Nimisha Barton. Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France, 1880–1945.

Abstract

In the 2000s, the global turn swept through modern French history, above all among scholars in the United States. In a post-Cold War context where Western Europe was no longer of great strategic interest, France and the French had to be made “global” to retain their relevance in a crowded disciplinary marketplace. Fortunately, it was easy to globalize the history of a nation that had once had a substantial overseas empire, was widely recognized as a “great power,” and seemed to be grappling openly with the politics of racial difference and the legacies of its colonial past. As research agendas in the field quickly changed, a new cohort of graduate students began to rediscover topics that had fallen out of fashion or had been ignored altogether. Nimisha Barton fits squarely within this new generation of French historians, and her book reflects many of the most interesting innovations that have emerged from the global turn. Anyone who knows the field will recognize themes—such as immigration, gender, and the meaning of citizenship—that have been the subject of significant English-language scholarly attention in the past twenty years, but Barton carefully moves the conversation on to more unfamiliar chronological and methodological terrain. For a start, her focus on the Third Republic is a welcome departure from the much more crowded historiography of immigration in postwar France. Just as importantly, her use of the term “reproductive citizens” brings into conversation the histories of women, the family, and republican citizenship. Despite the stimulating work of scholars such as Camille Robcis, Judith Surkis, and Amelia Lyons, the strongly gendered character of republican citizenship in twentieth century France remains a neglected subject of study.