Joseph Bohling is Associate Professor of History at Portland State University and a recent Visiting Fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. 

A specialist in the history of twentieth-century France and Europe, Bohling is the author of The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France (Cornell, 2018) and a series of articles on French capitalism in the twentieth century.

Bohling’s current work is a book titled Power to the Republic: The Oil Crisis and France’s Search for Energy Independence, 1969-1993. This project examines the emergence of new bodies of knowledge about energy and the political struggles that have led to a monumental restructuring of the energy sector since the 1970s. In response to the oil crisis, the French state invested heavily in the development of a vast nuclear energy infrastructure in order to shore up its dirigiste growth model. This nuclear gamble, wrongly assumed to be a strategy to free France from fossil fuels and the uncertainties of the world economy, is often interpreted as an example of French exceptionalism, the inevitable result of a monolithic state and of an innate interest in large technological projects. Bohling uses newly opened archives to put such stereotypes to rest. He tells a messier story of how France’s so-called “nucleocrats” were not omnipotent, nor was nuclear power the only energy path that French policymakers pursued. Instead, the expansion of France’s nuclear power infrastructure depended on the outcome of other public policy debates, whether related to rival energies, employment, transportation, national defense, regional development, environmental protection, or the Europeanization of the French economy. Power to the Republic is a social, environmental, and political history of this tumultuous energy transition.

 See Joseph Bohling page on the Portland State University website