David Frum Casts Critical Eye On Colin Jones's History of France
By David Frum
"The Great Nation is hailed by its publisher as the first single-volume history of 18th-century France in English in 40 years. That's a pretty remarkable claim, but it's not the reason I bought the book. I bought it because it was written by Colin Jones, whose delightful history of the city of Paris I read and praised earlier this summer.
"As scholarship, The Great Nation represents an even more impressive achievement than Jones' history of Paris. The book takes its place in Penguin's projected new multivolume history of France (as far as I can tell from the Penguin site, it is the only volume as yet published), and it attempts to synthesize a generation of scholarship in multiple languages.
"Perhaps for that reason, The Great Nation is alas not only far less enjoyable than Jones's history of Paris, but oddly, far less useful. Over the past four decades, French history has turned away from high politics to a close study of local social realities. Under the influence of the structuralist 'Annales' school, recent French history writing has tended to emphasize the supposedly unchanging (or only very slowly changing) dynamics of everyday life rather than dramatic events in far-off capitals. Marginal persons — slaves, poor peasants, subordinated women — have been spotlighted as central characters."
