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It is the postulate of the books discussed here, and this review, that there is still a great deal of life left in our hoary national frameworks in an age of global and imperial history. The three volumes of the Histoire de la France contemporaine by Aurélien Lignereux, Bertrand Goujon, and Quentin Deluermoz may be read as one more wave in a historiographical series that is in a profound process of renewal : How to prevent a trip back down the national from becoming yet another nostalgic journey that has lost none of its charm and popular appeal, but seems of a different era ? The radically new ways in which the local, regional, imperial, oceanic, hemispheric, and global scales became so deeply enmeshed during the nineteenth century was due, primarily, and this is the essential point, to the construction and consolidation of the modern nation. What is necessary, and a reading (which is also an interpretation) of these volumes suggests precisely this point, is not a turning away from national history, but a serious consideration of how national histories have and will inform the imperial and global histories of tomorrow.