A View of France from France by an Englishman, Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our second part of Terry Field's deeply penetrating essay on French history and society continues....

France, the French and Why Things are as They are, Part 2 

by Terence Field of Normandy

Another historical circumstance unique to France is its experience of religion, and what measures it has settled upon to accommodate the tensions that flow from belief. The replacement of the Roman Catholic church with lawyers in every town and city after the the French Revolution of 1789 was an expression of the rage felt by the French - or at least the intellectual forces whose writings had stirred the discontent - for a church that had allied itself with the forces of property, repression and injustice.  Strasbourg and church steeples.

In the new state, religion would be excluded from the life of the nation; it would be a private matter, and the church would have no power over the formulation of laws and the governance of the people. Embedded in the minds of the people would be, and still is, desire for the secular state. It would shine as a beacon of rationality, a light of equity and the deliverer of justice, untainted by the preconceptions of religion.

That secular life is a reality in modern France. How does it work for the French? I will return later to this.

The experience of Empire in France is quite different to that of the British. The French empire was not on the same scale as that of Britain, and the peoples it encompassed in large measure defined its character. The French empire was really centred on North Africa; a land quite close by, and composed, in the main, of Muslim peoples. Whilst France had some possessions in Asia, its political engagement was focussed on Africa, and of all its African territories.  Algeria was by far its most important, and demanding, responsibility.

France has incorporated some territories into its state as 'departments,' and as such they are considered common element in the French body politic. The application of the belief in equality is what France would claim as a principal driver in making this arrangement.

Given the close relationship between the French and Algerian social elites, the war for Algerian independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s simply ripped France apart. The trauma of the tearing away of Algeria from the French people cannot be explained adequately to a foreigner. In its way, it was as dreadful a loss as was India to so many British people who loved that country and its people as their own.

France lives with this; its effects I will return to later.

When considering the history of France, it is not possible to talk about France without looking at the two wars of the twentieth century.

The first war 'bled France white'. Millions of the bodies of its soldiers fertilised the fields of the border regions. The 1814 retreat from Moscow that resulted in the deaths of nearly half a million Frenchmen  did not have the traumatic effect the slaughters of Verdun and elsewhere had on the nation.

The villages of France found most of their young men never returned. Village after village lost half its population, as the men died, the women moved to cities to work in munitions factories never to return, and the land became partly abandoned for lack of horses to till, and for lack of people to sow and harvest. Old people eked out lives of lonely poverty and an echo of the joy of the Belle Epoque returned only slightly to the great cities.

After this, above all, France feared war; dreamed of its lost sons, hated the 'Bosch' and hoped, above all things, for better times. That those times did not come, that depression and stagnation became seemingly endemic caused a flirtation with communism and social democracy not in tune with the history of the conservative mindset of an essentially agrarian society.  The country was split down the middle; its politicians were entirely out of sympathy with the guardian of the State, the victors of the Great War, the bearers of the soul of the nation - the army.

The run up to the Second World War saw the army intellectually isolated from social developments in France, and it was similarly isolated from new thinking on matters military. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the French officer class were as antipathetic to social democracy as were National Socialists in Germany. Just as the French staff officers loathed their political masters, so they relied upon the technology and strategies that had proven successful in the past.

In contrast to Germany, whose newly developed general officer group looked hungrily to Britain and America for new military ideas and their application, France remained deeply rooted in the past. When war did come, the performance of the French army, by any reckoning an enormous force, was lamentable.

This was not simply a result of the fear of again being 'bled white', but had as much to do with both old military ideas, and crucially, no great antipathy to the Hitlerite armies. For many French, the real enemy was within. Extreme socialism was roundly blamed for the condition of the nation by the most senior commanders in the country.

It is not an overstatement of the case to say that the second war had the effect of paralyzing the French, since the country was culturally and politically split asunder, and many viewed Germany as a bastion against the horrors of communism yet to come. That events did not allow such divisions to became apparent to the world in no way reduces their potency.

The post war 'victor propaganda' has caused such extreme divisions to be removed from  public discussion, except where painful events, such as the behaviour of Claus Barbie, (who persecuted Jews) cause them to resurface. Certainly such matters are not discussed in the presence of the rest of the world. The shame, and the pain of it is a private matter.

The liberation of France needs also to be referred to. The presence of great foreign armies on the soil of France, even though they acted to remove the occupying power, was painful for all the French. The resistance in France was very largely composed of the communists. They dominated the post-war political space in a way not generally recognized outside the country. They held moral authority. They looked to the dominant military power in Europe, Russia, for inspiration, and their acquiescence in political life was required by all other political forces, including De Gaulle.    

Charles De Gaulle, the great general of the Free French in World War II and later President served immediately after World War II and again during the Algeria Conflict.

To assert that the social, cultural and political life of France from 1945 to the present is dominated by the ideas of the intellectual French left is not an over-statement. From Sartre, Camus, and so many others, the French formed the social attitudes we know today. The Socialists, who had so dominated events under Leon Blum before the war, returned in the political vacuum of 1945 and 1946.

The left created the agenda concerning employment law, labour protection and social protections. They did not have it all their own way, as the actions of the riot police used to destroy the socialist workers councils at Renault clearly demonstrated.

How can the polarization of France into communists and socialists on the one side, and nationalists and Gaullists on the other be explained? 

In part, it is unfinished business from 1789. France has never lanced the bad blood between the Grande Bourgeoisie and the inheritors of the sans culottes.

The history of radical social thinking that goes back to before Voltaire and Rousseau informs attitudes even today, and has encompassed the parts of soviet thinking that chimes with its own revolutionary inheritance.

There is a living and ongoing consideration of social values that does not exist in the same way in England and, we shall discuss that in the next post.

Next post, Terry continues to examine how history has taken France in directions very different from the United Kingdom.