Review by Choice Review
This book is a welcome contribution to the study of immigrants, their naturalization, and their integration into French society. Feldblum focuses, inter alia, on the problem of national identity, the arguments between the left and the right, and the various challenges to traditional Jacobin ideology. She deals with the background of the debate, especially since the 1980s, and with the decision-making process and the legislative proposals and policy changes regarding citizenship. The book is thoroughly documented, using most of the important published sources supplemented by interviews. It provides lengthy excerpts from the debate of the 1986 Commission on Nationality and incorporates a summary of the foulard affair (including the author's earlier writings on it). Feldblum judiciously deals with the relatively new, and still hesitant, French commitment to "differentialist" pluralism. Here it would have been interesting to examine the problem of language pluralism, a continuing point of contention; the increasing openness to the idea of religious diversity, the impact of decentralization on the reexamination of membership in the "national" community; and the relationship between ethnocultural and institutional pluralism. Moreover, the book would have benefited from the use of attitude survey results. But these omissions in no way detract from the high quality of scholarship of this work. Graduate students and researchers. W. Safran; University of Colorado at Boulder
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
