A Social Laboratory for Modern France

"Janet Horne's book provides not only an excellent history of the Musee Social but also an important new perspective on the activities of turn-of-the-twentieth-century reform networks. It demonstrates that the Musee Social constituted a unique French institution, free from Jacobin, centralizing pressures, where experts, intellectuals, and administrators could interact among themselves. Her work reveals the misunderstood but essential role played by independent reformers in the modernization of France."--Pierre Rosanvallon, directeur d'etudes a l'Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales "This book is far more than the history of a single institution. It is also a thoughtful examination of political ideology and social discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an important and convincing argument about the origins of social policy in the Third Republic."--Don Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill