Big Cheeses
La Belle France: A
Short History
By Alistair Horne
Knopf; 512 pp. $30
As a true-born Englishman, I took Francophobia in with my mother’s milk —
or, at any rate, with my mother’s reflex response, when anyone mentioned our
neighbors across the Channel, that “they let us down in the War.”
This settled in my infant mind as a sort of
Homeric epithet: the French who-let-us-down-in-the-War. My
father was even more astringent. He spent
his declining years writing furious letters to the editor opposing British
membership in the European Common Market, which he believed to be a French
attempt to pick the pockets of honest Englishmen, and to obtain by guile
what Napoleon had been unable to gain by force. Some
years of experience in the world naturally broadened my outlook, but I still
came to Alistair Horne’s La Belle France bearing a good load of
ancestral prejudice, that load fortified most recently by my colleague John
J. Miller’s book, a splendid Francophobic rant titled Our Oldest Enemy.
I cannot say that La Belle France left me feeling any better disposed
towards the French, whose history appears to have been even more of a
catalogue of massacres, miseries, and betrayals than I had previously
thought. The book is, though, beautifully
done. It is literate, fluent, informative,
and often very funny. Above all, it displays
the “iceberg effect” that one wants to see in a book of this sort.
I mean, its effortless style of presentation
quickly convinces the reader that the knowledge on display is the merest
fraction of the author’s stock. As an
introduction to the history of what has been, however much we may deplore
the fact, an important nation, Alistair Horne’s book could hardly be better.
It is not an easy thing to encompass a millennium and a half of history in
roughly 500 pages, and one expects that a certain amount of the earlier
record, which is in any case pretty grim, will be skipped over lightly, in
the interest of providing full coverage of the modern period.
Yet Horne manages to give a fair account of
all the important medieval rulers, with 15 full pages on King Philippe
Auguste (reigned 1180–1223), a person previously known to me only
indirectly, from Bellini’s lovely opera about the monarch’s sequestered
wife. Henri IV gets a whole chapter, as of
course does Louis XIV. From the Revolution onwards, nothing of importance is
omitted.
Though the author is writing narrative history, not political science, he is
illuminating about the differences in development between France and her
rival across the Channel. Why did the French
never develop a robust parliamentarianism? Conversely,
why did absolute monarchy “take” in France, but not — never, not really — in
England? One key factor was the sheer size
of the French population. Horne notes that
in the early years of Louis XIV, France had 18 million people, compared with
England’s 5½, Spain’s 6, Austria’s 6½, and Russia’s 14. Another
was what the author calls France’s “prodigious combination of climate and
incredibly fertile land,” which permitted her to bounce back quickly from
national misfortunes. (Horne quotes Sully:
“Tilling the soil and keeping flocks — these are France’s paps, the real
mines and treasures of Peru.”) The rulers of
a nation endowed with great natural wealth simply have less need of their
people, or of their people’s approval, as the history of the modern Middle
East illustrates. They can be more detached
from mere facts, and may display positive astonishment when flashes of
reality dawn on them, like socialist president François Mitterand’s sudden
insight, in 1984, that “it is the firm that creates wealth, it is the firm
that creates employment.” Quelle
révélation! (Though it is not clear that
the rulers of France, even now, really believe this.)
How quotable the French are, though! Most of
the best apothegms are well enough known, even to us Francophobes, but it is
satisfying to see them placed in their historical context, and the author
never lets us down by missing one. Here is
Louis XI sighing that “knowledge makes for melancholy.” Here
is the Marquis d’Ancre’s widow at her burning exclaiming: “What a lot of
people to see a poor woman die!” It turns
out that Henri IV may not have said that Paris was worth a Mass, but it is
pretty certain that Talleyrand did scoff at the the Bourbons for having
learned nothing and forgotten nothing. (And
the old cynic was still at hand 15 years later when the beleaguered Charles
X groaned: “I see no middle way between the throne and the scaffold.”
Talleyrand: “Your Majesty forgets the
post-chaise!”) Here is Napoleon describing
sexual love as “an exchange of perspirations.” Here
is an anonymous guest at the grand ball held to kick off the Algerian
conquest, telling the Duc d’Orléans that “we are dancing on a volcano.”
Here is Charles de Gaulle wondering how he
could be expected to govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese...
And so on. Seeing these quotes in
context is the milder sort of pleasure, the pleasure of the familiar, but
Horne was right to put them all in.
You can’t please everyone, of course. My own
pet peeve is that the author did not give over a page or two to France’s
brilliant mathematical tradition — the principal reason, so far as I am
concerned, for thinking that France has not been a complete waste of time
and space. Until the rise of the Germans in
the 19th century, France practically owned math. Augustin-Louis
Cauchy’s entry in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography covers 17
pages, the same as Gauss’s. (And Cauchy was
a great reactionary, as well as a great mathematician.) This
magnificent tradition reaches far back, too. The
flamboyantly gay Henri III, who reigned 1574–89, cannot be counted one of
France’s more serious-minded monarchs, given as he was to showing up at
court functions in drag; but he enjoys the imperishable glory of having
employed François Viète, the greatest trigonometrist of the age, and the
inventor of modern algebraic symbolism. A
brief mention wouldn’t have gone amiss.
All in all, though, this is a fine book, the perfect thing for anyone whose
knowledge of French history is fragmentary, and who would like to see the
fragments set in place in an instructive and entertaining narrative.
La Belle France is a most enjoyable
read, written by a scholar filled with love for his subject, who yet wears
his learning lightly.
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