A View of France from France by an Englishman, Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

In a recent post discussing the American election, an American living in England asked our Englishman living in Normandy, France, how France appeared to him and could he make generalizations on France as he did on England.  Here is part 1 of Terry's three part reply.  This first part discusses French history and how important English Common Law has been to the United Kingdom and the USA, and how such is sorely lacking in France.

France, the French, and why things are as they are, Part 1

by Terence Field

It is the easiest thing to put pen to paper and write volumes about 'peoples'. In making observations about a nation of people, little can be achieved without resort to generalisations on occasion.

Generalisations, questioned by one of the observers in this column, are intended merely to promote a conversation, and at the end of it all, I challenge any person to rely upon other than their general impressions of a place, a circumstance, people in groups or in general. That is all we have to coalesce the many small observations our short lives allow us.

I would submit that our subjective landscapes are the product of forces and experience unique to each of us. The mind creates its own reality, and outside there may be something really quite different. The mind, however is all that we have.

The wise confront their internal generalisations - their 'prejudices' as we may like to consider them, and spend their time continually re-assessing and revising.

Right, a corner in Paris

For good or ill, I would offer the following notes, on a people that I live amongst, and whose lives I have had the privilege to observe for some time now. Does France actually exist unchanged over time, to the extent that there is any really observable continuity? Indeed does any place so exist?

Not such a foolish question, given that one could equally well write 'is there any national group of people, who, over time retain characteristics that are recognisable from the mind-set of the people who occupied that place only a generation or two before'.

The peoples who make up France were, not so many centuries ago, not even the users of a common language. The French aristocracy used a language quite different from that used by the common people who served them; the Languedoc is a direct derivative of the 'Language of the Occ', and the Langedaille used yet another language. Latin unified all those who had cause to think, to own the great tracts of land, and to travel across the landscapes of the different regions we now call L'hexagon.

France has had a number of political manifestations in the last quarter of a millennium. It has moved from being the most populous single state in Europe, with a royal court that dominated the continent, and whose language - French - was the replacement for Latin in the lives of all educated persons in most countries, and certainly for all the royal courts of Europe, in which both power and control was concentrated until as recently as the twentieth century.

Change, and the sufferings of the French peoples

The five republics that have been constructed in France all have a single common thread, the attempt to cause political life to reflect the shifts in both power and fortune amongst the different groups of people that make up France since Napoleon. During the period from the dawn of the seventeenth century until the events of 1914 and after, apart from Britain, no great nation can have experienced both the intensity and breadth of upheavals in both national and personal life that France and its citizenry lived through.

This note is not intended to be a historical review, but it should be remembered that the France we all live with now is the product of the dislocations, and the extreme variation in national fortune that the French have know. To take but a few examples, the French revolution caused a trauma of  slaughter and reformation to entirely remove the power and authority of classes of people who had known stability for centuries dating back to the incursions of the muslim armies, and the wars with the English.

The settled view is that the French revolution is a piece of history, but its effects are still being played out; a Chinese politician, quite recently, being asked by his French opposite number of his opinion of the revolution, replied 'it is far too early to tell'.

How wise to put a context of long periods of time on the consequences of events. I live in a dreamscape of snippets of history from my own reading of the past. The past is all I - all we - have, and the reflective person takes his life time to grapple with what it all means.

The appearance of Germany, and the declaration of the Reich by Bismarck in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles introduced a new element to France. Germans, unified and all aware of the horrors that they had suffered during the Thirty Years War, and more recently by the armies of Napoleonic France, were determined to employ national awareness and strength to stop any such thing happening to them again.

Right, a bistro in Paris

They had learned the lessons of national self determination that Napoleon had introduced; the replacement of the ancient loyalties with those of the nation state   entered the consciousness of all peoples in Europe. Within thirty years of the birth of Germany, all of Europe had constructed national beliefs, beloved of the newly powerful urban middle classes, and sitting very uncomfortably on top of all this were the ancient monarchies.

As these national stirrings grew, and the rough-hewn autocratic 'projection of power' that such beliefs gave birth to developed, France was strangely out of step. It had removed that ancient class of autocratic rulers, its emperor had departed, and it looked to something new. It looked to democratic representation, and looked in particular to Britain as an example of that compromise between the past and the present. Whilst France had been a prime mover when it came to the rights of man, and the  championing of the social values of liberty, equality and fraternity, yet it was unable to achieve the depth of democratic representation found north of the English Channel.

It has never been able to do so, despite all the genius it undoubtedly possesses.

Why is this?

One example is the time it takes to develop a body of law fully reflective of the liberties of the individual. It is one thing to express them in high flown rhetoric, the sort that flows from the chamber of a national parliament, quite another to deliver them in practice. In England, and in America, a continuum of case law, common law, the law of particular and unique personal experience judged to be worthy of universal application, has grown up over the many centuries. America has been wise to accept and develop (from the English root) this precedence law, and apply its gentle, and thus powerful principles to the work of its own Supreme Court. Codified law is of course needed, but precedence and constant interpretation make for real, full democratic freedoms.

The great European countries simply did not, and still do not, have this sophistication. The precedent based legal journey is eternal; it never ends. As we are reminded of now with the death of the great jurist, Justice Scalia.

That this sophistication has not been possible in Europe stems directly from its inheritance the use of Roman law. France has applied  Roman Law, modified by codified law handed down from legislatures, and refinement provided in the main by a political process that is, perforce, both more remote, and thus far less subtle, than the methods of legal development used in the Anglo Saxon world.

The political and social life of both France and Germany has precluded both societies form employing the time required to refine the development of laws as found in the Anglo-Saxon civilisation.

This matters greatly, and I will return to it later.

Next post, Terry continues his thoughtful essay on French civilization....