LA VIE EN BLEU: France and the French since 1900
by Rod KedwardAllen Lane £30 pp761
France has always been a fractured (and fractious) territory. “All Gaul,” said Julius Caesar, who did his share of the carving, “is divided into three parts.” In 1789, the revolution’s tricolour hopefully symbolised a society united in “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, yet the flag was also an inadvertent reminder of the Three Estates into which the ancien régime had been divided: nobility, clergy and common people. Of these, only the last (and poorest) paid taxes. Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution begins with a rousing polemic account of the oppression of the (largely rural) proletariat, leeched by idle aristocrats and by princes of the Church.
The Church remained a reactionary force well into the 20th century. Indeed, clericals and anti-clericals are still fighting a Hundred Years’ war between partisans of écoles laïques (state-funded schools where all distinct signs of religion — notably, today, the Muslim girl’s headscarf — are banned) and the écoles privées, fee-paying Church schools where Catholicism is integral to the curriculum.
Different visions of what France is, or should be, continue to divide Frenchmen. As for French women, they did not obtain the vote until 1945. Liberty may have been romantically symbolised by Delacroix’s bare-breasted freedom-fighter at the barricades, but, in practice, female liberty was either that of a domestic, maternal slave or a whore. Only the arts, and perhaps teaching, offered women a lively prospect of freedom. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, published in 1949, broke the stereotypical mould and helped to emancipate her sex from the little black dress that was so often a little black straitjacket.
Rod Kedward explains that his title is both “provocative and ironic”. He uses blue as a shorthand for all things French, especially when things are going well. The cry of “Allez, les Bleus”, for instance, was never more exultant than when France won the 1998 World Cup. Yet even then, the Front National leader, the ever-grinning, ever-malicious Jean-Marie Le Pen, wondered loudly how a team captained by Zinadine Zidane, the son of Algerians, with team-mates from Ghana and Senegal, could call itself French, especially when some of them appeared not to know the words of the Marseillaise. A year or so later, Le Pen obtained more votes in the first round of the presidential election, than Lionel Jospin the greyly decent socialist prime minister. Le Pen was, of course, roundly defeated in the final round, after “republican solidarity” had rallied the left to Chirac’s cause. As soon as Chirac was elected, however, the left/right war continued as usual.
General de Gaulle asked, famously, how anyone could govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese. His answer was to be the incontrovertibly biggest cheese. His Fifth Republic made its president an elected monarch who could trump the politicking of those who disagreed with him or dismiss them. In opposition, François Mitterrand wrote a magnificent polemic, Le Coup d’Etat Permanent, denouncing the Gaullist autocracy. However, when he succeeded to the presidency, Mitterrand reigned, from 1981 until 1995, every bit as grandly as de Gaulle, with the “socialist” addition of allowing his lieutenants to rob the (newly nationalised) Crédit Lyonnais. Chirac, his right-wing rival, was more modest: while he was mayor of Paris, some of his barons were handed leases on luxury flats and his party (inherited from de Gaulle) benefited from the salaries of non-existent municipal employees. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la m ême chose” is the only immutable rule in French public life.
The great merit of Kedward’s long narrative lies in his vigilant non-partisanship: he resembles the best kind of referee, always on the spot, alert to a fault but rarely obtrusive (some might think him unduly lenient to Edith Cresson, Jack Lang and Régis Debray). It’s nice that he finds time, too, among all the kaleidoscopic realignments of French political “loyalties”, to mention Georges Méliès, who discovered the technique of film editing when his camera broke down while filming in the Place de l’Opéra. After a few seconds he restarted and found that “when the bus emerging from the Boulevard des Capucines reached the Boulevard des Italiens, it was a hearse”. Film narrative became the art of what could be left out.
As today’s immigrants have discovered, France can be variously welcoming and exclusive. As the home country of the Rights of Man, it prides itself on absorbing asylum-seekers. Yves Montand, as great an actor as he was chansonnier, was born Ivo Livi, of Italian immigrant parents. Racism meant nothing, he said, in the cosmopolitan French working class where all his friends were “Italians, Armenians, Greeks or Spanish”. Is it tactless to note that they were all “white” and that they shared the ambition to become as French as they knew how, or could learn?
Although all immigrants had their misfortunes, none were so unfortunate as the prewar Jews, diabolised by the Church and scapegoated by ultra-nationalists such as Charles Maurras, the stone-deaf leader of the far-right Action Française and a stylish advocate of their murder. While prime minister in the 1936 Popular Front, Léon Blum, who was Jewish, was dragged from a car and almost beaten to death by enthusiastic chauvinists and royalists, whose ideal Frenchman was already Philippe Pétain.
The marshal is often sanctified, though not by Kedward, as a self-sacrificing Simple Soldier who impersonated La France Profonde, the true (peasant) France whose profundity can be exaggerated. Pétain’s “simplicity” covered direct responsibility for not extending the Maginot line to cover the “impenetrable” Ardennes, through which Guderian’s panzers launched the 1940 blitzkrieg. Misguided tactics — not paid holidays or the Communist fifth column — did for the Third Republic, which Pétain abolished in favour of his own collaborationist dictatorship.
The post-war Fourth Republic was doomed from the start by its leaders’ reluctance either to embrace or let go of the prewar empire. On VE-day, as a reprisal against rioting “natives” in the Algerian town of Sétif, the newly liberated French launched an air raid on local villages which left between 10,000 and 45,000 dead. The seeds of two decades of disastrous colonial wars were sown on the very day of victory. The consequences — not least a largely unassimilated immigrant proletariat of some five million Muslims — continue to embarrass France and its belief in its capacity to homogenise all its citizens.
Lacking in memorable character-drawing or phrase-making (“decimate” and “refute” are painfully misused), Kedward’s narrative nevertheless remains a monumental contribution to our understanding of the twists and twitches in the political and social history of a cruel century in which La Vie en Bleu only intermittently coincided with the sentimental charm of La Vie en Rose.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £27 on 0870 165 8585
THE COLOUR OF SUCCESS
When les Bleus, France’s multicultural football team, won the 1998 World Cup, commentators were keen to depict the team as a symbol of modern, racially tolerant France. Just before the tournament, however, a government-sponsored survey had suggested that more than a third of the country was happy to call itself racist.
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