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Even at the best of times, Charles de Gaulle is a historical figure that one can’t avoid in France. More than 3000 towns and villages across the country honour him with a street name. When Paris built the world’s most impossible international airport, there was only one name they could give it. And inevitably, France’s nuclear aircraft carrier bears the name of the man his military school classmates called “The Great Asparagus“.

This week France marks the 70th anniversary of “The Appeal of 18th June 1940“, and so Charles de Gaulle is even more omnipresent than usual – on TV, in newly-minted books, and on metro walls.

A few years ago, I visited the (now closed) Charles de Gaulle Museum in Bayeux, Normandy, and described the exhibitions as “creepy and obsessive”. Now, having lived in France a little while, I’ve come to understand a little better the influence that “le connétable” still exerts over the French nation and its sense of itself.  The obsession is certainly there, but perhaps it’s less creepy than simply necessary…

Whether you like it or not, many aspects of Charles de Gaulle’s “conception of France” form the backbone of the French nation as it enters the 21st Century: strongly centralised government, broad state involvement in the economy and French exceptionalism in foreign policy. For better or worse, every French President that followed him has  had to work within a political system largely conceived by de Gaulle when he founded the 5th Republic in extremis in 1958.

The event being commemorated this week, De Gaulle’s Appeal of the 18th of June, arguably marked the birth of modern France. The speech made by de Gaulle on the BBC that day in 1940 effectively created the Free French forces, and asserted that the legitimate power of the republic now lay with those resisting occupation, rather than with the collaborationist government headed by Pétain.

But in terms of re-establishing the French nation-state, de Gaulle’s stubborness in the face of his British and American allies was just as important as his fight against the Nazis.

Churchill and Roosevelt were constantly annoyed and bemused by de Gaulle’s insistence that France sit at the table of “great powers”, and Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of the monomaniac de Gaulle continued well after the war. In 1964, the General was famously portrayed as a Dalek in a cartoon in the Daily Mail.

Key to de Gaulle’s plan for the recuperation of post-war France was his insistence on establishing a national legend of  Resistance.  This week I visited Mont Valérien on the outskirts of Paris, site of the monument built by de Gaulle to the heroes of WW2, the Mémorial de la France Combattante. It was extraordinary to me to see how a monument that commemorates France’s triumph over fascism could look so, well, fascist…

But while De Gaulle still inspires awe, argument and occasionally derision in France today, there are some who are not scared to paint the Great Leader in a satirical light. Jean-Yves Ferri’s De Gaulle à la Plage imagines a cartoon Charles de Gaulle and his family on holiday at the beach in 1956, illustrated in hilarious and affectionate detail.

In some ways, de Gaulle has become immortal like Abraham Lincoln or Oliver Cromwell, a character who has become historical shorthand for a certain time period and a certain view of the world. Whether speaking on the radio from wartime London, cryptically addressing Algerian colonists with his Je vous ai compris speech, or lying under a sun umbrella on a beach in Brittany, Charles de Gaulle is going to be haunting imaginations for a long time yet.

Today is V-E Day. Place de la Comédie in Montpellier was cleared for a few hours of its café tables and lounging youths while the military paraded in commemoration of France’s “victory”.

Faced by ranks of braided motorcycle gendarmes, tricolor bunting and martial music, it might be easy to forget that the 8th of May 1945 was as much the end of a complex and painful period in French history as it ever was a triumph. The story of Occupied France is fascinating, raising many questions about personal morality, politics and memory.

After the war, with de Gaulle as president, the myth of a nation of stubborn résistants and a handful of cowardly collaborateurs emerged. This convenient simplification of history was perhaps necessary to underpin the rebuilding of a traumatised society and economy.

In the turbulence of 1968, a revisionism of the myth started to emerge. Max Ophüls’ film Le Chagrin et la Pitié was the first to explore the reality of French experience under Axis domination. Released 40 years ago this year, it’s still one of the best documentaries ever made, mixing perspectives of ordinary French and Germans with the recollections of political figures such as Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendès-France.

Later fiction films started to explore the dramatic possibilities of a morally grey period in the nation’s life: Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir les enfants, alongside Truffaut’s Le dernier métro address very directly themes of antisemitism, collaboration and loyalty.

Scene from Le Chagrin et la Pitié

Novelists quickly recognised that in reality, many French citizens were, at best, ambivalent about the defeat in 1940 and Pétain’s armistice. Irène Némirovsky‘s Suite Française is  full of characters simply trying to retain their humanity as the tide of history swirls around them. In this maelström, Némirovsky depicts courage, cowardice and indifference as all valid reactions to circumstance. Given that Némirovsky never lived long enough to view the occupation with hindsight, her perspective is remarkably poignant.

