This collection, first published in 1970, brings together twelve articles on French political subjects, mostly concerned either with the plots and scandals that arose out of the long struggle for decolonisation, or with the culmination of that struggle in the Algerian war. In his introduction as well as throughout the book, Williams demonstrates the connection between these two themes, and explains why political scandals have been so prominent and recurrent a feature of French public life and how these scandals affected both France as well as Algeria.

A series of essays, originally published in 1970, surveying French elections in the Fourth and Fifth Republics.