The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s.

Few scholars have contributed more to modern French history than Eugen Weber. In Peasants into Frenchmen, he chronicled the integration of rural people into urban culture and national life. Subtitled "The Modernization of Rural France," the book unabashedly affirmed that peasants were happy to escape from their primitive past. With France, Fin-de-Siecle, Weber challenged the fashionable claim that France was suffering from a severe social and moral crisis. He attributed the rhetoric of decay to intellectuals who were out of touch with the masses, whose standard of living was actually improving and whose faith in progress was not in question. For obvious reasons, consideration of the fateful 1930s forces this prolific and insightful author to shift gears. He undertakes the task of portraying a France plagued by exhaustion, insecurity, and national dilemmas without solutions.

To be sure, Weber brings to the problem of decline the impressive arsenal of scholarly and stylistic qualities which made his earlier work so influential and so readable. He reaches effortlessly beyond the story of high politics, which others have recounted so many times before, to find new and telling subjects. His synthetic approach leads to a comprehensiveness which has eluded most of his predecessors. Thus, the chapter on 1936 pays almost as much attention to innovations in sports and tourism as to the economic policies of the Popular Front government. The reader learns about the plot lines of best-selling novels as well as about the weaknesses of military strategy for tank warfare. The Hollow Years sustains Weber's reputation as the master of detail. He brilliantly evokes complex psychological states with well chosen anecdotes. In his analysis of the Universal Exposition of 1937, for example, one can discern many of the illusions, false starts, hesitations, and mediocre efforts which would bring the Third Republic to a disastrous end.

Weber's books have a way of being contemporarily relevant without being the least bit present-minded. He has achieved this once again, for who could deny that explaining national decline is very much front-page news today? His story of insecurity, weak resolve, inferior leadership, and foundering ideals provides a cautionary tale for the 1990s.

For all the craftsmanship and insight of this book, it is less ambitious than his previous work. Whereas Peasants into Frenchmen initiated exciting reflection on the construction of national consciousness and France, Fin-de-Siecle cogently warned historians against over-reliance on the opinions of the cultural elite, The Hollow Years does not have this sort of historiographical significance. Weber generally accepts or confirms received opinion. The study illustrates decline in one field after another - art, commerce, science, film, politics, military planning - without an original approach to explaining the pattern. His attribution of credit and blame is fairly conventional. It is noteworthy that the book has no formal conclusion. Weber's contribution, welcome enough though not path-breaking, is to broaden the focus and bring more aspects of daily life under scrutiny.

Ultimately, Weber's fascination with the non-ideological aspects of French history may be better suited to deal with the focus of prior works, progress, than with decline. The challenge he faced in writing the history of France in the 1930s was to explain how problems which were so petty, so repeated, so deep-rooted - finally, so banal - brought such tragedy. The answer, as Weber would certainly affirm, lay as much outside France as within.

Lenard R. Berlanstein University of Virginia