Category: French History

‘The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War’

by Graham Robb

Norton, 454 pp., $27.95

Most of us have a reasonably clear sense of France and its history. Invaded by the Romans and ruled by a series of royal families, France was rocked by a bloody Revolution, ruled by an emperor named Napoleon and made home to the Eiffel Tower, ultimately becoming the classic tourist destination (before the Euro made it too expensive to visit). But this modern conception of France is not only incomplete, but fundamentally misconceived.

Almost everything that makes France “French” is a more or less modern invention. French as a language, for starters, was not widely spoken throughout France itself until well after the French Revolution. Instead, peasants throughout the countryside spoke a hodgepodge of differing languages and dialects. Even in the late 1700s, a traveler leaving the city limits of Paris typically required a translator to be understood and, farther south, would have difficulty even identifying the language he or she was hearing. Indeed, just over 100 years ago, French was a foreign language to nearly 80 percent of the population.

Graham Robb, a historian and author of several acclaimed biographies, provides a ground-level historical geography of France from the Revolution through the First World War. An avid bicycle rider, Robb researched the book by riding more than 14,000 miles throughout France and spending four years in the library. What he discovered was how little of what one might consider “France” existed only a couple of centuries ago.

Indeed, authorities didn’t even attempt to map the country until the mid-18th century. Even then, the cartographers encountered stiff hostility from villagers suspicious of “foreigners” with strange devices.

Large parts of France weren’t even part of the country until relatively recently. Brittany, for example, didn’t become part of France until 1532, when Queen Anne of Brittany married into the Royal family and brought the Celtic province as her dowry. France, similarly, didn’t acquire Alsace and Lorraine until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nice and Savoy didn’t become part of France until 1860. As Robb notes, “the propaganda of French national unity has been broadcast continuously since the Revolution, and it takes a while to notice that the tribal divisions of France were almost totally unrelated to administrative boundaries.”

The Revolution, together with the introduction of modern transportation and communication systems, brought enormous pressures to bear on provincial culture. In the provinces, being “patriotic” or “educated” often meant denigrating one’s own culture, language and customs.

Little of what once existed survives to this day. On the marsh lands of southwest France, shepherds on 10-foot stilts once covered dozens of miles of heath in a day. Deserts covered portions of the interior. Seasonal migrations of masons and other skilled workers traveled the footpaths toward Paris and employment. Highly trained dogs in the north smuggled goods to evade taxes.

With much of the country transformed by modern agriculture, the French language imposed from above and modern transportation leaving villages to collapse into neglect, many of the curiosities of ancient France simply vanished into the slipstream of history.

Robb’s book offers a glimpse into that forgotten past, from evidence found at bike level in obscure corners of the country most of us are unlikely to visit. And for that meticulous research, he deserves a standing ovation. He could, however, have benefited greatly from a strong editor with an ample supply of red pencils, as the book suffers from occasional numbing detail, arcane asides and a less-than-transparent organization. But for those in search of a remembrance of things past, to paraphrase Proust, this is a priceless glimpse into history.

Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Random House; translated by Charlotte Mendel

308 pp., $24.95

As the self-proclaimed greatest living French philosopher and “prophet,” and with the chutzpah to compare himself to Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac, Bernard-Henri Lévy has a lot to live up to. Instead of doing so, in “American Vertigo: Traveling in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” (Random House, 308 pp., $24.95, translated by Charlotte Mendel), he presents a textbook demonstration of the adage that those who boast the loudest most often have the least to boast about.

Lévy, a prolific French author-activist, spends his time courting the press, pursuing various causes and relaxing by the pool at his Marrakech palace with his movie-star wife, Arielle Dombasle. The author of some 30 books, Lévy is breathlessly described by his publisher as no less than “France’s leading writer” and by Vanity Fair magazine in a recent profile as a “superman and prophet: We have no equivalent in the United States.”

Excuse me? If this is “France’s leading writer,” then that’s a sad statement indeed for the state of the French Academy.

Lévy was commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly magazine to travel the United States, in an effort to duplicate Alexis de Tocqueville’s own journey, made famous by his 1831 book, “Democracy in America.” De Tocqueville’s thoughtful observations about America and the American democratic experiment are among the most influential political analyses ever written on the subject. The book, in print for more than 150 years, is a classic of political literature and few, if any, foreign writers have ever come close to de Tocqueville’s trenchant observations.

The suggestion that Lévy, the playboy gadfly of the French intellectual set, could “follow in his footsteps” is a dubious concept from the outset, and the actual product proves even worse.

