The Economist reviews a new history of 20th-century France by a British historian this week. -- Rod Kedward, a British historian, divides the period he has chosen into three, each part characterized by an underlying preoccupation. 1900-1931 is the era of the primacy of the republic, when ideas about France's universalist message, its faith in reason and civilization, and its secular anti-clericalism were entrenched. The 1920s-1969 marks the spiral of ideology, when the aftermath of the Great Depression marked an intensified and highly contested quest for alternative ideals, from communism and socialism to fascism. The 1960s-2000s covers the obsession with identity, an era when France tries to find a place in a globalizing, post-colonial, post-ideological world. ...
Books
AU CONTRAIRE
Economist
August 11, 2005
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4269779 (subscribers only)
La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900. By Rod Kedward. Penguin/Allen Lane; 740 pages; GBP30. To be published in America by Overlook Press in January 2006; $35.
Why are the French so, well, French? Several recent English-language books have put the Gallic nation under the microscope, from the polemical (Our Oldest Enemy by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky; The Arrogance of the French by Richard Z. Chesnoff) to the fictional (A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke). Here, instead, is a serious history of modern France, which tries to unpack a complicated people through the forces that shaped them during the 20th century.
Rod Kedward, a British historian, divides the period he has chosen into three, each part characterized by an underlying preoccupation. 1900-1931 is the era of the "primacy of the republic," when ideas about France's universalist message, its faith in reason and civilization, and its secular anti-clericalism were entrenched. The 1920s-1969 marks the "spiral of ideology," when the aftermath of the Great Depression marked an intensified and highly contested quest for alternative ideals, from communism and socialism to fascism. The 1960s-2000s covers the "obsession with identity," an era when France tries to find a place in a globalizing, post-colonial, post-ideological world.
The strength of this sympathetic and elegantly written book is Mr. Kedward's refusal to over-simplify. At each turn, he manages to convey the conflict and antagonism that propel events. De Gaulle's struggle to impose himself in allied eyes as the legitimate resistance leader; collaboration with Vichy and the subsequent purges after liberation in 1944; the eventual denunciation by French Marxists of Stalin after 1956: each was fiercely contested. His account of de Gaulle's creation of a provisional government in Algiers in 1944 is typical: "In retrospect it seemed an evolutionary process. In reality it was one of fractures and disputes."
The author is particularly good on his speciality, the Vichy period: its iconography, the cult of Pétain and what he calls the "collective pathology" of a nation after the fall of France to Hitler. Given contemporary France's struggle to deal with the chill winds of globalization -- which partly motivated the electorate to reject the European Union constitution earlier this year -- Mr. Kedward's account of the political battles on the left over anti-capitalist ideology is also a useful reminder.
A splintered left characterizes France throughout the century. The Communist Party was still regularly polling a quarter of the vote into the 1960s, dwarfing the Socialists in the 1969 presidential election. After May 1968, Marxist splinter groups, formed after disillusion with the Communists' Stalinist ties, argued that the French at the barricades were at the same point as the Russians in 1905: true revolution was just round the corner. Arlette Laguiller, who proposed a Trotskyist revolutionary program at the 1974 presidential election, is still a political figure today. And the Socialist Party is still debating whether to ally itself to others further to the left.
Where others see only paradox in French history, Mr. Kedward identifies a certain coherence. It is no contradiction, he argues, that "a political culture which extols the rational, orderly mind should also value the power of dissent so highly" since "it stems from an all-pervading involvement in disputing the conflictual merits of 'for' and 'against'."
However, despite his efforts to explain contradictions neatly, Mr. Kedward's story in some ways gets lost in its complexity. He sets out to convey a "narrative," or rather multiple narratives, a word he has a particular fondness for. His evocation of a France composed of so many different strands leaves the reader at the end feeling faintly cheated of an over-arching theme. Apart, that is, from a theme of contradiction and conflict. Ah, Mr. Kedward might reply, but that is France.