As a historian of Vichy and the Resistance (perhaps the greatest myth of France's recent history), Kedward is sensitive to the conveniences of historical forgetfulness, to the partiality of storytelling and to how, at different points, the French political model has always worked by accommodating some and excluding others. His narrative is baggily inclusive, but it tracks more richly and consistently than previous general histories the shifting positions of women, regional identities, and colonial and immigrant groups within the Republic. Kedward's framing paradox is that while a unitary France is continually and loudly asserted--the Jacobin myth--France actually contains a plurality of histories, and it is "the resilience of a unitary state within a multiform and multilayered society that constitutes the singularity of France since 1900."