Prisoners of Want examines the experience of the unemployed and their protests in France in the interwar years. Little has been written on the experience of unemployment in France despite the wealth of material - social and medical investigations, government reports, novels, memoirs and newspapers - that can be used to reconstruct the representation and reality of the experience. Assessing the impact of unemployed protest upon the authorities (in terms of policy and the longer term development of the welfare state) this book places the role of the unemployed in the wider context of European...