THE HISTORY OF MODERN FRANCE
Jonathan Fenby
Simon&Schuster, 2015
535 pages, Rs 899
All modern democracies can be placed somewhere within the three dimensions staked out by Britain, France and America. In varying degrees, they contain the universalist aspirations of France; the conservative, common-law and custom bedrock of Britain; or the multi-ethnic churning of the United States. India is more Anglo-American than most. But reading a history, any history, of modern France is a reminder of how much more French our state needs to be.
Most histories of modern France focus on events and drama. In a history dotted with extraordinary personalities, from Napoleon to de Gaulle to Jean-Marie le Pen, it is an almost impossible temptation to resist. The instinct is to - once the Revolution has been dealt with - only deal with ideological disputation as it relates to the clashes of parties and people. After all, this is France; its evolution into the pillar of secularism and effective monoculturalism is almost pre-ordained. But the truth of the mother of republics is that, more than either of the other democratic templates for democracy, it has been the site for the political arguments that can enlighten and elucidate other nations. This is the truth that Jonathan Fenby, the famed head of the China team at emerging-markets consultants Trusted Sources, so effectively reveals in his third book on the country where he once served as bureau head for Reuters and The Economist.
In The History of Modern France, Mr Fenby gallops from 1815, and the final defeat of Napoleon, to the Charlie Hebdo attacks this year, exactly two centuries on. It is a tribute to Mr Fenby's skill that the story of those ghastly murders reads like a natural, and anticipated culmination of his argument - although surely the book was mostly written before they happened.
The ferment of the mid-19th century; the glories of the fin de siecle; the dark troubles between the wars; and the Trente Glorieuses, the 30 years of post-War growth, are all examined one by one. In each case Mr Fenby has an experienced business journalist's eye for the economics and the ideology underlying the politics and the narrative. Sometimes, the explanation is so perfect, so poetic, so retrospectively obvious, that it causes one to close the book for a moment and nod in pleasure. Consider the origin of France's enviable cafe culture, for example. Mr Fenby mentions how difficult urban life was for workers and the poor in the late 19th century. When the new and lovely Paris we see today was created by Baron Haussman, he bulldozed the old neighbourhoods that used to provide housing, so "many families lived in overcrowded tenements... and many bachelor workers inhabited single rooms... Paris housed a quarter of a million renters by 1882". The consequence of "crowding at home and solitary lives in lodgings"? Town-dwellers "increased their use of cafes, "whose numbers doubled in the 1880s and then enjoyed a boom at the turn of the century with 146,000 opening in the decades to 1914 - many going bankrupt after being set up by artisans whose businesses were hit by foreign and provincial competition".
Mr Fenby himself says that his central argument is that France is a "prisoner of its past", strait-jacketed by its 200-year-old political heritage.
And he does quite expertly explode several myths - that France is always progressive, for example. He points out that, when presented with a straightforward choice between Right and Left, the French are more than likely to choose the Right. The chapter dealing with Charles de Gaulle's seizing of power in 1958 is exemplary. The General replaced the Fourth Republic with a Fifth designed to exalt him and his successors through what looks like the blatant threat of military force - an extraordinary event to happen in one of the few most prominent Western democracies. That de Gaulle's assumption of the "imperial presidency" was approved of by four-fifths of the country (judging by the electoral college votes he received) supports Mr Fenby's claim about France's choices.
De Gaulle reversed a 90-year trend. From the time that Germany's Bismarck thrashed Napoleon III to the day de Gaulle took office, France had been a nation run by "little men" - office-seekers and opportunists and ideologues with limited appeal, banding together in shifting coalitions. From their incredibly disparate visions was somehow created the monolith of modern France's self-image, an act of political alchemy that you slowly begin to appreciate as you read this book. The Third Republic, from 1870 to 1940 - from Bismarck to Hitler - was the high point of confusion and coalition; but it created one of the world's great countries and influential cultures. "The Republic", said one of the Third's founders, Adolphe Thiers, "is the regime that divides the French the least". And it managed, in the years between 1870 to 1900, to push at least two things, as Mr Fenby points out: universal, effective schooling; and an aggressive secularisation. One wishes that our own fractious politics would learn.
Still, I at least cannot agree with Mr Fenby's basic premise, that France is a prisoner of its past, when I put it up against his own telling of the cleavages that marked its history. Yes, for example, it struggles today with the "outsiders" in its midst; but the history of French anti-Semitism, from Dreyfus to Petain, suggest that it has done so before. The past contains more than just traps - it contains lessons, and examples, and patterns that the present can use to solve its problems. The past may be a locked prison cell; but it is also the key. A country that so completely reinvented itself so many times, when crisis threatened, cannot but be considered a possibility for re-invention again.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
