Peter McPhee

There is a popular image of the ‘Hexagon’ (the roughly six-sided shape of France) as a powerful, stable national entity with a confident, even overbearing, cultural identity. Colin Jones instead stresses France’s dynamic history as an ethnic and cultural melting pot and its shifting borders as a crucible of military conflict. The central thread of Jones’s engaging story is the tension between contested meanings of ‘Frenchness’ on the one hand, and France’s constant interactions with the wider world on the other.

In a mountain area of south-eastern France that I know well, the locals will often respond to a comment on the beauty of the valleys by remarking glumly that they are not what they were: the forest is expanding, they say. We might see reforestation as a good thing, restoring hillsides devegetated and exposed to erosion by goats and sheep, but to them it marks the loss of a beloved familiar landscape. This bears out a point that Peter McPhee makes throughout his engaging new book, An Environmental History of France: that people have an idealised image of French landscapes, perceiving them as beautiful and timeless. In fact, he shows, they are the product of human activity, most markedly over the past 150 years. In that time, the bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has been largely reclaimed for farming, the hedgerows of Normandy have been destroyed, and freeways and fast train lines have sliced through the countryside.

No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

On 27 August 1783, Jacques Charles launched the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). He excluded his rival Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier from the ticketed reserve. Then, on 21 November, Charles and another ‘navigateur aérien’ made the first manned flight, landing thirty kilometres north of Paris. Montgolfier was invited to cut a ribbon as a gesture of reconciliation in the name of science.

There are two powerful images evoked by the waves of revolutions that broke across Europe in 1848. The first is of ‘the springtime of the peoples’, when scores of popular insurrections overturned the conservative Metternich system of a balance of power between monarchical regimes that had ruled the continent since the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. In France the core demand was popular democracy. Elsewhere, demands for self-determination were linked to dreams of national unity in Germany and Italy, and further to the east to the desire for independence from the Austrian and Russian empires.

Bruce Dowding was born in 1914 into a middle-class family in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He won scholarships to private schools, including Wesley College, where he taught French during his Arts degree at the University of Melbourne. In January 1938, he departed to France on a travelling scholarship, guaranteed a position on the staff at Wesley on his return.

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an eminent Norman aristocratic family, with ancestors who had participated in the Battle of Hastings and the conquest of England in 1066. This was a family and social milieu that was to be deeply scarred by the French Revolution of 1789–99. His parents were Hervé, Comte de Tocqueville, formerly an officer of the personal guard of Louis XVI, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo, a relative of the powerful political figures Vauban and Lamoignon. The couple married in 1793; the following year they barely escaped the guillotine. Louise’s grandfather Malesherbes (Louis XVI’s minister and defence lawyer at his final trial) and both of Louise’s parents were condemned to death, as were her elder sister and her husband.

Histories of the origins of the idea of ‘Europe’ have probed the legacies of the Roman Empire, the concept of western Christendom, and the power of the ‘republic of letters’ in the dissemination of ‘Enlightenment’ ideas, culminating in the cosmopolitanism of the early years of the French Revolution. Anthony Pagden is well aware of this heritage but has decided to begin his own study with Napoleon. It seems a strange choice, since the emperor’s European dream was always of a French imperium, whatever the toll in lives; but it does serve to highlight the later triumph of the European Union in securing continental peace.