Our Paris bureau chief picks seven books to make sense of modern France

BY RE-ELECTING Emmanuel Macron as their president in April, French voters once again defied populism and preferred a centrist leader to the political extremes. Yet if the democratic centre held at the ballot box in 2022, the country at large remains fractured and restless, prone to self-doubt and periodic uprising.

This paradox makes France a complex place to govern, and to understand: at once conservative and rebellious, unified and splintered, comfortable and discontented. Below is a selection of books, a mix of non-fiction and fiction, all published in recent years and available in English (or soon to be), which look at the forces shaping contemporary France.

De Gaulle. By Julian Jackson. Belknap Press; 928 pages; $39.95. Published in Britain as “A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle”; Allen Lane; £35

To understand France today, consider the figure whose shadow looms over the country half a century after he left office: Charles de Gaulle. The founder of the Fifth Republic has over 3,600 roads or avenues in France named after him, as well as the main Paris airport and the national aircraft carrier. One of the best guides to the general is “De Gaulle” by Julian Jackson, a British historian. Published in 2018, at over 900 pages it is a doorstop of a biography ill-suited to beach-reading. But it rewards the effort. Mr Jackson deftly blends meticulous first-hand research with historical narrative to unpick the vision, flair and flaws of the leader who “exhorted the French to believe in themselves as a ‘great’ nation”. This is our review of the book from 2018.

Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-1950. By Agnès Poirier. Henry Holt; 352 pages; $30. Bloomsbury Publishing; £25

A rather different phenomenon to emerge after the second world war was the radical philosophy, intellectual effervescence and anti-bourgeois style that took hold on the Paris rive gauche. It too shaped today’s France, or at least the country’s high-brow sense of itself. “Left Bank” is a geo-literary gem published in 2018 by Agnès Poirier, a French author, and centred on the streets and boulevards around the Café de Flore, where aspiring writers and thinkers shared views, cigarettes and beds. The French still treat their public intellectuals as national treasures. This anatomy of the post-war generation, and the intertwined lives they led in a narrow stretch of Paris, is a useful reminder of where that fashion began. We referred to the book in this essay on French public intellectuals.

Returning to Reims. By Didier Eribon. Translated by Michael Lucey. Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents; 256 pages; $17.99. Allen Lane; £9.99

For a change of tone, Didier Eribon’s memoir, “Returning to Reims”, is a short, sobering account of the French sociologist’s return to his working-class roots after the death of his father. A first-person insight into the darker political forces at work in France today, it was picked up by a big English-language publisher in 2018, several years after it came out in French. The tale is partly a personal reckoning: the young Mr Eribon walked out on his abusive homophobic father to make a life as a gay man in the intellectual circles of Paris. But it is also an exploration of why the social milieu he grew up in, with its dead-end jobs and violent masculinity, turned its back on the hard left and communism, and looked for salvation to the far right instead. His is a personal account that speaks of the disarray, disillusion and anger behind the vote for the extremes today.

The Familia Grande: A Memoir. By Camille Kouchner. Translated by Adriana Hunter. Other Press; 224 pages; $24 and £20
Consent: A Memoir. By Vanessa Springora. Translated by Natasha Lehrer. HarperVia; 208 pages; $27.99 and £9.99

A chilling indictment of the close-knit contemporary version of the Paris left-bank circle can be found in two books that expose its dark underside. Neither makes for easy reading. Camille Kouchner’s “The Familia Grande”, published in English in May 2022, touches the paralysing guilt that grips the victims of incest, in this case her twin brother, set against a backdrop of indifference and celebrated sexual liberation. The powerful psychology of a predatory liaison is also at the centre of Vanessa Springora’s memoir, published in English in 2021. Her account is of a sexual relationship that began when she was 14 years old, willingly—or so she thought at the time—with a well-known literary figure who was nearly 50. Each tale is damning: for children, the law offers little protection in the face of shame and silence. This is our review of the two books.

Discretion. By Faïza Guène. Translated by Sarah Ardizzone. Saqi Books; 240 pages; £12.99

Paris is not only the capital’s chic left bank. Faïza Guène is a young French novelist who has a fine eye for the contradictions, agonies and delights of life at the intersection of Algeria, contemporary Paris, and its banlieue. “Discretion”, published in French in 2020 and out in English later this year, follows Yamina Taleb, an Algerian woman who grew up with a garden and fig tree in a small Berber village. She suffers a double exile: first to Morocco during the Algerian war, then to Seine-Saint-Denis north of Paris after an arranged marriage. A tale told through the eyes of her four French-born adult children, it takes in dispossession, belonging, memory and the intergenerational conflict over silence and discretion in the face of pain or injustice. A short bitter-sweet read with a light touch, Ms Guène captures many of the tensions that tug at second-generation immigrant families in France today with honesty, humour and warmth.

Anéantir. By Michel Houellebecq. Flammarion; 736 pages; €26 . To be published in America by Farrar Straus & Giroux and in Britain by Picador.

No guide to understanding France is complete without a novel by Michel Houellebecq, the country’s literary enfant terrible. “Anéantir”, which means annihilate or reduce to nothing, came out in French in January 2022 and will be published in English later this year. Mr Houellebecq’s eighth and latest novel touches on the novelist’s signature complaints, including ageing, sexual dissatisfaction, emotional dysfunction and existential self-doubt. Set at the end of the second term of a fictional Emmanuel Macron, it also turned out to be prescient, published three months before the president was re-elected. Yet for a writer better known for déprimisme Mr Houellebecq this time offers an unusually tender story, amid the requisite bleakness, of benevolence and love. We reviewed the novel when it came out in French.■
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Our Paris bureau chief is the author of a biography of Emmanuel Macron:

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation. By Sophie Pedder. Bloomsbury; 297 pages; $28 and £25

A close-up biography of an odds-defying president by our Paris bureau chief. “A terrific first draft of a history with significance far beyond the borders of France,” said the Wall Street Journal.
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