Lévy’s overblown style combines ceaseless name-dropping, merciless redundancy and horrific verbosity in one toxic combination. An editor could have easily reduced this entire volume by some 75 percent without losing a single important thought. Lévy manages, in the introduction, to launch sentences that ramble through villages, streams and forests without punctuation, pause, or even the suggestion of a period for nearly a full page. Whew. Is this mash-up of thoughts supposed to impress the reader or simply beat him or her into submission?

Worse, Lévy has the gall to compare himself, at the outset, with both de Tocqueville and Jack Kerouac. He would have profited mightily by setting his sights just a bit lower. Lévy set out to follow de Tocqueville’s travels and, with a handful of exceptions, followed his path. He devotes short chapters to describing what he found. From the monstrosity of Mount Rushmore to the foggy city of San Francisco, Lévy catalogs a variety of American sights, cities and movements. He devotes an adoring chapter to Seattle, in which he declares that he “loved absolutely everything about Seattle” (although he uncharacteristically manages to convey his thoughts on the subject a pithy three pages). But for all the arm-waving, the author provides precious little political analysis or thoughtful observation about his travels, America after the turn of the millennium, or its status as the world’s only superpower on a lonely nation-building mission to remake the world (or at least parts of it). The book reads more like a compendium of jumbo postcards written by a pompous European observer with a short attention span and an apparently straying intellectual curiosity. Surely, we can do better than this. France arguably laid the very foundation of American democracy — funding the revolution when there were precious few others willing to underwrite such a ragtag collection of rebels; contributing some of the most potent strands of political theory embraced by the revolutionaries; and, half a century later, contributing an astonishingly thoughtful observer, in de Tocqueville, to catalog the American experiment as it unfolded. Unfortunately, however, Lévy’s return engagement fails to provide any fresh insight. Instead, it serves as a rather dramatic reminder (at least for those intrepid enough actually to finish the book) that the value of an idea or an observation is far more often measured by its perceptivity or originality, rather than the lifestyle of its author or the sheer volume of ink used in its printing.

‘La Belle France: A Short History’
by Alistair Horne
Knopf, 485 pp., $30

There are few countries with a more fascinating history than France. In “La Belle France: A Short History,” Oxford historian Alistair Horne provides a breathtaking tour of French history, from its earliest kings through the Mitterand government of the 1980s.

Starting from Julius Caesar’s division of Gaul, Horne surveys the Crusades; the Dark Ages; the Plague; and endless royal succession, mendacity and extramarital sexual liaisons. Horne, no stranger to his subject, has authored nine prior volumes of French history.

Horne deals with the French Revolution in a single chapter, but then sweeps on. Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power amidst the anarchy of the Revolution. But he fatally invaded Russia in 1812, was forced back, and ultimately surrendered. He was banished to Elba, escaped, returned to power and was defeated at Waterloo, all within the so-called “Hundred Days.” From the Revolution to Waterloo took 25 years – a span of time comparable to that from the election of Ronald Reagan to today.

Internally, the restoration of the monarchy lead to repeated popular uprisings. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, seized control and declared himself “Emperor” but ultimately was defeated by Prussia, which forced a humiliating capitulation by the French at Versailles in 1871.

From there, it was a straight line to World War I, an utter calamity for France, during which she lost 1.3 million men. The United States, by contrast, lost 53,513 men in the entire conflict. Indeed, France lost more men in World War I – by a large margin – than the United States has lost in every war it has ever fought, from the Revolutionary War through the last soldier to die in Iraq, combined.

That’s no criticism of unquestionably brave American soldiers, but for much of the brutal slaughter of the Great War, they were home in Nebraska. How do you measure bravery? By sacrifice? By the willingness to stand and fight against all odds? By the war’s end, France was bereft of an entire generation of young men. That loss – 20 years later – resulted in a shocking disparity in birthrates. By the eve of World War II, four times as many militarily-capable young men were reaching maturity in Germany as in France.

Conventional wisdom would have it that the brutal peace terms dictated by France and her Allies led directly to World War II. But for France, humiliated at Versailles in 1871, this was a settling of debts. Unfortunately, not the last.

Like slow-motion footage, the book slows as it approaches the cataclysm of World War II. The devastated French sought desperately to avoid another war but devoted their attention to eastern fortifications and social unrest, rather than military preparations. The Germans, by contrast, quietly built a powerful war machine and lulled the West to sleep. When ready, Hitler sidestepped the French Maginot line and punched a 60-mile-wide hole through the French defenses, moving with astonishing speed. It was over before it began, with the French losing more than 300,000 men in the first six weeks alone.

The Germans were strictly instructed to be extremely courteous in occupied Paris, and it was only after they consolidated control that neighbors living near 74 Avenue Foch, where the Gestapo settled, were kept awake at night by the screaming from the interrogation rooms.

