Review of The enemy within : culture wars and political identity in novels of the French Third Republic, by Chaitin, G.

This is a book about a crisis of identity—a crisis that threatened both the fin-de-siècle novel and also the citizens of the French Third Republic. Chaitin's framework is the range of literary responses to the Ferry educational reforms of the 1880s and to the later ralliement of French Catholics to the Republic at the end of the century, within which he focuses on four politically engaged novelists: Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, Anatole France, and Emile Zola. But if The Enemy Within is primarily a work of literary history and criticism, it is also a work of history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, drawing explicitly on these contrasting approaches to offer a complex and composite reflection on states of individual and national trauma. Chaitin's book adds another chapter to the history of literary engagement in politics, while equally contributing to a very contemporary interest in the relationship between culture and the fulfilment of the Third republican dream