on the bookshelves

As many of my colleagues and I have learned, a large determinant of who people think they are (individually and nationally) is captured in which parts of their history they tend to remember. Today, I walked down the Boulevard Saint Germaine, and went into almost every bookstore I came across. In the history sections, in each of these stores, there was a shelf for medieval France, a shelf for the ancien regime, two shelves for the Revolution, a section of "the world wars" that was dominated by the second, in particular the resistance (though Paxton's "Vichy France" was in every store too), and then a large section on 1968. Some had sections for Jewish French history, others subsumed that into the "world wars" and the Shoah, but the two dates that dominated were 1789 and 1968--the revolution that changed the world, and the revolution that never quite came to pass...