With The Divided Path, Allan Mitchell completes his superb trilogy on
the German influence in France between the wars of 1870 and 1914.
Mitchell's focus here is on the French response to the pathbreaking
social legislation passed during the 1880s in imperial Germany under
Otto von Bismarck. Operating under a liberal republican regime, France
tended to reject the interventionist policies of its imposing neighbor
and to seek a distinctly French solution to the many social problems
that became more pressing as the nineteenth century reached its climax
in the First World War.
Mitchell's carefully researched study investigates a number of specific
issues that remain of direct relevance today, such as gender
relationships, health care (including the treatments and prevention of
infectious disease), labor conflicts, taxation policy, social security
measures, and international tensions on the eve of a major war. He shows
that certain key problems of public health and welfare found different
solutions in France and Germany, and he explains why the differences
emerged and how they defined the two major competitors of continental
Europe. The nineteenth-century epidemic of tuberculosis provides a case
in point: the German state intervened to combat the dreaded disease with
vigorous measures of public hygiene and popular sanatoria, but the
French republic moved more cautiously to limit interference in the
private sphere, even though laissez faire often meant laissez
mourir.
Mitchell's book is the first full-scale study of French social reform
after 1870 that is based on documentation in both France and Germany.
The first hesitant steps of the French welfare state are thrown into
sharp relief by comparison with developments in Germany. No other work
on modern France presents such a broad panorama of social reform, and
none draws together such a rich tableau of telling detail about the
development of the French health and welfare system after 1870.
In a lucid conclusion, Mitchell places this story in the general context
of his three volumes, thereby offering a summary of the Franco-German
encounter that has come to dominate the history of Europe in the
twentieth century.
Originally published in 1991.
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