"This book will be read with interest by students and scholars of nineteenth-century French culture and politics, especially for the sharp portraits of the individual figures on whom it most focuses. It will be especially valuable for its discussion of the Second Empire's politics of education and religion, and as a contribution to ongoing debates about modernity as both an emerging condition and the idiom in which that condition was evoked, apprehended, and encoded."—James McDougall, H-France
"This meticulously researched and intellectually stimulating study focuses primarily on continental France. . . . The author makes excellent use of historical source materials . . . and has interspersed his study with quotes from key political players, thinkers, philosophers, journalists and administrators, but also writers, and jurists, thus broadening the scope of his project to encompass cultural debates that shaped modernity beyond French domestic politics. This book would be of interest to historians, anthropologists, social scientists, and scholars of French and Francophone studies."—Christa C. Jones, French Review
“A provocative—and convincing—account of how the conception of modernity became a vital means to political action and legitimacy in nineteenth-century France.”—Benjamin Franklin Martin, Katheryn J., Lewis C., and Benjamin Price Professor of History at Louisiana State University and author of France in 1938
“A serious and ambitious work that will inspire a great deal of debate, which I imagine will last some time. The author is a talented thinker.”—William Gallois, associate professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at the University of Exeter and author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony
