After The Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France after the Great War (History)
by Hugh D. Clout
Category: History

This is not another book about World War I. Instead, it explores a relatively ignored aspect of recent rural history: how the ordinary environments of fields, farms, villages and market towns of northern France were reconstituted once peace was restored. Using both official reports compiled by prefets and much more critical commentaries by those whose homes and land had been devastated, Hugh Clout charts the geography of destruction and then analyses the work of the state-directed services, the creation of reconstruction cooperatives, the controversial reclamation of the profoundly devastated 'red zone', and ultimately the reconstruction of the countryside across the ten northernmost departements of northern France.