A disappointing collection of thematic overviews that fails to get at France’s approach to the great sociopolitical questions. The authors neither ground core problems nor suggest departures, but frequently trend toward sociology as well as left-liberal consensus circa 2000; the essays ignore Maastricht, fairly enough for a history but illogical in light of attacks on right-wing ‘identitarianism’.
• The long-term goal of the Third Republic was to build the state for plutocrats as well as bourgeois, never mind the Dreyfus affair’s ruptures. But radical democrats and emergent socialists found no common ground: democratic (i.e., liberal) socialism was ‘impossible’
• Fin-de-siecle governmental persecution of Catholics, led by Rousseau-Waldeck over 1899-1902, parallels Bismarck’s earlier efforts: the separation of 1904, undoing Napoleonic concordat, exposed the church’s dependency on the state. Despite the hostility, many clergy fought for France in World War I, earning some respite; in the early Fifth Republic, de Gaulle and other ministers again brought Catholics to the fore; there is no discussion of Muslim immigration
• France’s descent over 1815-1945 stems from demographic decline – there is no linkage to the Catholic plight – especially after Germany’s 1870 unification. By 1910, France was the world’s leading immigrant country, attracting Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and French colonials to work at large, industrial firms. Traditionally rural France, which contacted the outside world via the bicycle (presaging the Tour de France), finally succumbed in the postwar era to economic modernization – though small farms persisted, protected by the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, and the state remains the country’s largest employer
• Only after 1936 did France subordinate her foreign policy to Britain, and in the postwar era much her impulse has been to restore independence and grandeur
• In addressing the French Communist party as well as ‘committed’ intellectuals (said to ‘think in German’), the authors allude to obvious dead-ends but adduce no evidence of remorse. However, the Fourth Republic collapsed because it was designed to counter the extinct Communist threat; Algeria mattered mainly to the political classes; the Fifth Republic minimized the influence of the Fourth’s ‘notables’, for example by referenda. Mitterrand’s Parti Socialiste, succeeding the SFIO (Section francaise de l’Internationale ouvriere), wisely limit doctrinaire politics, mimicking the more flexible right, and so succeeding in 1981
NB: Barres: intellectuals are those who believe society is founded on logic