France and the French

The many in the one indivisible

Schoolchildren of my generation were brought up on Alfred Cobban's three-volume Penguin history of France from 1715. Cobban, famous for lambasting the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, viewed France with a coolly sceptical eye. His three volumes are succinct, learned and witty; they still repay reading. But since their publication a lot has happened both in historiography and history (Cobban's last volume stops in 1962). Some years ago, therefore, Penguin commissioned three historians to write replacement volumes for each century. The first, on the eighteenth century by Colin Jones, was published in 2002; Rod Kedward's La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 is the second to appear.

There have, of course, been other British interpreters of France since Cobban -- notably Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin. They could not be more different. Cobb assumed France as a "second identity". Reading middle-period Cobb, one can almost smell the gauloises (which explains why his impact in France was less than Zeldin's: the French could smell gauloises without needing to read Cobb). Zeldin studied France more dispassionately, like an entomologist. As the scourge of the idee recue, he would take a generally accepted statement about France and destroy it. This was exhilarating to read but ultimately frustrating: what was left at the end? He compared his method to pointillisme, but whereas in a pointilliste canvas a picture emerges, Zeldin creates no picture -- only fascinating dots.

Now we have Kedward's France. Professor Kedward is the pre-eminent historian of the French Resistance -- but not the heroic epic of Gaullism or the cloak-and-dagger resistance of sabotage and secret agents. The distinctiveness of Kedward's work on the Resistance has been his focus on ideas and motivations, and his sensitivity to the infinite complexity of individual trajectories and to the specificities of place. La Vie en Bleu is informed by a recognizably similar vision, but applied on a much wider canvas. The narrative falls into three parts: 1900-34, 1934-68, 1968-2004. In Part One, Kedward's theme is the centrality of the Republic (whether one was for it or against it) as the organizing principle of French political culture. In Part Two (the longest section), the theme is ideology: the descent into violent political conflict under the impact of economic depression, Occupation and decolonization. In this period, politics frequently bordered on civil war. In Part Three, these ideological battles lose their force, and Kedward's theme becomes the search for new identities in a political landscape where the familiar frontiers have disappeared. Another idea explored here is the much-discussed (in France at least) idea of the "end of French exceptionalism", as the politics of centrist consensus seemingly replaced 150 years of political conflict.

This tripartite division works well even if there are other ways of dividing the century up. Other possible dates for the end of Part Two might be 1962 (the end of the Algerian War), 1965 (when Francois Mitterrand's decision to contest the Presidential election symbolized the Left's acceptance of de Gaulle's new institutions) or 1983 (President Mitterrand's abandonment of "Keynesianism in one country" and the Left's renunciation of a rupture with capitalism). But Kedward only uses his periodization as a guide. He is more than aware that the nature of Republicanism still continues to exercise the French today, and that ideology is far from dead: the three thematic strands of his book overlay each other.

It is hard to do justice to the richness of this dense, magisterial and humane book, but its overarching theme is easily summarized. It is the tension between unity and diversity, more precisely the ways in which the Republic One and Indivisible accommodated (or did not accommodate) the multifarious variety of French society. The Republic claimed to be universal, but its universalism was built around numerous exclusions: it did not like difference.

Kedward opens with a triumphant speech in 1903 by Ferdinand Buisson, architect of France's secular education reforms, extolling the benefits of the Republic to an audience in Tunisia. But he then moves on to all those who had no place in the political nation as defined by Republicans like Buisson: the colonial populations, those claiming a regional identity, women. France, the first country to introduce universal male suffrage, was among the last to extend the vote to women, largely because of their alleged subservience to priests. Kedward devotes much attention to the exclusion of women, and the efforts of female activists -- Hubertine Auclert, Sarah Monod, Maria Verone, Gabrielle Duchene, Helene Brion, Marcelle Capy, Madeleine Vernet, Madeleine Pelletier to redress this both in the workplace and in politics (none of these names appears in Cobban's last volume, where the only women to appear are Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Curie, shackled to Pierre, and Mme Caillaux, a politician's wife who achieved momentary fame for assassinating a newspaper editor in 1914).

There has long been a leftist tradition in France which despaired of the conformity imposed by the Jacobin Republic, and looked to syndicalist and libertarian alternatives to it. But Kedward, while clearly sympathetic to this tradition, is also consistently more optimistic about Republicanism -- as articulated for example in the humanistic outlook of the Socialist leader Jean Jaures. He quotes from a speech by Jaures at the start of the book, and returns to it on more than one occasion. This book is about what the Republic was, what it said it was, but also what it had the potential to become.

Obviously the First World War is central to Part One. Indeed, it is the defining experience of France in the twentieth century -- more even than the Occupation. Perhaps for that reason it is still difficult to evaluate its significance. For Kedward, the meaning of the war "which dominated all others" was that it consummated the fusion between nation and Republic. But equally plausibly, he remarks elsewhere that "there was no single meaning" to the war. This contradiction is not so much his own as a reflection of the contradiction in opinion during the 1920s. Where Julien Benda (author of The Treason of the Intellectuals) believed the war represented the triumph of Republican universalism, others, like the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, saw it as a tragicomic nightmare, which had for ever exposed the hollowness of such rhetoric.

