Culture | France, a history

Citoyen, citoyenne

Why the French national may not be as deeply rooted as it is made out to be

The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the Present Day. By Jonathan Fenby. Simon and Schuster; 536 pages; £25.

FRANCE breathes its history, and engraves the past on its landscape. No French town is complete without an Avenue Charles de Gaulle. The boulevards and train stations of Paris—the Gare d’Austerlitz, Avenue de la Grande Armée—recall great battles waged and won. In speeches modern politicians draw on France’s past glories in a way that British leaders, say, might feel was an uncomfortable expression of national vanity. So it is always useful to take a fresh look at how history shapes the country’s politics today.

Jonathan Fenby, The Economist’s correspondent in Paris in the early 1980s, is a veteran and affectionate observer of France, and a biographer of de Gaulle. In his latest book, he takes the long view, recounting the country’s modern history, starting in 1789 and ending with the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks of January this year. The bulk of the book is a well-told narrative account, and so valuable primarily as a text of reference. But he is at his best when he teases out the tensions between the republican unifying ideal and the enduring divisions that periodically emerge to challenge the French nation.

Mr Fenby marshals evidence to suggest that the republican tradition, celebrated in so many French national rituals, is less deeply rooted than is commonly assumed. In doing so, he leans on an idea formulated by Sudhir Hazareesingh, an Oxford scholar, that France is an “unfinished republic”. The secular republic, with its impulse to centralise, standardise and unify, has always collided with the fractious forces of rebellion, pitting secularists against Catholic traditionalists, Jacobins against royalists, left against right. For all its revolutionary mythology, the author writes, the nation has never “fully digested that heritage because it has never wanted to shed its other, more conservative character.”

The myth of continual progress from the revolution onwards masks a bloody, disrupted history: 1830, 1848, 1871, 1940, 1968. Republican insurrectionists often embraced repression and conservatism. After the overthrow of the Orléans monarchy in 1848, it was a republican government that sent in the troops against the June revolt, resulting in some 10,000 dead or injured. “Society was cut in two,” wrote Aléxis de Tocqueville. “Those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.”

Indeed, Mr Fenby argues that in some ways national unity is a historical exception: under de Gaulle after liberation from Nazi occupation or during fleeting moments such as the post-Charlie Hebdo republican marches. Such experiences, he suggests, are “rare and bred by shock”. More often, he writes, division, disillusion and conservatism impede constructive compromise. Even the unity expressed on the streets after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks fell apart because of a feeling in the country’s banlieues, or suburban housing estates, that freedom of expression and French secular principles—entrenched to contain the influence of the Catholic church—were a licence for offending Islam.

Perhaps inevitably, after this gallop through more than two centuries of history, the section on the past 20 years feels rushed and a bit jumpy. Rioting that took place in 1997, for example, merges into rioting in 2005, as if the banlieues were alight, on and off, all the time. A more analytical text on the same period, and on which this new book directly draws, is the updated version of Mr Fenby’s own previous work, “On the Brink”. It was first published in 1998, but still rings true today.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Citoyen, citoyenne"

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