Sara B. Pritchard . Confluence: The Nature of Technology and the Remaking of the Rhône . (Harvard Historical Studies, number 172.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2011. Pp. xvii, 371. $49.95.

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, a common response to military defeat has been for the vanquished to appropriate modern technologies while interpreting them in terms of longstanding cultural ideals (see Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery [2003]). After humiliating collapse in World War II, postwar France undertook a vast set of engineering projects to reconstruct and modernize the nation, not only for practical purposes but also for compelling displays of renewed national glory.