Where did French Modern come from? To answer this question, Paul Rabinow used the method initiated by Michel Foucault in Words and Things to study the evolution of representations, practices and knowledge from 1830 to 1930. It was over the course of this period that the political, social and intellectual apparatus that produced the Thirty Glorious Years was put into place. Certain events, like the cholera epidemic of 1830, which provoked a crisis in earlier representations of social hygiene; the emergence of statistics, which led to a rollback of moral approaches in favor of a global vision of society; industrial laboratories of paternalism, like Le Creusot; controversies about architectural conception (particularly the role of Viollet-le-Duc), advances in urbanism, and the actions of a few figures of colonization, like Lyautey and Gallieni, World War I and more, all played determining roles… The work accomplished in Vietnam, Madagascar and Morocco appears here in a surprising light: the colonial heritage hardly deserves to be tossed out with the bath water. The overseas territories are seen as laboratories for planning, social engineering and urbanism projects that later took the form of New Towns. In a post-face written 16 years after French Modern’s U.S. publication, Paul Rabinow looks at why France seems to have lost its will to be modern in the name of the principles of precaution and security.