My France is a valedictory volume of essays by Eugen Weber, one of the five or six greatest European scholars in the United States and one of the two or three finest historians of France now writing anywhere. Born in Romania, where French culture was a grail ardently sought by anyone with pretensions to learning or even refinement, Weber had the good fortune to leave his unhappy country just before World War II and settle in Great Britain. After a brief but outstanding academic career as a student and graduate fellow at Cambridge University, he emigrated to the United States in the 1950s. For nearly four decades he has been on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has produced groundbreaking studies on French politics, culture, and society. Perhaps the best known are Peasants into Frenchmen and Action Française, although my favorite is a collaborative volume (edited with Hans Rogger), The European Right.

Weber is a type of academic soon to become extinct on the American scene: a man of profound, indeed astonishing, culture, who also possesses great humor and a sense of nuance. Those of us who attended college before the 1960s were lucky enough to meet up with men like him during our undergraduate days; their most lasting gift to us was the discovery that in addition to high purpose, learning could actually be fun. They also gave us something of a historical imagination. As Weber continually reminds us here,