About the book: 2005 / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, a historian continuing the tradition of Braudel, gives in this book an overview of the history of various regions of France, talks about their simultaneous or gradual integration, thanks to the policies of the “Ancien Régime” and the regimes established after the French Revolution. The national state in France managed to achieve a community, despite the differences of its constituent regions. Nowadays, this community sometimes begins to fluctuate due to more or less active demands for national self-determination put forward by peripheral regions: Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, Corsica, etc. Not born Is there now “a new cycle of protest in the regions”, the author asks.