was dying, there was all these different kinds of things happening, and I. I gave it, you know, a real good pass on my own, and I cut, like, 20,000 words out. But I was like, I'm so attached to all these different things. So I took the advice of some friends and hired an editor who's not a historian, who.
- [64:09]
D
I kind of.
- [64:09]
C
We talked through the challenge of, you know, cutting 70,000 words out of this manuscript. We kind of have had word targets for each chapter. And he was amazing because he felt no attachment to this material. He went through and did a pretty vicious cut of each chapter. And then I would go and read it, and if I didn't miss things, then I was like, okay, it's fine. Whatever was in there probably didn't need to be there in the first place. So then we started to reshape it to make it make sense to people who were not deeply embedded in the field and how it would read to people who were just encountering this material for the first time. I think, yeah, that World War II chapter was challenging for both of us because it was, I think, in its very initial drafts, very explicitly historiographical in a lot of ways that I had to kind of bury some of that beneath the surface.
- [64:59]
D
Right, right. Well. And I imagine, particularly for a textbook, having somebody who's not actually a specialist in history might be helpful to do the editing. Right. Because it shows you. Can they still understand this from start to finish? If I chop all this out, is that narrative still making sense to them despite the fact that this is not at all something that they're kind of interested in or specialized in or anything like that? Was there anything in particular that got chopped out that you're sort of like, oh, that's a story that I loved, and I know that it was fine that it went away, but I wish that it could have been there?
- [65:29]
C
Well, you'll be unsurprised to hear that I wrote a billion and a half words on the Algerian war.
- [65:35]
D
I mean, you kept the Section on the Algerian War is astonishingly short for a thing that I also love to read about. It was impressive.
- [65:42]
C
And that all got chopped, as you mentioned, it feels like a short section. In some ways.
- [65:50]
D
It's not nearly as long as I'm sure it could have been.
- [65:53]
C
Yeah, I think literally 5,000 words on the Algerian war got cut out of that chapter. So I could have written a whole other book about that. But that's, I think, why having an editor who's not in the field really helps, because I was, you know, I was asking some friends, like, you know, Miriam Davis is here, like, helping me. She's like, it all seems important. And I'm like, this is the problem Algerianist about this. So we kind of, you know, like, in those initial times I'm talking with other scholars, identify, like, what really needs to be in here, what, how does it. And then once again, like, having to go back to the thing I tell my students, like, how is it in service to your argument?
- [66:28]
D
Right.
- [66:28]
C
So much of this detail I find fascinating, and I'm talking about, like, the experience of peasants and so on and so forth, forth, and the different conflicts within the FLN and all that. Nobody cares, actually. It's not in service to the argument of this chapter and to the broader narrative about the enormous catastrophe that this was for both France and Algeria, and then the kind of consequences of it. So, yeah, there's definitely different things like that. And also in some chapters where I felt like I had just done an enormous amount of work to kind of go grasp the, you know, the stakes. The Napoleon III chapter, for example, there was so much diplomatic history. I read like, 10 books on the Crimean War. And then in the end, it's like three sentences. And I think this is. That's what it needs to be like. Nobody actually also really cares that much about the. The role of Napoleon III in the Crimean War. But it's, you know, I had to do that work in order to get to a point where I could only write three sentences and kind of distill it down and into its essential pieces.
- [67:29]
D
Yeah, no, it's a. There's just so much. As I say, I was reading the Algeria section, and also as a person who writes about the Algerian War, my God, there's so much like, oh, how could anybody possibly manage to contain themselves to this amount? Which I'm sure every scholar feels about the chapter that they'd be closest to in their own research, but it seems like such a gargantuan task.
- [67:46]
C
But that's also why I Think it's really, really useful to have outside readers and eyes on things, no matter what you're doing. Just to make it more clear.
- [67:55]
D
So many of the things that we will not notice on our own, that somebody else will be able to tell us. Like, it's, you know, put it in the draft chapter, make yourself feel better some other way. But, like, it doesn't belong here. It's okay.
- [68:04]
C
Yeah.
- [68:04]
D
Right. So maybe as a last question, do you want to tell us a little bit about what's next on the agenda for you, if there's anything sort of on the horizon that you're excited about?
- [68:13]
C
Yeah. So I'm in a kind of interesting place in my career. I actually just quit my job as a professor.
- [68:20]
D
Exciting new things ahead, then.
- [68:21]
C
Yeah. And if you want to know all the reasons why, I have a piece in the London Review Books coming out in a few months that explains why it's kind of impossible to be a professor in Florida right now. But I am starting in a developmental editing and translation company with my friend and colleague Sandrine Sanos. And we have been, like, kind of hard at work trying to figure out what it means to have a company on the one hand, but also, just, like, translation. So I kind of realized when I was thinking about, like, what do I want to do next? Do I want to just, like, be a writer, historian, go do something else entirely? But I was like, I really love translation. Like, I definitely will continue to do research and write on history and various other things. But, like, translation is something where I can, you know, do very interesting intellectual work, still remain within the field and do that. So that's. That's what I've been doing for the past couple months and hopefully will continue to be able to do do. But then I have a lot of, like. I kind of. I think, like, getting out of the academic mentality just, like, exploded my brain. And I have all these ideas for. I'm working on a, you know, sort of slapstick mystery novel that takes place at a French history conference, and.
- [69:27]
D
Oh, that's great. I'm so excited.
- [69:31]
C
Kind of conceptualizing. Called the Paris of. Which is about how all these places call themselves the Paris of something like Pittsburgh is apparently the Paris of Appalachian, where I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is like a dump called itself the Paris of the West. And I'm like, literally, in no way does this Cheyenne, Wyoming, resemble Paris, except in the sense that, like, it had a few brothels or something in there.
- [69:55]
D
Basically the same place. Don't worry about it. You wouldn't even notice.
- [69:57]
C
Yeah. But like, everywhere does this. So I'm like, how is. Why does everyone imagine Paris is the thing that you should aspire to? And then what are they trying to say about themselves in that process? So I think that'll be fun. And then, you know, someday, hopefully I'll be able to get back to this, like, monograph I've been kind of working on and bits and pieces about the role of adventure in the Algerian colonization. So I think that would be fun, too.
- [70:20]
D
That's really cool. It's kind of a nice, you know, closing one chapter, but very exciting things and a diverse array of things you get to kind of pour your heart into in the future, it sounds like.
- [70:29]
C
Yeah.
- [70:29]
D
Yeah. Awesome. Well, Darcy, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
- [70:33]
C
Thank you so much for having me. This is a great conversation.
- [70:35]
D
Yeah, it was so much fun. So for those interested, Darcy's new book, it's a phenomenal resource for scholars and students of modern France is Modern France and the World, and it's out now with Rutledge. Thanks again.
- [70:59]
C
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