Some recent reading on the subject of France

Multiple visits in recent years to Gigondas and several other wine-producing areas of France have prompted me to direct more of my reading towards the country and its people. This is not to say that I was previously ignorant of French literature, history and society. As a child we often holidayed on France, I lived in Paris in the 1990s, and for much of my career I created advertising for Citroen. Thus I absorbed my share of Sartre, Celine, Camus, Maupassant, Robbe-Grillet, Flaubert, Voltaire, de Sade, Houellebecq et al, and read numerous non-fiction books on subjects such as Guy Debord and the Situationists, Voltaire, Rousseau and, of course, the Revolution.

This recent uptick in my reading around the subject of France has been very enlightening and I hope that sharing my thoughts might alert you to some books that interest you. For the purposes of brevity I have excluded books on the subject of wine. 

A load of Cobb(lers)?

Perhaps the most ‘difficult’ book among my recent reading is The French and their Revolution by Richard Cobb. This is not an account of the Revolution itself because Cobb was a social historian par excellence. As such, he focuses on subjects such as ‘The Officers and Men of the Parisian Armée’ and ‘A View on the Street: Seduction and Pregnancy in Revolutionary Lyon’. The result is 450 pages of dense, esoteric information – utterly fascinating or too much detail, depending on your point of view.

Still in a historical vein, The Conquest Of The Sahara by Douglas Porch is certainly worth reading. Essentially, it's one long tale of 'What were they thinking of?' as one expedition after another heads off into the desert, with countless deaths at the hands of the heat and/or the indigenous population. 

Cheese eating surrender monkeys?

Needless to say, I have read one or two books that cover WWII. Very enjoyable was Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorehead. This is an inspiring story of  how people of various religious denominations – but mainly Protestants and Darbyists – living in the remote Easter Massif Central helped to save 5,000 people from the Nazis.

Less inspiring, indeed profoundly depressing, was France Under The Germans: Collaboration and Compromise by Philippe Burin. I read this just last year and even I was shocked at the extent to which groups such as the unions and industry enthusiastically collaborated. The book also acts as a solid history of the Vichy regime. Highly recommended.

Talking of cheese, I picked up an Eyewitness Companions guide to French Cheeses a couple of years ago, with a foreword by Joel Rubuchon. It is very thorough but I keep forgetting to take it with me on visits to France.

Some fiction

You may have heard of Leila Slimani, the French-Moroccan writer who has been lauded everywhere from the New Yorker to What Car?* Her novel entitled The Perfect Nanny won the Prix Goncourt a couple of years ago so when I saw a copy in one of the ‘street libraries’ in Amsterdam I naturally read it. I can only advise you not to do the same. Even by the standards of contemporary fiction it is nonsense.

*Only joking, I don't think she has come to the attention of the automotive press.

Better, I suppose, but not in any meaningful sense, was Houellebecq’s latest, Serotonine. It is all about…oh, you know what it’s all about and how he tells the story, such as it is. Why bother?

Peasants and prescience

John Berger is not French, of course, but he lived the second half of his life in France, largely as a peasant farmer in the Haut Savoie. While there he wrote some of his best fiction, notably some collections of stories about, or told by, peasants. A few years ago I read one of these collections. It is called Pig Earth and it is marvellous. It also incorporates a very good essay on the essential nature and outlook of what might be described as the ‘eternal peasant’.

A couple of years ago I finally got around to Jean Raspail’s Camp Of The Saints. An impressive piece of work that offered a glimpse into the future, although one person to whom I lent the book thought that it fell apart towards the end.

Politics and ‘progress’

Not too long ago I read The French Right from de Maistre and Maurras. A thin and rather pointless book if you ask me, which revealed some very nasty anti-semites, although Maurras had some interesting things to say about democracy. I don't know why George Steiner was involved with this book. Surely he had better things to do

Somewhat unstructured but always interesting was The Discovery of France by Graham Robb, which I read last year. Broadly speaking it relates the process by which a diverse and disconnected France, in which half the population didn’t even speak French in the mid-19^th century, was hammered into the modern French state. As so often with such books one immediately forgets much of the content, yet one fact always remains with you. In this case it is the fact that in 2005, something like 36 French departements were home to fewer people than in 1905.

Oh God it’s Godard

As someone who has probably seen more films by Jean-Luc Godard than most, I felt compelled to read every word of Everything Is Cinema by Richard Brody. It’s a very comprehensive biography of this infuriating man, with detailed accounts of all the films and TV projects etc. That reminds me, I also read a short book about Agnes Varda’s classic film Cléo 5 a 7, which contains more new ideas than almost any film ever made. Sadly, we lost this great artist last year.

Further down the cultural ladder, I happened to read Francoise Hardy’s autobiography quite recently. For reasons I cannot recall the title is Despair Monkeys. Naturally, it contains a lot of silliness and when you go to YouTube to check out the songs they are mostly rubbish although I will always like Star and A Vannes.

Truffle trouble and Peter Mayle

It’s not a French book, but Truffle Underground by Ryan Jacobs incorporates large sections about the shenanigans pertaining to the hunting and sale of truffles in places not far from Gigondas. Very interesting. And disturbing.

And then there’s the dreaded Peter Mayle. I had always refrained from reading him as A Year In Provence was the only book I ever saw in the hands of the most intellectually and spiritually vacuous boss I ever had. (And there is some competition when it comes to the vacuity of my various bosses, believe me). What surprised me about A Year In Provence and Toujours Provence when I found them both in street libraries (obviously I would never buy them) was just how feeble and unfunny they are. What a racket!

Odds and ends

I read a book – not a hugely detailed one – about Cezanne a couple of years ago but I can’t find it. Just recently I read those parts of The Novels of Robbe-Grillet by Bruce Morrissette that relate to the novels of Robbe-Grillet that I have actually read. And of course one is always reading travel or history books by the likes of Paul Theroux or Andrew Roberts that incorporate France to some extent.

In that regard, it should be said the Ashoka Mody’s brilliant EuroTragedy: A Drama In Nine Acts is substantially about France, given that it was Pompidou who first proposed the single currency and the French who constantly pushed for it thereafter. Fortuitously, I purchased this book a day before lockdown and it kept me occupied for a few days. Everybody should read it.

What’s next?

I would like to read that new biography of de Gaulle. There’s a book on the pile entitled St Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West although I don’t know if I’ll ever bother with that one as I probably know all I need to know about Jeanne d'Arc. I really must read Soumisison, which will probably come to be regarded as Houellebecq's most significant book, if books are permitted in the future that awaits us. I will not be reading any books by or about Sarkozy, Hollande or Macron.