Endorsements

This is a book about how understandings and experiences of time shape people's politics. Focusing on a key period of change in France between the late 1890s and 1914, it follows thinkers and activists as they grappled with questions about time. How should temporal categories be conceived? Do people have control over the future or are they subject to immutable historical laws? Could and should the past be recreated? Such questions came to the fore during the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal that challenged conceptions of the French nation and the heritage of the Revolution of 1789, prompting past, present, and future to be re-examined. Political right and left emerged from the upheaval more clearly distinguished from each other; on the right, radical groups such as Action française protested against the Third Republic, while the left sought new ways of overthrowing the entire capitalist order, such as the general strike. Drawing on a range of primary source material-including letters, diaries, articles, speeches, novels, and police reports-Time and radical politics shows how the lens of time offers a unique perspective on nationalist, socialist, and syndicalist movements during this period. Time was contested terrain, a source of conflict or consensus between and within different groups that structured political thought and engagement. Ultimately, ideas about time shaped how pressing issues such as revolution, nationhood, and social change were understood.