Soldiers Who Made France

FRANCE AND THE FRENCH: A Modern History.

By Rod Kedward. Overlook. 741 pp. $35

The remarkable feature of French history in the last 30 years is that it has ceased to hinge upon soldiers. French politics in the first two-thirds of the 20th century were very largely defined by Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Marshal Henri Pétain, and General Charles de Gaulle, and the intense loyalties and hostility they variously inspired. The importance of these three soldiers reflected the extraordinary role that the French army, known as the school of the nation, played in the popular imagination and political life. Conscription meant that the army became the great shared experience of Frenchmen, the institution in which Bretons and Provençals and Parisians learned a common language and culture.

The false accusations of espionage against Dreyfus starting in 1894 were only on the most visible level about injustice and anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus case also represented another outbreak of the argument that had divided France since the Revolution of 1789. Was the army the custodian of the nation, timeless and Roman Catholic and resting atop a deep monarchical tradition, or of the Republic, secular and modern and democratic? Soon after Dreyfus was cleared of all charges in 1906 came the Republic’s revenge. The ministry of war began keeping secret dossiers on each officer’s religious beliefs and practices. A Mass-going officer would find his promotions blocked, whereas a staunch and anticlerical republican could rise through the ranks.

Purged and divided, this political punching bag of an army then faced the industrialized slaughter of World War I, in which Pétain made his name defending Verdun. The troops held on, just. But even America’s entry into the war in April 1917 could not avert the sullen mutinies of that summer by an exhausted army that could no longer sustain the monstrous losses of doomed attacks, and Pétain again saved France and her army, this time by suspending offensives for the rest of the year and allowing morale to recover. The consequent status of national hero brought him out of retirement when the Germans returned in 1940—but after France’s defeat, Pétain became the figurehead of the puppet Vichy regime, a role that proved curiously congenial to the deeply conservative old man. He relished the Vichy slogan “Family, Country, Work,” chosen in deliberate opposition to the “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of the Republic.

So, having saved France in 1917, Pétain betrayed her in 1940—this was the first of the myths established by France’s next essential soldier, de Gaulle. Like his myth of a widespread and self-generated Resistance, it was only partly true. The old division between a France for and against the Revolution, for and against Dreyfus, revived under Pétain. At least until late 1943, when the Nazis began losing the war, the Vichy regime was rather more popular, and the Resistance very much more marginal (and very much more dependent on British arms and inspiration) than de Gaulle later insisted.

In peacetime, de Gaulle saved a kind of democracy by becoming a kind of dictator. He sought to reconcile those deep French divisions by inventing a new constitution for his Fifth Republic, one that combined republican form and monarchical powers. He preferred plebi­scites to elections and abjured political parties. And, aside from the dreadful Algerian War, he was lucky. His presidency, lasting from 1958 to 1969, overlapped with les trente glorieuses, 30 years of economic growth. His successors have labored instead under les trente piteuses, 30 years of relative stagnation.

Rod Kedward is a leading historian of the Resistance, and his book comes trailing almost worshipful reviews in Britain. A skillful chronicler of Dreyfus, Pétain, and de Gaulle, he is also marvelous on social change and intellectual life. He is splendid, too, on the selective and delayed French memory, and the ways that the collaborations of Vichy and the torture of Algeria have recently returned to haunt a chastened France. He presents a France torn and yet also defined by competing identities and differing narratives and realms of memory, an approach that leans on historian Pierre Nora’s celebrated divisions among the traditions of the Republic, the Nation, and les France, the last an almost untranslatable notion of a single France com­posed of many different elements.

Kedward concludes that “the identity sought by France within Europe had long become inseparable from attitudes to the global market economy,” which is to say that one way or another, France’s future as a nation is increasingly being subordinated to the grander narratives of Europe and of globalization. But at least the soldiers finally seem to have faded from the picture, and President Jacques Chirac’s recent decision to end conscription is taking the army from the central role in national life that it has enjoyed and en­dured since Napoleon.

—Martin Walker