Book Review

France’s century of upheaval

La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900

In 1903, a handful of Premonstratensian monks in Nantes received a government order to dissolve themselves and leave their monastery within days. The state was determined, as a matter of urgency, to marginalise the Church from the centre of French society.

The monks contested the order and the population of Nantes divided for and against them. Many citizens threw them flowers as they presented themselves at court; scuffles broke out between defenders and detractors. Here was an ideological and social conflict, writes Rod Kedward, which “challenged the right of the government to dictate local cultural practices”.

In the same year, a professor at the Sorbonne, Ferdinand Buisson, was vaunting French secularism in Tunisia, “this African extension of the soil of France”. The Third Republic was 30 years old in 1900, its new secular education system – the most centralised in Europe – taught all children the benefits of “Frenchness”, regardless of origin or belief.

Such Frenchness was (and is) based in profoundly ideological principles. France was engaged in a mission civilisatrice based on reason. The Republic had sprung, fully armed, from the Enlightenment, paradoxically espousing the universal values of liberty, equality and fraternity while sowing terror and destruction during its revolution. Paradox and conflict lie at the heart of Rod Kedward’s magisterial account of France’s past 100 years. The supposedly “civilising mission” of French global imperialism, for example, was, in reality, pragmatic, profiteering and racist. Indigenous dissent was brutally repressed. All too often, the French have betrayed themselves as hypocrite lecteurs of their republican ideals – universal human rights, justice and solidarity undermined by a parochial mono-culturalism.

War subjected the Republic’s unitary assumptions to a battering throughout the twentieth century. The slaughter in the trenches in the First World War led to mutiny; the occupation during the Second led to both the Resistance and collaboration, to heroism and appalling anti-Semitism (France’s role in the death-camp exportations has only been officially acknowledged in the last 10 years). An eight-year “war without a name” marked the end of Algérie française. These are some of the darkest chapters of the last century.

Kedward shows how, in the “egalitarian” French state, some have been more equal than others. Women achieved the vote only in 1945 and ethnic minorities have been subjected to all manner of indignities, insensitivities and downright racism – under the Vichy regime or, in the past 25 years, due to the baleful presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Immigrant workers lived in disgraceful bidonvilles, or shanty towns, until the early 1970s; today huge swathes of immigrants remain marginalised in suburban high-rise estates.

Professor Kedward, Emeritus Professor of History at Sussex University, is scrupulously fair-minded, not least to the Church. With one exception, the hierarchy capitulated to the Vichy regime; right-wing or reactionary groups such as La Croix du Feu and Action Française appealed to some church members. On the other hand, groups allied to what Kedward dubs “social Catholicism”, such as Marc Sangnier’s social welfare movement Sillon, and worker priests, emerge throughout the last century. “Social Catholics” were in the vanguard of lively, child-centred colonies de vacances in the 1920s and ’30s, and subsidised workers’ allotments; they formed trade unions, credit unions and radical newspapers.

Abbé Pierre, founder of Emmaus and champion of the homeless, was “analysed by [the atheist intellectual] Roland Barthes for his studied image as a latter-day messianic pilgrim complete with beard, cloak and staff”. The secular state’s most popular Frenchman is celebrated here by Kedward as an “idiosyncratic public conscience in the consumer society” .

His other heroes include the socialist leader Jean Jaurès, a figure of “giant moral and political stature”, an arch-conciliator whose assassination by a madman in 1914 robbed the world of an impediment to the Great War he had striven so hard to avoid. General de Gaulle is hailed for galvanising the reconstruction of a shattered post-war France after 1945 through the force of imagination and personality and for his role in decolonisation.

The “social acquisitions” of the interventionist state are acknowledged – an excellent universal health system, sleek trains that run on time, town planning and vibrant festivals – even though today unemployment and recession, affected by the global economy, are undermining the French common good. Kedward also traces the richness of French culture “created by cinema, intellectual life, avant-garde art, fashion design, sport, music and even the tradition of dissident politics.”

As for the title, La Vie en Bleu evokes French sporting identification with blue, the colour of the national strip (as well as Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose). When France won football’s World Cup in 1998 with an ethnically mixed team, commentators could not resist comparing the bleu-blanc-rouge of the national tricolour with the black-blanc-beur (backslang for Arab) make-up of the team. Here was a celebration of a plural national identity.

Kedward’s superb opus deepens our understanding both of France and the French.

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