The central experience of Part Two is the Occupation. Occupied France was fragmented both literally (the country was divided into many zones) and metaphorically (pre-existing political allegiances had lost their relevance). Thus resistance started as a set of concrete acts at the level of locality -- "local" is a favourite Kedward word -but it was also about reconstructing a national political map. The Liberation, for Kedward, was the moment when a new, more inclusive vision of Republicanism might have emerged. But 1944 was the turning point when history failed to turn. What occurred was the fashioning of a "reactionary and exclusive . . . resistance narrative" by the dominant forces of Gaullism and Communism, which airbrushed out the role of foreigners, women and peasants (the countryside being associated with Vichy): "the centre and the top occluded the periphery and the bottom. Jacobin centralism was reaffirmed".

With Jacobin centralism came the reassertion of imperial power. In Europe, May 8 commemorates the defeat of Nazism; in Algeria it commemorates the Setif massacre when up to 45,000 demonstrating Algerians were killed by the French military in May 1945. From 1946 to 1962 France fought two bloody and divisive colonial wars. Here Kedward, whose tone is generally even-handed, cannot hide his anger at the failure to stop France "lurching into a repressive ideology of archaic imperialism". In this context, he cannot but commend de Gaulle for completing the process of decolonization without civil war, but otherwise he is less seduced by Gaullism than other British historians (such as the late Douglas Johnson). While sensitive to de Gaulle's streak of "fatalistic melancholy", he sees de Gaulle's Republic as accentuating "the recurrent paradox" of twentieth-century France: "a society of massive diversity and differentiation, but one in which difference and self-management (auto-gestion) were suspect and denied".

For Kedward, the events of 1968 -de Gaulle's nemesis -are the Liberation that might have been, exploding France's Jacobin master narrative. Part Three, then, is about the transformative effects of 1968 on French politics. Feminism, ecology, gay rights, regionalism and decentralization enter the scene. Kedward shows how identification with particular localities helped to explode existing national political identities: he celebrates those protesting at Larzac, in the Auvergne, against the eviction of peasant farmers to make way for an army camp; or at Plogoff, in Brittany, against the building of a nuclear plant. But that was the exciting 1970s. Moving closer to the present, diversity threatens to collapse into fragmentation, ideological demobilization to tilt into anomie. This is the mood which, from the mid-1980s, has been so successfully exploited by the Front National. Thus another theme of Part Three is how to put the political pieces back together after 1968. There is definitely a pessimistic narrative to put alongside the upbeat one. Although he does not duck this, Kedward remains cautiously optimistic, seeing the problems caused by diversity as a price worth paying for the end of Jacobin uniformity. Even in the 1990s, the period when many people diagnose a malaise in France, he highlights the creative aspects of French society: the proliferation of voluntary bodies, associations and social movements "seeking to invert the hierarchies of authority", the emergence of syncretic cultural forms like cinema beur. But what political model is available to make sense of all this? Certainly not multiculturalism, which in France is negatively associated with atomizing "Anglo-Saxon" liberalism and "communitarianism". So French exceptionalism has life in it yet. As Kedward observes, contemporary debates about the role of ethnic minorities in France -in particular the ban on Muslim girls wearing headscarves in state schools -use assumptions about religion, secularism and gender which would be absolutely familiar to Buisson were he still alive.
(And where but France could one have seen in 1984 a million people demonstrating against the Left's attempt to secularize Catholic schools, and in 1994 a million people demonstrating against the Right's attempt to amend the 1850 Loi Falloux on the financing of Catholic schools?)

In France, in recent years, almost any positive developments seem to have been followed by negative ones. Kedward's title alludes to France's victory (as hosts) in the 1998 football World Cup. The multiracial composition of the national team, les bleus, was heralded as signifying France's contemporary plural identity. But only three years later, on April 21, 2002, the country was rocked by a political earthquake when Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had once said that players whom he deemed to be foreign could not be said to represent France, reached the second round of the Presidential election. The trauma of that event is comparable only to the shock caused by the rejection of the proposed European constitution in the referendum in May 2005 and then, five months later, by the riots in the banlieues of Paris and many other cities. These two events (which took place too late to be included in Kedward's book) have caused a great deal of national soul searching, with endless discussion of the respective merits of the French and Anglo-Saxon social models. The latter causes alarm, but there is increasing scepticism about the efficacy of the former. The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, publicly celebrates the French model while whittling away at it, and the French Left fall back on ritualistic incantations of the horrors of "liberalism". For the crisis of the Left Mitterrand bears much responsibility. Kedward comments with understatement: "Mitterrand failed to give a viable and ethical meaning to a post-Socialism that was well within his grasp".

A French political journalist recently remarked to me that there would be no French Tony Blair -- no viable post-Socialism -- until there had been a French Margaret Thatcher. If this is correct, perhaps change is on the way. Despite, or perhaps indeed because of, his stance last autumn's troubles (and one should not forget that in addition to his muscular law and order rhetoric designed to appeal to supporters of Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy has also been one of the very few French politicians to support affirmative action for ethnic minorities), the future of the French Right probably still lies with the ambitious Sarkozy, who is as close to Thatcher as France is likely to get. If he becomes the next President, perhaps he will pave the way for France's Blair. Certainly this is not a fate Rod Kedward would wish upon the country, but his splendid book offers fascinating perspectives on all these issues.

Julian Jackson is Professor of Modern French History at Queen Mary College, University of London. His most recent book is The Fall of France: The Nazi invasion of 1940, 2003.

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