History is written over time, in the wake of research, by students doing their best to understand. Here, in one volume, historian Robert J. Young has assembled ten of his previously published essays on France in the 1920s and 1930s, in such a way as to offer an interpretive overview of the contentious Third Republic. An Uncertain Idea of France provides a perspective which emerges from analysis of materials as disparate as French military doctrine and strategic planning, elite and popular mentalites, social biography and cultural propaganda, combined with the author's personal reminiscences about where and how his own past has intersected with the past of interwar France.