Newly available in paperback, Redefining the French Republic is an innovative work. Explicitly adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the book investigates continuity and change in contemporary French politics, society and culture. The chapters go beyond the familiar question of whether the Republic is acting in accordance with its vocation, to address the issue of whether that vocation is still viable. Drawing on contributions that reflect a variety of methodological approaches, ranging from theoretical speculations and modelling to the interpretation of fieldwork data, this study examines the dynamics of the relationship between the Republic and its constituencies, in the fields of political relations, territorial identities, social movements, public policy and foreign policy, and in each context juxtaposing what is perceived as the model for that relationship with the current reality. France in the twenty-first century is facing challenges that could not have been imagined a generation ago. The test for the Republic is whether it will resist the ongoing pressures for redefinition imposed by internal contestation and the emergence of powerful supranational and global forces, or whether it will find a way of adapting to these pressures while preserving a part of the vocation and ambition that make it characteristically French. The book concludes that, though the French polity remains characteristically different from other models of modern liberal democracy, internal and external pressures have challenged the republican model to the core. -- .

From the construction of Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower to the Fall of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to Napol on Bonaparte's defeat at Waterloo to Albert Camus' L'Etranger and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, France has been a part of some of the greatest and most memorable events in human history. Author Gino Raymond relates the history of these events in the second edition of The A to Z of France. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on kings, politicians, authors, architects, composers, artists, and philosophers, a thorough history of France is presented.

When Gino Mastrianno took the job as a manager of a set of office buildings in a downtown complex he didn't know he would have to fight with something that couldn't possibly exist. People were missing and the company was covering it up. When he took notice and wanted to find out the truth things turned into a struggle of life and death. The truth turned into a creature hundreds of year's old kept secret from the outside world living amongst us in a busy metropolitan area. In a race against time they must find a way to defeat it before it hunts them down. Everything is against them, the building, the people and the ageless thing in the tower.