One Monday in April, the editors of France in the World were preparing to launch their book in America. Then, as the world watched, French history happened. Notre Dame caught fire.
Amid global grief and shock, billions were pledged for restoration and Emmanuel Macron vowed work would be done within five years. But, equally swiftly, many asked why so much money should be thrown at an 850-year-old building, a monument to a dwindling religion, when so many in France feel neglected by their government, besieged by globalisation and nationalism, set apart over class, politics and race. Ought a nation heal itself in the present before healing a symbol of its past?
To Patrick Boucheron, a medievalist at the Collège de France who is the guiding force behind France in the World, and to the book’s English-language editor, Stéphane Gerson of New York University, such debate is familiar. France in the World is a major work, exhaustive, controversial and fresh – and entirely relevant to Anglophone readers.
History is always alive. The US like other countries is in thrall to its national myth. It is also in its third year under Donald Trump, who has once again defended white supremacists who marched to save a Confederate statue. In conversation, Gerson points to remarks by the author of a new history of America, Jill Lepore of Harvard: that in a time of surging populism, amidst domestic and international fracture, historians must not retreat from the public square.
France in the World has pitched its authors straight into battle. They deploy literary verve and narrative skill – Boucheron says readability was “important not only in terms of the pleasure given to readers, but as a political question” – but they do not present a conventional narrative, a story of the rise and fall of kings and republics. This is history with a whetted edge, set against established ideas, and it has duly provoked reaction.
The nearly 150 essays that make up France in the World are arranged under years but not only those – 1066, 1789, 1914, 1940 – that everybody knows. The authors seek instead to show France in constant flux, a nation among nations. It is a simple geographic area, stage or launchpad for endless interactions and migrations. It is also, eventually, a state, its people subject to political passions, sometimes subjected, sometimes subjecting others.
The resultant book is huge. It rewards dipping in and out as well as reading from start to finish. Its editors offer thematic paths through the aeons. They also refuse to follow accepted ideas of what should be included and what should not in a history of a country has developed, in Boucheron’s words, an “extravagant claim to speak in the name of the universal, as if France could encompass the world”.
“Oddly enough,” he adds, “the world has not pushed back against this.”
But some have pushed back against his book. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic, from left and right, have complained for example of its relatively glancing treatment of the resistance to Nazi occupation, or its scant consideration of the greatness or otherwise of Gen Charles de Gaulle. And yet, roused anger does not just raise fists. Sales can shoot up too. In France, more than 100,000 copies have shifted.
‘We wanted to encompass it all’
In slightly altered form, the book is out in America. At its launch, at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy on Fifth Avenue, Boucheron described himself as “an obstinate monolingual” in a multilingual world. That made two of us, so at the office of the US publisher, Gerson provides translation.
“Conservatives,” Boucheron says, “have accused the book of rejecting or falsifying the national narrative, whereas defenders of the book have presented it as a counter-narrative.
“But that was not our intent, because that would create an imbalance, as if we would leave French history to the others and simply content ourselves with some of the margins.”
He and his fellow editors, he says, “wanted to encompass it all, from Vercingetorix’s defeat against Caesar to Louis XIV and Versailles, to Napoleon’s coronation in, yes, Notre Dame. All of these moments make their way through the book.”
Despite such scale, France in the World grew quickly. Boucheron had the idea in the aftermath of terror attacks in Paris in 2015. The book begins in prehistory and ends in the office of Charlie Hebdo, at the Bataclan, outside the Stade de France.
As we talk, Islamic State has claimed attacks in Sri Lanka in which hundreds more were killed. In France in the World, Islam is a significant presence, from ancient battles, migrations and cultural exchanges to colonial conquests which spawned the tensions of today.
At the New York launch, Nicolas Delalande of Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po said he and other writers had attempted “to denationalise history” in a time of rising nationalism. Their success, he said, could in part be seen in their having prompted “some people to say there are too many Muslims in your book, and others to say there are not enough”.
In short, Boucheron and his editors and writers have produced a book that will be contested wherever it is read.
It was published during a French presidential election in which Macron beat back Marine le Pen and the far-right Front National. Since then, migration crises real or manufactured have come and gone, the dismal saga of Brexit has dragged on, Trump has continued to rage. The world is changing. But it has changed before. As well as a liberal, internationalist rejoinder to the forces of division, Boucheron aims to give readers a sort of a guide.
“It’s urgent,” he says, quoting “the first line of Stéphane’s introduction. The book, as its very title shows, attempts to solve a dilemma, or to resolve a false opposition: let us not think that we have to choose between roots and cosmopolitanism.
“Populism itself is a transnational movement. It’s connected. Look at [former Trump adviser] Steve Bannon traveling across Europe, trying to unite the different populist rightwing movements. Populism itself wants to create that dichotomy. It wants us to believe that we have to make this choice between the rooted populace and the cosmopolitan elites.
“But the book is about circulation. It’s about people circulating, it’s not only about elites circulating.
“Let me give you an example. Let’s go back to Notre Dame. It surfaces at different moments in the book: Napoleon’s coronation, De Gaulle being shot at there by a sniper in 1944. In the Middle Ages, 1287, it tells a story of a mason who is bringing the knowledge that he acquired of the Gothic cathedral to Sweden, where he will build a cathedral in that model. He was not rooted.
“Our message is that we can be from here, we can be from a specific place and proud of it. And at the same time, we don’t have to be limited to that. We can also be from elsewhere. This is a world history of identities.”
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France in the World is published in by Other Press