Any recommendations on books about France in the Interwar Period?

by TheBullMcHale

I read a post on a r/history dicussing the failure of France during WWII, with one comment pointing to the political divisions that had occurred in France in the inter war period as a reason. I have tried to find a good book that might describe this process in more detail but haven't had any luck. Any Recommendations?

Orel_Beilinson

There are multiple good books. Here are some that I found essential: Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People; Patrick Fridenson, The French Home Front, 1914-1918; Antoine Prost, Veterans of the Great War and French Society, 1914-1940; Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France. Samuel Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu and Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington, France and Fascism: February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis are also helpful.

Slightly more specific but also good are Robert O. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères and the Crisis of French Agriculture; Robert J. Soucy, French Fascism; the Second Wave 1933-1989; Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France; Kevin Passmore, From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province (Cambridge, 1997). Also essays in Brian Jenkins (ed.), France in the Era of Fascism.

Tyler Stovall's The Rise of Paris Red Belt is an interesting corrective to the focus on parties and ideologies by looking at municipal politics. It should be read together with Laird Boswell's Rural Communism in France, 1920-1939 and, perhaps, Eric D. Weitz's comparative Popular Communism: Political Strategies and Social Histories in the Formation of the German, French, and Italian Communist Parties, 1918-1948.

I can also suggest some articles or books in French if you wish.