The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture- True France The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900–1945

Today as many as 30 percent of French voters would agree with Jean-Marie Le Pen that foreign-born Muslims should be expelled from France. True France is a provocative history of the prototype of this contemporary "France for the French" movement - the conservative, static, intolerant understanding of French identity that became a powerful tool in national politics during the first half of the twentieth century.
Drawing on the insights of anthropological and cultural theory and on extensive archival research, Herman Lebovics shows how, among politicians and thinkers from both the right and the left, the glorification of True France masked the cultural project of eliminating diversity. He skillfully interweaves the biographies of representative figures in debates about "True France" from the time of the Dreyfus affair to the end of the Vichy regime: the anthropologist and politician Louis Marin, the colonial hero Marshal Lyautey, the radical Vietnamese student Nguyen Van Tao, Paul Rivet, the Socialist director of the Musee de l'Homme, Andre Breton, and the folklorist Georges-Henri Riviere. Lebovics offers fresh accounts of such landmarks in the growth of True France as the founding of French anthropology, the formulation of French cultural policy in the colonies, the manipulation of imagery at the Paris International Colonial Exposition of 1931, attempts by the Left to include workers in the culture of True France, and the institutionalization of the myth of French identity under the Petain regime. Historians of modern Europe, intellectual and cultural historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, ethnographers, and others interested in the politics of cultural identity and pluralism today will want to read True France.