A history of France, newly available in English, has shocked some readers by what it omits, as much as what it includes. Patrick Boucheron, a French specialist of medieval Italian history, organized the project after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. These shook a country already riven by xenophobia and anti-Semitism after the kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a young Frenchman of Moroccan Jewish ancestry in 2006, and related events. Amidst the turmoil four years ago, right-wing French presidential candidates called for a return to a sense of national identity through a teaching curriculum reflecting an insular France. As a counter-offensive, Boucheron asked dozens of historians employed by elite Paris institutions to produce brief essays arranged in chronological order. As the publisher explains, the book dynamically “conceives of France not as a fixed, rooted entity, but instead as a place and an idea in flux, moving beyond all borders and frontiers, shaped by exchanges and mixtures.” So interactions within the country itself and outside are offered, as when ambassadors from Persia or Siam appear at a French royal reception, or when Chile's President Salvador Allende, a hero for the Gallic left wing, was overthrown in 1973; all are highlighted as part of the nation's history.
The result, France in the World: A New Global History — a bestseller in France in 2017 — is lively, especially in episodes about prehistorical cave dwellers and agriculture, which read like lofty versions of historical fiction. The book is meant to serve as a reaction to the idea that there exists a single version of French history, and it concerns insular France. And it's hard to argue, both on the virtue of the book's content and also the success of it, that it hasn't succeeded in making that argument. However, it also raises important questions about what readers get out of this exercise. The editors suggest readers jump around between the essays, to gather new knowledge here and there. But if you read it through, in search of more than factoids, are you rewarded with a true history of France — or left with little more than a supplement to mainstream history?
There is a certain devil-may-care boldness in the choice of subjects. Few other histories of France devote a chapter to Allende, let alone the death of Joseph Stalin, on the grounds that the murderous Soviet dictator was loved and mourned by French Communists. Yet many French subjects of interest and importance are excluded.
One key story overlooked is The Appeal of 18 June 1940, a radio broadcast by Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French Forces, generally seen as the origin of the French Resistance to the German occupation during World War II. After a chapter on a Nazi-directed raid and mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police in 1942, neither the French Resistance nor collaborationist Vichy France is explored. Chapters are sparse for that era; we go from the French Front Populaire in 1936 immediately to 1940 and the official naming of Brazzaville, in what was then called the French Congo, as capital of Free France between 1940 and 1942. Also in 1940, the discovery of the cave paintings at Lascaux, an occasion for more prehistory, which this book does well and evocatively.
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