The French Republic: Debates, edited by Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 2011. vii, 378 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Every book has a history, but that of The French Republic is particularly relevant to its structure, content, and scholarly contribution. The volume's origins lie in the Dictionnaire critique de la Republique, which was edited by Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson, published in France in 2002, and subsequently reprinted in 2007 in slightly revised form. Coming in at over 1,300 large-format pages, this massive volume aimed to provide a critical history of the French Republic by examining republican institutions, practices, values, heroes, and symbols in a way that incorporated contradictions, repudiations, and episodes of violence. The almost two hundred essays and entries included ten contributions by seven leading American and British scholars of France. Struck by the distinctiveness of the Anglo-American contributions, which was also on view in 2004 at the first Society for French Historical Studies annual meeting to be held in France, Duclert and Prochasson enlisted Edward Berenson, a 2004 conference co-organizer, to help produce a new version of the Dictionnaire critique to be published in the United States. The resulting work, The French Republic, reprints both the original ten pieces written by American and British scholars and a nearly equal number of French pieces, and pairs them with twenty new pieces on topics of particular interest to Americans, including immigration, decolonization, the civilizing mission, and commemoration. Although this much slimmer volume thus blends scholarship on Republican France produced in both France and the Anglophone world, it is most interesting as a reflection of the approaches and concerns currently animating American historians of modern France who, as the editors point out, have a different relationship to the Republic than their French counterparts. The French Republic is divided into three very different sections: Time and History, Principles and Values, and Dilemmas and Debates. The first section, which provides the book's historical framework, includes synthetic essays of between eight and ten pages on each of France's five republics alongside essays examining the relationship of republican thought and practice to the Enlightenment, the Second Empire, the Vichy regime, and war (read World War I). The essays generally begin with an historiographical overview before proceeding to the development of a new interpretive argument. Although the essays in this section vary considerably in style and approach, the essay that seems least in keeping with the rest of the volume is that examining the Fifth Republic, which was established in 1958 and still in place. Written by a political scientist, the essay does not foreground historiography, focuses on constitutional and political history (narrowly defined), and says little about events after de Gaulle's departure in 1969. Since the Fifth Republic's last forty years serve as the historical backdrop for many of the issues and debates addressed in the third part of the book, this is unfortunate. …