Virginia Rounding reviews Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 by Robert Gildea
The title of this volume, part of The New Penguin History of France, is explained in Robert Gildea's opening sentences: "On every generation to which it gave birth the French Revolution left its mark. A mark of hope for a new dawn, a new order of the world, but also a mark of tragedy, of a project that came to grief in anarchy, bloodletting and despotism."
Every political struggle of the French from 1799 until 1914, argues Gildea, a professor of modern history at Oxford, was informed by the attempt to accept and assimilate the Revolution and its bloody aftermath. Not until the First World War were the wounds finally healed - but at what a cost.
'An entire generation of Frenchmen "left a million and a half of its number dead in the field, demonstrating the strength of the French in national unity and finally burying the divisions inherited from the Revolution."
Between 1799 and 1870, "regime change" in France was so frequent as to become habitual. The final defeat of Napoleon was followed by a restoration of the monarchy, Charles X following on from Louis XVIII, only to be toppled himself by the revolution of 1830 and the accession of Louis-Philippe.
Eighteen years later, the so-called Citizen King was in exile and the Second Republic had come into being. This turned out to be particularly short-lived, with Napoleon III ushering in the Second Empire in 1852. The events attendant on its collapse in 1870 proved more traumatic to the French than any other of the upheavals of the 19th century, and so it's no accident that Gildea divides his book into pre- and post-1870 sections, with "War and Commune" in the central chapter.
After the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, there was a search for someone to blame. Various scapegoats were targeted, including courtesans of the Second Empire, who were declared by some to have demoralised French men and, by extension, France itself.
Gildea highlights a more serious example of prejudice, though, with far-reaching consequences. In 1886 the journalist Edouard Drumont published La France Juive ("Jewish France"), which condemned Jews for all the evils of the modern world; it became an instant bestseller, embedding anti-Semitism into French culture.
Decades later the French were still haunted by 1870 and in 1914, as war again began to seem inevitable, their great fear was of a catastrophic repeat. The Battle of the Marne, lasting for several days in early September, cost 250,000 French lives, but at least laid that particular ghost to rest: the German advance was halted and Paris saved.
This was the point, argues Gildea, when the French overcame their ideological differences. Men of all persuasions answered the call to arms and thus "ensured the survival of the republic through the Great War, which finally fused republic and nation into a single entity".
The length of a book's acknowledgments is often in inverse proportion to its worth; in this case, they are delightfully brief.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Theodore Zeldin was a formative influence on Gildea. They use similar techniques, abandoning traditional narrative history in favour of a more multi-faceted approach, often viewing large events through the prism of individual experience.
The individuals Gildea selects range from the well known, such as George Sand and Marie d'Agoult, through to the unknown apprentice mason or unskilled labourer. The result humanises the account and makes it more accessible to the non-specialist.
Other angles from which Gildea looks at his subject include literature (in particular, the realist fiction and social commentary of writers such as Balzac and Zola), religion (both anti-clericalism and "rechristianisation" after the Revolution), and the developments (and reversals) of feminism.
Each section of the first part is paralleled in the second - so that "Revolution or Consensus?", which deals with political change up to 1870, is matched by "Consensus Found", while "A Divided Society", which discusses the differences between rich and poor before and after the various revolutions, is answered by "Class Cohesion" towards the end of the century.
A particularly interesting section entitled "The French in a Foreign Mirror" shows how France's image of itself as enjoying a unique blend of liberty, culture and power was constructed partly by comparison with other countries.
Hippolyte Taine, travelling in Italy in 1864, demonstrated his sense of French superiority with his pronouncement that Italy was "a backward France", while Madame de Staël, in her book On Germany (1813), declared: "The love of liberty has not developed among the Germans."
But the French were at their most dismissive when confronted with their old enemy, the British.
Joseph Fiévée, hired to write anti-British propaganda during the Napoleonic wars, lambasted the English for their lack of civilisation and obsession with wealth creation, which meant they had to spend all their time at work. Stendhal, visiting London in 1821, took up the theme, joking that the ceaseless work to which the English were condemned "avenges us for Waterloo".
The English, he declared, despite the legacy of Shakespeare, were reluctant to read anything not related to making money. The far-ranging, original and very enjoyable Children of the Revolution proves him wrong.