Some things are understood best from a great distance. French resistance to more recent calls to arms must be seen through the prism of its bloody history, and particularly its staggering losses of the last 100 years. As Santayana famously remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

‘Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March’

by Adam Zamoyski

HarperCollins, 672 pp., $29.95

Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia ranks as one of the greatest military disasters in history. The story has been told countless times and inspired Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”

But, according to “Moscow 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March,” much of that history has been politically distorted. Author Adam Zamoyski strives to set the record straight with an objective and comprehensive account of the ill-fated invasion. And what a story it is.

At war with England, Napoleonic France controlled virtually all of Europe, spreading the subversive egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the civilizing Napoleonic Code.

Russia, in 1812, could hardly have been more different. Controlled by Czar Alexander, Russia was a backward, feudal country whose leaders were threatened equally by foreign armies and peasant uprisings. Although allied with Napoleon, French trade restrictions devastated the Russian economy, forcing Alexander to confront Napoleon or face mounting discontent at home.

Napoleon had nothing to gain from invading Russia but felt compelled to teach it – and his many “allies” – a lesson. The midsummer invasion force was the largest army ever mustered. The French army, used to foraging for food and supplies, found precious little in the Russian countryside. Dysentery, starvation and dehydration wreaked havoc before the first shot was fired.

Although Soviet historians have characterized the Russian retreat as a clever strategic trap, Zamoyski painstakingly documents the incompetence of the Russians and their terror at facing the French. Indeed, the Russians retreated until forced to fight at Smolensk and Borodino, where 70,000 were slaughtered. It was a record that would not be matched for 100 years – until the Battle of Somme in 1916.

Napoleon continued his advance, forcing the Russians to surrender Moscow itself. On foot and horseback, Napoleon’s invasion force got further than Hitler’s mechanized war machine over a century later, but it had no greater success. Moscow harbored neither the czar nor his government and, indeed, was burned by the Russians themselves, leaving Napoleon a hollow victory. By any fair measure, he had won – prevailed in every battle, controlled sections of the country and seized the capital city. But the Russians refused to surrender, leaving Napoleon to ponder his circumstances as winter stealthily approached.

As late as the end of October, Napoleon ridiculed the Russian winter as a myth used to scare small children. Within days, the temperature had dropped below zero, the snow had begun to fall, and his error was manifest.

The retreat was almost unfathomably brutal. The French troops had no winter uniforms, and what clothing and boots they had were in tatters. With little food and burdened with looted Russian treasure, the retreat passed through lands already stripped clean of nourishment. And the temperature continued an inexorable fall, ultimately reaching 35 below zero Fahrenheit.

The starving men turned frantic – cutting chunks of meat off the back legs of living horses (the dead ones were too deeply frozen to cut). The horses, nearly frozen themselves, hardly noticed. The temperature was an implacable foe. Those who slept often never awoke. Soldiers were observed frozen in place standing, sitting or lying by fires. The Russian army, meanwhile, bungled several opportunities to destroy the French army. Napoleon was nearly caught at the River Berezina, which was held by Russians on both banks and circled by troops to his rear.

Napoleon sent a diversionary force south, then headed north where 400 Dutch pontooneers worked through the night to build two bridges over the river. Standing chest deep in icy water, dodging 2-meter chunks of ice, they worked as Napoleon sat on horseback and watched them die – and make progress. Although only eight of the pontooneers returned home, the bridges were completed and the French survived.

Of the more than 600,000 French soldiers who crossed into Russia, barely 150,000 made it out alive. About 160,000 horses perished during the invasion. Counting Russian losses, nearly 1 million people died during the course of the six-month invasion.

With Napoleon in retreat, the Russians followed and, just over a year later, occupied Paris. Napoleon was eventually overthrown and exiled to Alba. Although he returned, he was ultimately defeated by the British at Waterloo and exiled to St. Helena for the remainder of his life.

But the consequences of the 1812 invasion lived on. It is difficult to grasp the extent to which our world today has been shaped by the invasion and its failure. Napoleon’s disaster emboldened Russia to extend its reach into Europe and solidified German nationalism and militarism, with devastating consequences in the following century.

This is a towering history – a thoroughly enjoyable read that is worthy of the monumental scope of its subject. Zamoyski’s writing is vivid and, perhaps more important, he knows when to let his sources speak for themselves.

If one can complain, it is simply that Zamoyski gives short shrift to the consequences and enduring legacy of the 1812 invasion and its very real impact on the political geography of today.

When Napoleon died in 1840, his body was returned to Paris, where it awaited burial. In honor of the 1812 invasion, 400 veterans silently, but eloquently, saluted their fallen leader – by spending the night on the ground around the casket as the temperature plunged to below zero.

‘Memoirs of a Breton Peasant’

by Jean-Marie Dguignet, translated by Linda Asher

Seven Stories, 431 pp., $27.95

Jean-Marie D