Robert Sabatier‘s perennial hero Olivier Châteauneuf faces World War 2 as a stubborn but confused teenager in Olivier 1940: his experience of war is one of survival and frustration, punctuated by occasional adventures.  There is little heroism in Olivier’s war: he only accidentally joins the maquis right at the end of the novel. In La Douleur, Marguerite Duras evokes how a woman’s humanist concern for the chaos that engulfed Europe is submerged by personal grief and uncertainty about the return of her husband from deportation.

The reconsideration of France’s wartime story is explored on TV next month with the first 6 episodes of Philippe Triboit’s Un Village Français broadcast on France 3. This ongoing series promises to recount the life of a community in Vichy France throughout the entire war period. The promotional material focuses on the moral dilemmas faced by the characters, and I’m hoping it’s going to be as provocative as the books and films that have preceded it.

Here’s a blog that could be worth following during the year: the Grauniad‘s jazz writer John Fordham has started writing a weekly ‘episode’ that will eventually span “50 Great Moments of Jazz”. Fuel for education, debate and controversy no doubt.

It’s likely that Fordham’s perspective will encompass a ‘British’ view of the music, and I guess he’ll include at least a couple of moments that will relate to the local UK  scene (will we hear from Nat Gonella, Humphrey Lyttleton, Mike Westbrook or Courtney Pine?).  And it’s very possible that Fordham will avoid some of the classicist/progressive debates (Stanley Crouch vs Dave Douglas for example) that have so concerned US jazz cognoscenti since the 1980s.

Anyway, this week he starts with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, (illustrated above) which is probably the only place to start if you want to post a recording each week.  By the end of February I’m guessing we’ll have cruised past King Oliver and Louis Armstrong‘s Chicago recordings, and hopefully have paid tribute to Paul Whiteman and Bix on the way through…

PS. Observant listeners/readers may notice that the version of Livery Stable Blues included in this post is NOT the 1917 ODJB version, but a much more swinging 1945 version by Muggsy Spanier‘s band.

The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb,
Picador, 2007 [Buy]

The Gorges du Tarn (Photo: Patrick Giraud)

The Gorges du Tarn in southern France are the largest canyon system in Europe, up to 500 metres deep and up to 1500 metres wide, cutting through the heart of the Cévennes. Yet the most amazing fact about this rather large piece of geology is that it was entirely unknown to the French government until 1905.

Until the 19th Century, vast expanses of France remained unexplored, inhabited by a peasant population strongly attached to their local pays, speaking myriad dialects and leading lives mostly independent of the elite minority ruling from Paris.

Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France describes how modern France began to coalesce into a coherent geographical, political and economic unit following the French Revolution. The story told by Robb is necessarily circuitous and complex, with many diversions into curious sub-plots that will suprise most Anglo-Saxon readers, (and probably many French readers too).

Robb is concerned to evoke the experience of the ‘everyday’ French citizen outside Paris, and illustrate how the new France (whether Napoleonic Empire or paternal République) not only brought enormous progress but also erased many lines of custom, territory and language that could be traced back 2 millenia to the time of the Roman Empire.

Shepherds on stilts in the Landes, southwest France

The Industrial Revolution arrived late in France, and witchcraft and Catholicism cohabited in the rural hinterland well into the late 19th century. In many places the village priest (always an outsider) was tolerated only because he was the sole person in the district who could read  – or speak – French.

During this slow emergence into the modern world, a majority of French citizens spoke languages other than French – including hundreds of dialects of Breton, Basque, Franco-Provençal, Alsatian and Occitan.  The introduction of a universal national education system in the mid-1800s was as much concerned with imposing the ‘civilised’ language of Paris on the population and elminating local patois as it was about implementing the republican ideals of equal opportunity.

The advance towards a unified nation occured in fits and starts, with many of the supposed agents of “progress” actually proving counter-productive. For example the building of new national roads and railways promoted growth of towns along their route, but actually served to impoverish and further isolate some regions, such as the Auvergne, which happened to be bypassed by the grand transport schemes launched from Paris.

Illustration from Francois Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en France (1830)

It is perhaps appropriate that it should be an English author who writes this story, for the English have for a long time had a complicated love affair with France. In fact many of the best source texts for descriptions of French landscape and society in the 18th and 19th centuries come from English explorers and writers.

Graham Robb accomplished his own exploration of France by bicycle, and he followed up his travels with 4 years of research. Despite 30+ pages of footnotes, the book remains incredibly readable.  As a specialist in 19th century French literature, Robb has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Rimbaud and Balzac (and wrote his Oxford doctorate in the field), but his writing is never laden by excessively academic concerns.

In some ways the entire book resembles a leisurely but thoughtful bicycle journey. Plenty of scope is allowed for detours to admire incidental details or episodes. Anecdotes and sideways leaps into ethnography, linguistics and cartography add spice to Robb’s storytelling. History is rarely linear, and when presented like this, it’s invariably fascinating.

After reading The Discovery of France, I was left feeling just slightly jealous, because Graham Robb has pretty much written exactly the sort of book that I’d love to write if I had the talent, time and brains.

Bilingual French/Breton road signs in Vannes