So near and yet so far-I

From the Revolution in 1789 till the Second Coming of de Gaulle in 1958, France had a uniquely dramatic history. In a two-part article, CHRISTOPHER HURST looks at this phenomenon.

IT is sometimes tempting to think that no other people could be more different from the British than their nearest neighbours, the French. It is in the way we think and act and look, and in the nature of our environment. Enter the central districts of Paris and one immediately sees and feels the difference. London has many charms, some hidden away, but nowhere can it produce the drama or glamour of the Champs Elyses, sweeping up to the mighty Arc de Triomphe built to celebrate Napoleon's victories; the Place de la Concorde; the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower; the Louvre; the Invalides; the two islands (Cit, with the cathedral of Notre Dame, and St. Louis); the national cemetery of P`ere Lachaise; the palaces, Elyse and Matignon, occupied respectively by the President and the prime minister (they have an air of privacy and elegance lacking at Buckingham Palace); the supremely smart Faubourg St. Honor; the many grand residences still in private occupation; and so on. For me the former royal palace at Versailles lacks soul - Hampton Court and Windsor Castle stir me far more - but it stands as the supreme European example of architectural bombast and royal extravagance (by Louis XIV and his successors) and a model which many lesser monarchs throughout Europe later emulated. It could be nowhere but in France.

The panorama of French history, political and cultural, since Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (died 1715), is unequalled in its inherent drama and its dramatic reverses of fortune. In the art of the last decades of the Bourbon monarchy one finds an exquisite refinement; portraits of effeminate noblemen and pampered ladies, fantasy pastoral landscapes, and furniture for which only a palace can be a suitable home. (What a contrast to the robustness of the contemporary English artists Reynolds and Hogarth, and the furniture and buildings of William Kent.) Yet this art is shamelessly decadent, reflecting the gross social inequalities that led to the Revolution of 1789.

And what a revolution it was. Romantics everywhere hailed the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, as the start of a new era in the history of mankind ("Blest was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven," said Wordsworth). The revolution lasted several agonising years of rapid change, war and uncertainty. Robespierre was the quintessential revolutionary - a brilliant young lawyer of burning conviction, known as "the Incorruptible". He was partly responsible for the Terror, which consumed the King and Queen, hundreds of aristocrats, and finally himself.

What could have been more symbolic of the new era than the revolutionary calendar - rational and scientific with "decades" (of 10 days) replacing weeks, and the months and days given beautiful names from nature (e.g. Fructidor and Germinal). "Year I" began on September 22, 1792. Napoleon reinstated the old Gregorian calendar in 1806. The Revolution's legacy was powerfully felt in North and South America and in the nascent Balkan nation-states (like Greece) that emerged from the Ottoman empire. To ancient tyrannies it flashed a warning. And out of its womb leaped Napoleon.

Like the Revolution itself he was in a class of his own - a man for all time. He waged destructive, costly and ultimately pointless wars, and ended in ignominious defeat and exile, but he is remembered in France and throughout the world as a hero. He was a military genius, whose campaigns are studied to this day, and his radical transformations of the French legal and administrative system have survived. Needless to say, he left an artistic legacy - in the neo-classical "Empire" style.

French history has never been short of contrasts. The Second Empire of the great man's nephew Napoleon III is a by-word for vulgar ostentation and imperialistic posturing, but it produced the drastic rebuilding of much of Paris by Baron Haussmann, which gave it long, straight vistas in a style that would have appealed to Louis XIV, and which are generally admired as typically Parisian. It was a statement about the self-perception of France - as somehow more glorious than other nations. This obsession was to recur with de Gaulle in the second half of the 20th Century.

But the younger Napoleon's career also ended in defeat and exile. Whereas the victorious powers in 1815 were happy to replace Napoleon I on the throne with a brother of Louis XVI, thus starting a period of reaction in Europe that lasted till the next wave of revolutions broke in 1848, the Germany of Bismarck inflicted the maximum of humiliation on France, robbing it of its two eastern provinces and proclaiming the king of Prussia Emperor of Germany in the palace of Versailles. It is hard to imagine what a similar blow would have done to the British psyche at that time.

