The first half of the twentieth century was crucial in creating the identity of modern France, yet that process appears on the surface to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, it was one of the most dramatic periods in modern French history, encompassing the four years of blood-letting of the First World War, political and economic volatility in the interwar years, culminating in the Depression of the mid-1930s, the catastrophic defeat in June 1940, followed by four years of German Occupation, and, finally, the Liberation of France, which also took the form of a near-civil war and vicious purges.

These dramatic events were accompanied by, and in some cases the product of, deep divisions in French society inherited from the nineteenth century: the fierce antagonism between republicans and anti-republicans, although mitigated after 1900, which would lie dormant for years, only to reappear at moments of crisis, like the Depression or the defeat of 1940; the battle of the Republic against the Catholic Church in the early years of the century which rumbled on right into the period of the Occupation; important social divisions between the urban working class, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie; inequalities between men and women, not least in the areas of electoral suffrage and legal status; and, finally, conflicts real or potential which were the product of ethnic divisions. Throughout the first half of the century, France was amajor colonial power, second only to the United Kingdom, and its relationship to its colonised peoples, in North and West Africa, in South-East Asia and in the Pacific, was crucial in the forging of a national identity based upon a stereotype of the white Frenchman.