-- For more than a century, Alsace was the most contested region in western Europe, a battleground for ethnic and cultural identity in an era of rampant nationalism. Harvey's compelling analysis of working-class politics and nationality explains the successive attempts of French and German authorities to impose one national identity on the region and shows how workers responded by adopting a cultural policy that reflected their own political and class interests.

Harvey argues that the course of historical events along the Rhine led Alsatians to identify finally with the French republican state even though Alsace was culturally closer to Germany than to France -- the victory of politics and class over culture and blood. In addition to revealing the pragmatism of Alsatian workers, Harvey integrates their identity into regional history to portray the consecutive stages of the region's ongoing cultural definition. A complex dialogue between ideology and experience shaped the workers' successive embrace of French republicanism, German socialist democracy, and Alsatian autonomism, frustrating both French and German nationalists.

Based upon extensive archival research, Constructing Class and Nationality in Alsace will be of vital interest to those concerned with questions of collective identity, class, and political culture, as well as to students and scholars of both French and German history.

The occult sciences have attracted followers and fascinated observers since the middle ages. Beyond Enlightenment examines the social, political, and metaphysical doctrines of Martinism, a French occultist movement and offshoot of Freemasonry that flourished from the late eighteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth century. The French Revolution and the disorder that followed it convinced Martinists that modern society was on the wrong path. For guidance they looked back not to the corrupt Old Regime but rather to a lost golden age of mankind that existed only in their imagination. The Martinists were closely engaged in the political events of their times, and rightly or wrongly, they earned a reputation for secret intrigue and ubiquitous hidden influence. David Allen Harvey focuses on the Martinists themselves, recreating their own social and political views. He traces the birth of Martinism during the Enlightenment, its revival in the fin de siecle, and the late nineteenth-century formation of a distinctly Martinist project-the synarchy-aimed at the social and political renewal of France and the greater world. The Martinist doctrines formed a unique synthesis of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought. Harvey maintains that Martinists were a peaceful, esoteric society that rejected both secular materialism and dogmatic Catholicism, seeking to reveal the hand of Providence in history, discover divinely inspired laws of social and political organizations, and enact the kingdom of heaven on earth. Seeking to explore and analyze the "irrational" side of the "Age of Reason," Beyond Enlightenment is a welcome addition to recent studies of esoteric movements. Historians of culture, religion, and politics in post-Revolutionary France, as well as historians of esotericism and alternative religions will be interested in this engaging and revealing study.