Years of Plenty, Years of Want: France and the Legacy of the Great War

Few historians of modern France navigate the troubled waters of the Third Republic with a steadier hand than Benjamin Martin, or with more style.

-Michael Burns, Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at Mount Holyoke College and author of the award-winning Dreyfus: A Family Affair from the French Revolution to the Holocaust

Years of Plenty... humanizes some of the prominent individuals in France from the Belle Epoque through the Second World War and will appeal to a wide audience, including undergraduates.

-History: Reviews of New Books

Martin (Louisiana State Univ.) is very good at conveying a sense of the indirection that marked the final decades of the Third Republic and prepared the way for the Vichy era. He also succeeds in illuminating the mood of France in this period by considering the ways in which leading writers, particularly Roger Martin du Gard, portrayed France as a nation in political and moral crisis. This work of historical interpretation is both original and lucid. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Scholars and students alike.

-CHOICE

Martin provides an elegant, fast-paced narrative of the political and social history of France from the early 1900s to 1939, covering the political and diplomatic lead-up to the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. -William Hoisington, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author, most recently, of The Assassination of Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil: A Frenchman between France and North Africa

Benjamin Franklin Martin is Katheryn J., Lewis C., and Benjamin Price Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of five previous books, Count Albert de Mun: Paladin of the Third Republic, The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque, Crime and Criminal Justice Under the Third Republic: The Shame of Marianne, France and the Apr\u00e8s Guerre, 1918-1924: Illusions and Disillusionment, and France in 1938. He has been a consulting scholar to the Jewish Museum in New York for the celebrated exhibition The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice and a featured contributor to documentaries by The History Channel and The Learning Channel.