France and the French: A Modern History

I bought this because of a pair of good reviews, both quoted on the back of my copy, in the Economist and the Guardian. In particular, the Guardian review says "essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand why the survival of the French republic is more than one country's concern". I very specifically wished to understand why I should care about the French republic, but Kedward fails to make me. I assume that he is a Francophile - he has written a 650 page book about the place, and on the evidence of the last section (on the Mitterrand and Chirac era) he has been clipping French newspapers seriously for a large part of his professional life - but he does not manage to communicate much affection. In fact, on most of the post-war occasions here documented where France emerges to engage with the larger world, in what is otherwise a pretty introverted narrative, it is to lose miserable, vicious colonial wars, to set off nuclear bombs, or to cultivate unpleasant African dictators.

The problem is with all those clippings: too much information, too little thesis. The reader is confronted with a river of facts, but most of the analysis is at the level of (to be brutally pejorative) the ex-cathedra musings of a Guardian-reading sociologist. Take the section on May 1968. One skeptical view (e.g. Tony Judt, following Raymond Aron) is that May 1968 was a load of narcissism; Kedward though, even after listing the only concrete grievance of the students as lack of access to the girls' dorms, clearly thinks that it was a big and substantive deal, but I couldn't identify why he thinks so. The best I could make out was that I should see it all as a manifestation of the Zeitgeist, but this is implied more than stated, with talk about a post-modern society - however while I more or less know what a post-modern building or painting is, I don't know what a post-modern society is.

Here are some questions and issues that I missed:

I was expecting a much more differentiated analysis of French politics, especially in the first section. Kedward has little more than a left and a right. He doesn't much like the French right (fair enough - a lot of it isn't, historically, very attractive) but he doesn't provide a feel for the theoretical, or for that matter moral, complexity of political development on the left (c.f. Sheri Berman, for instance).

Why is the modern French university system so mediocre (and how much, if at all, does that mediocrity have to do with the lasting effects of 1968)? What is with mobs in the streets as a normal part of politics? Why has France suffered such brutal structural unemployment in the last 30 years or so - Kedward talks a lot about this, but never actually thinks about it, he just treats it as some sort of exogenous given. Why French Anti-Americanism (and its influence on foreign policy)? What about the concerns and dynamics of the bourgeoisie? They are remarkably underrepresented in the discussion, especially in the last section, but as a class they are the core political and cultural player. Why should I care about, admire, or like, France?

This is a book for those who are already reasonably familiar with the outlines of French history in the 20th century. For them Kedward's formidable researches (the bibliography of Selected Further Reading runs to 26 pages) will provide a mass of details not easily found elsewhere; but it seems to me that he takes quite a lot of previous knowledge for granted (one tiny example out of very many: he assumes that readers know what the Schlieffen Plan was), and even for those who do have a good general knowledge, the book is quite densely written and in places rather stodgy (in at least one chapter - chapter 7 - almost impenetrably so). Kedward's ambition is to be thoroughly comprehensive - a tall order even for 650 pages of text. The result is that often the text is studded with the names of everybody who was anybody in France, and in places it reads a bit like a catalogue. In chapter 6, for example, every artist of significance is given about a sentence or two, which serves as a reminder to those who know something of their work, but cannot really bring it to life for those who do not. The arrangement of the book is chronological, but social and economic history - worthy, but sometimes, I fear, very dull - take up much more space than political history; character sketches of leading politicians are extremely compressed - just the odd adjective or two - and so are accounts of French foreign policy, though all the main events are featured. It all makes for rather dry reading.

It is, I think, much more difficult to write the domestic history of France than, say, the domestic history of Britain during the same period - largely because of the multiplicity of French political parties, the constantly shifting coalitions and the resulting short-lived nature of the governments of the Third and Fourth Republic. The governments of the Fifth Republic were somewhat more stable, but even then there are more parties, more shifting political groupings and more complications than we have in British history - not to mention three periods when powerful presidents have to cohabit with prime ministers and legislatures which are opposed to them. Kedward also makes it clear that the social structure of France is exceptionally complex, for not only is there the divide between Paris and the countryside, but the countryside is by no means homogeneous: rural areas vary enormously from left to right.

It is helpful that the book is very well organized, with frequent cross-headings; and it seems to me that the texture lightens somewhat from Chapter 10 - about a third of the way through - onwards.

For myself, I would single out the following as particularly valuable discussions:

- The role of women is given much attention throughout.

- There is an excellent account of the French resistance and of how it was interpreted after the war. One would expect no less from one of the leading historians of that topic.

- Kedward's anger about the folly and viciousness of French colonialism after World War II is manifest. Suppression of the nationalist movements in the colonies was ferocious from the very beginning: Kedward says that the massacre of some 10,000 to 15,000 Algerians in May 1945 (beginning on VE Day!) and an even bigger death toll from aerial bombardments in Vietnam in 1946 were barely mentioned in the French press at the time. But it is odd that there is no mention in the book of Syria and the Lebanon becoming French mandates or on their later achievement of independence. There is also just one paragraph on the Suez War of 1956 (and that does not figure in the index).

- Rightly, much attention is given to farmers, who carry so much more weight in France's politics than they do in Britain.

- Much importance is given to Jack Lang, Mitterand's Minister of Culture, in shaping the cultural climate of France: again a phenomenon that one could not find in Britain.

- There is the problem of ethnic minorities and whether or how to integrate them in French society. As portrayed here, the passions aroused in France are even stronger than they are in Britain, with Le Pen`s Front National a much more powerful influence in France than the National Front is in Britain. It has led to a passionate debate whether admirable diversity within a single French identity or dangerous divisiveness best describes France today.

- Parallel with that debate is the discussion, to which Kedward pays a lot of attention throughout the book, of the many different ways in which the French have interpreted their past. This had been an issue in the 19th century because of the long-lasting and traumatic polarization created by he French Revolution. In the second half of the 20th century it was the problem of how to come to terms with Vichy and also with the Algerian war. As an attempt to heal the wounds, amnesia was for many years promoted by the authorities, and in his last chapter Kedward traces the debates as that amnesia was challenged and broke down.

The treatment of French politics is scandalously scanty in even the British quality press, and this book, hard going though it is, is indispensable for those who really want to know in more detail what has been going on in our neighbour just across the Channel.

I have been looking for a book on modern French history for some time having exhausted the available single topic English language histories such as "A Savage War of Peace" (Algeria), "The Fall of the Third Republic" (1940) and "The Last Valley" (Indochina). Sadly, I am still looking. This is the driest tome that could possibly be penned on the subject. It is beautifully organized and I prize it as a refence book but I cannot just sit down with this title and enjoy myself.

Everyone tries to explain France, from those who know it well and often travel there to those who have only read about French attitudes and history. Any who would understand the puzzling nature of the French psyche, though, must understand its history and culture - and that's where the weighty and well-researched FRANCE AND THE FRENCH: A MODERN HISTORY comes in. Kedward explores French history using a lively narrative style to bring its majors modern influencing events to life. Chapters draw some important connections between these events and French attitudes, surveying those who confronted and created the military, political and social changes in the country during modern times. A definitive survey pairs history with social insights for maximum impact.