Today is Bastille Day. Might we recommend some choice scholarship on French history to celebrate?
First, try two books on what it means to be French. France is a nation of immigrants, but they aren't always happy about it. In Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli argues that mass immigration in early-twentieth-century France provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France’s relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and national anxieties regarding depopulation and degeneration. In How to Be French, Patrick Weil takes the long view, exploring immigration in France since 1789 and comparing French nationality laws with those of other countries.
France's empire brought many of their immigrants to their shores. Two recent books shed light on the 
history of the empire and its sometimes dark legacy. Gregory Mann writes about Malian veterans of twentieth-century French wars in Native Sons. He argues that France's and Africa's shared military history continues to animate their political relationship, especially regarding debates about African immigration to France. And in Curing the Colonizers, Eric T. Jennings looks at the history of therapeutic spas in the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Réunion. Jennings argues the spas provided colonizers with both an escape from the native people they ruled over and also an opportunity to exchange therapeutic knowledge with them.
Two interesting books look at the role of French youth in politics and the development of the state. Laura Lee Downs's Childhood in the Promised Land examines the history of France's colonies de vacances, a vast network of summer camps created for working-class children. Downs reveals how Downs reveals how diverse groups—including local Socialist and Communist leaders and Catholic seminarians—seized the opportunity to shape the minds and bodies of working-class youth. In Mobilizing Youth, Susan Whitney looks at how some of those same groups actively tried to recruit youth into their movements in the era between the two World Wars.
On a lighter note, if you plan to celebrate the day with some French bread, you must first check out Good Bread is Back by Steven Laurence Kaplan. For much of the twentieth century, Kaplan argues, mechanization led to the production of horrible tasting bread, which in turn led to a decline in bread consumption in France. But in the 1990s, artisans began to recover the lost art of baking bread in traditional ways leading to a resurgence of bakeries. Kaplan tells you the history of bread baking and also where you can find the best bread in France.
Finally, to keep up with your French history throughout the year, subscribe to the journal French Historical Studies, the official journal of the Society for French Historical Studies. The current issue has articles on revolutionary France in the South Pacific, the role of European women in the Algerian nationalist movement, and the politics of primary schooling in Alsace between the World Wars.