The consequences of that defeat were more notable than the defeat itself. Paris was besieged by the Germans in 1870-71 for four months, and when this could only be raised by surrender, the Parisians revolted against the French National Assembly. Municipal elections were won by revolutionaries who set up the famous Commune government. The story is complex, but for 10 weeks the Communards ruled Paris, deliberately harking back to 1793, until government troops crushed them, killing 20,000. Thousands more were imprisoned or deported. For long afterwards the right regarded the Commune as a dreadful warning, while for the left it was a glorious forestate of proletarian rule; Karl Marx wrote a classic text on the subject, and socialist workers continue to make an annual pilgrimage to the wall at the back of P`ere Lachaise cemetery where the last Communards were gunned down. The thought of this happening in London makes the brain reel.

Next in this progression of luridly dramatic happenings we come to the affair of Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a career officer in the French army from a wealthy Jewish background, who in 1894 was accused, on deliberately fabricated evidence, of selling military secrets to the German military attach. He was tried in an irregular fashion, and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana. In front of a large parade in the Ecole Militaire in Paris he had the insignia torn off his uniform and his sword broken by a brother- officer. A photograph exists of the condemned Dreyfus leaving the court, and the soldiers lining the steps have their backs turned towards him. The French certainly know how to do these things. But powerful liberal forces were mobilised to campaign for Dreyfus's release, and the novelist Emile Zola published a blistering newspaper article famously headed "J' accuse", for which the government sued him for libel. In 1899 Dreyfus was retried and again found guilty, but in 1904 at a further re-trial his convictions were reversed. He was awarded the Legion of Honour and promoted from captain to major. The army had fought long and desperately to preserve its sacred honour, which would be fatally tarnished if it became known that Dreyfus had been framed.

The affair divided elite society in France between liberal, republican, anti-clerical "Dreyfusards" on one side and anti- republican, Catholic, militaristic, anti-semitic "anti- Dreyfusards" on the other. The controversy has never died, and it re-surfaced a few years ago when a move to erect a statue of Dreyfus in the courtyard at the Ecole Militaire where he was disgraced had to be dropped due to conservative opposition; and quite recently a book was published in France claiming that Dreyfus was guilty. I have visited his modest grave in the Jewish section of Montparnasse cemetery. On the stone are inscribed the names of Dreyfus, his wife, his son, his daughter and son-in-law, and a daughter of the latter who was deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis and never returned. This last discovery gave me a profound shock, and I was also amazed that no allusion to the affair appears on the stone. One thing which no one ever accused Dreyfus of lacking was dignity.

No review of the landmarks in the history of the French nation and the French national consciousness could be complete without dwelling on the supreme battle of attrition in the war of 1914- 18: Verdun. It was fought over a front of 15 miles in eastern France and lasted 10 months. The tragedy has a heroic grandeur, as anyone who has wandered round the Ossuary of Douaumont (as I did early one wet autumn morning, with no other person in sight) can testify. That starkly modern monument piercing the sky is like a cry of pain. Alistair Horne, author of a near-definitive account of the battle, The Price of Glory (1962), says that the death toll was "at least 700,000". In military terms, it may not have been completely fruitless; it left the German army exhausted, whereas a breakthrough might have spelt either a French military disaster or an agonising prolongation of the war.

Be that as it may, the legend of this bloodiest of battles lives on as a beacon of heroism and glory. A number of the French and German military leaders in World War II fought at Verdun as young officers. One such was Charles de Gaulle. But standing alone was the "hero of Verdun", the victorious commander of the French forces in the later stages of the battle: Philippe Ptain. Promoted Marshal of France after the war, he was destined to play a role in World War II that caused him to be tried, after the Allied victory, and sentenced to death by his own countrymen.

(To be continued)

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