France in the New Century

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1999 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

John Ardagh. Viking. [pounds]20.00.757 pages. ISBN 0-67088360-3.

This is not a book of predictions, but a survey of France in the latter half of the twentieth century. John Ardagh's ability to know and understand France is matched by his powers of acute perception and narrative command. He has an eye for telling detail, and a sense of perspective so that a complex way of life is revealed as it is, living and changing before a watchful observer's vantage.

It's tempting to see France casually as sophisticated Paris with charming rural hinterlands. Give or take a new autoroute or glass pyramid, France doesn't seem to change over the years. Gendarmes continue to patrol the boulevards, and the chateaux yield their vintages. Certainly the continuities of French culture are strong. But there are complex undercurrents. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic brought stability and fluidity (against general expectations).

But France is potentially volatile. Fascism continues to threaten all the gains of the years since the Liberation. With its aberrant ultra-nationalism and sacrilegious use of Christian iconography, the Front National is too powerful to be dismissed.

No-one who saw President Chirac's appeal to the nation in March 1998 can feel entirely at ease, given the possible scenario ahead. It's essential that de Gaulle's mistake is not repeated. The rising generation of talent must not be ignored. If a liberal culture is to survive it needs its sympathetic elite.

Among the hopeful signs noted by John Ardagh is the growth of the cafe-philosophique movement. In the relaxed atmosphere of a bar serious ideas are discussed. The local cafe philo is open to all, and there are many throughout France. Hearts and minds are being won for books and ideas, against the mindless intrusions of either global media trash or le Pen's insensitive nonsense.

The rebels of 1968 accused the established order of lacking imaginative responses to the flow of society. The charge was levelled widely, and not merely at the governing party. The search for cultural community has given birth to successive waves of artistic and intellectual movements with international influence. The strength of French culture is in its fluid boundaries. When an idea wins hearts and minds in France it can be heard everywhere within the fibre of a common culture.

John Ardagh reminds us that the cohesive forces include a prevalent Catholicism. Even the rationalist acknowledges this. Barthes in his search for meaning through significant detail (and witness his influence on French film) is merely one instance of a thinker in debate with an absent God. His quest is iconographic and not the least sceptical.

The shaping of society will continue. That is the only certainty: the pattern is not determined. Wholly unforeseen events and characters will change all possible predictions, what we have is history, and this is a remarkable one.

France is often well reported in Britain, more so than one might think. John Ardagh is not fighting a lone battle, although he rightly and regrettably records the prejudice and ignorance which distort the picture. Here is an essential antidote, a source-book of undeniable fact persuasively narrated.

GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL