La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 [Hardcover]

In the early 1960s the historian Alfred Cobban wrote a three part history of France for Penguin. The books were excellent but in the intervening 40 years much has happened so that Cobban's texts seemed rather dated. Penguin decided to replace them with three new texts. The first 'The Great Nation' by Colin Jones is an utter masterpiece about the 18th Century. The volume on the 19th Century by Robert Gildea is still eagerly awaited but we now have this superb 20th century volume by Kedward at our disposal. The book is very easy to read and gives students and scholars alike an excellent insight into France during that period. The book is broken down into three sections: 'The Primacy of the Republic, 1900s-1931', 'The Spiral of Ideology,1920s-1969', 'Issues of Idenity, 1960s-2000s'. It covers all you would expect and more: the Dreyfus affair, the First World War, the Popular Front, Vichy and the Resistance, Decolonisation, May 68, the Fifth Republic. Although it covers all the main events it does so with an extrordinary sensitivity to the experience of ordinary people. This book should be recommened reading for all students of France and of European History. A must read.

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?