Choice Review

For the second time in his career, Vinen has taken a conventional subject and approached it from a very unconventional perspective. In this book he attempts to debunk the much-held notion that France's Fourth Republic was not a series of unsuccessful and misunderstood reforms, but rather a conscious and thoroughly planned strategy of "bourgeois conservatives" to maintain their class-based power. Despite the terminology, this is not really a Marxist analysis and is largely free from the determinism and jargon that characterizes that variety of history. Nonetheless, the book should have been much better. Vinen has done a tremendous amount of archival research to attempt to back up his claims of a "successful" conservatism. This, he believes, is the key to understanding the seemingly chaotic and unstable political situation in postwar France. Unfortunately, the extensive research is sacrificed to the agenda of the author. He relies entirely too much on fluid and unacceptable definitions of "conservativism" to give his argument coherence. His attempt to classify the Mouvement R'epublican Populaire (a major postwar party) as conservative and compromised by P'etainism is particularly unsatisfying. This work is most useful as a source guide to some otherwise neglected archives. S. D. Armus; SUNY at Stony Brook