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INTRODUCTION France had wood, water and stone. To its early inhabitants these were the essential raw materials, and the land offered them in abundance. Less rich in mineral resources, it proved in time to have scattered deposits of coal, iron ore and bauxite. More important, its mixture of soils, climatic zones and different kinds of landscape provided the basis for a variety of agriculture that has been the mainstay of its economy. In shape a rough hexagon about a thousand kilometres long and the same across, France stretches from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, giving it a blend of northern and southern characteristics that can sometimes disconcert its neighbours. For centuries, the more stolid English have looked across the Channel with alternating envy and disapproval at this unpredictable, seductive country, with its flair for style, its dubious taste for the speculative and theoretical, its alarming penchant for revolutions. Where does its history begin? Popular tradition long ago fixed on Clovis. It was he who dispatched the last representative of Roman power in Gaul and went on to piece together a Frankish kingdom that had at least the rough outlines of what later became France. But only after five ragged centuries of Merovingian and Carolingian rule do we really begin to see the emergence of modern France. Once the Capetian monarchs have established their sovereignty, we can talk with more assurance about the history of a nation. The Hundred Years’ War against England left it drained but intact, and before long it was looking towards Italy for foreign conquests. At the end of the 16th century, after decades of religious civil war, the Bourbon dynasty came to the throne. Within a generation, it had set France on a course of expansion abroad and absolutism at home which led at last to the financial chaos, political exclusion and social inequity that precipitated the Revolution. Napoléon’s rapidly acquired empire was as rapidly dismantled, leaving France to weave its way through a chequered century of restoration, revolution, empire and republic towards the cataclysm of 1914. In spite of the trauma of two devastating world wars and bitter colonial troubles, the end of the 20th century saw France in confident mood. Its millennium celebrations, by common consent among the best in the world, reflected a country that was still, as it had been for centuries, at the forefront of European powers. For those living at the time, it is the political history of a nation that looms largest – the wars, the laws, the governments, the national triumphs and disasters. For those who come after, the perspective changes. In the middle of the bloody horrors of the Seven Years’ War, Voltaire published Candide. Its words of provocation still ripple across the world; but who cares now about the victories and defeats that in 1759 seemed so much more important? In truth, the impact of a nation’s history often has less to do with battles than with books. Measured in terms of the unspectacular events that create a cultural heritage, the significance of France’s history is immense. From the poetry of the troubadours and the architecture of the great medieval cathedrals to the dominant artistic and intellectual movements of the 20th century, France has exercised a cultural influence unrivalled by any other country in Europe. If we look for the forces that shaped our way of thinking today, it is to the writers of the French Enlightenment – to Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and the rest – that we must return, and beyond them to Pascal and Descartes. The French themselves have rarely been in doubt about their cultural pre-eminence, which is perhaps one reason why, at a time when the west has in general been eager to shelter under America’s umbrella and share its culture, France has tended to stand aloof. A healthy suspicion of American influence has marked French policy on a range of issues from its attitude to NATO to its stance on the Middle East, from pursuit of nuclear weapons to protection of the national film industry. France goes its own way. And this irritating, admirable confidence in the superiority of its own arrangements comes ultimately from a pride in its past. No one demonstrated this more clearly than General de Gaulle. France, he explained at the start of his war memoirs, had always seemed to him to have a special ‘France could not be France without greatness.’ The conviction came to him from his father in a manner that de Gaulle sums up in a single, brief sentence. Quite simply, ‘Il m’en a découvert l’Histoire’ – He revealed to me its History.
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