A country of ruins

Contributers to multi-volume national histories are usually straitjacketed, expected to keep to well-trodden paths. But Robert Gildea’s subtitle is ‘the French’, not France, and in the third volume of the New Penguin History of France to be published he wanders freely. Foreign policy, for example, gets short shrift. Instead, a chapter is devoted to the French view of foreigners. Mathematics, science and medicine are sidelined, but the treatment of women is spacious. The political chapters are there and so are the socio-economic ones. The political narrative down to 1870, awash with names, is a bit helter-skelter. Of little interest to the initiated, it may have green undergraduates reeling. The handling of economic and social matters is livelier, partly because Gildea makes no attempt to be exhaustive: no discussion, beloved of English historians of the period, of rising or falling standards of living, no mention of birth and death rates. The poverty of statistics has always made conclusions about such things tentative, to say the least, and Gildea relies instead, as he does elsewhere in the book, on brief lives, thumbnail sketches offered as exemplary.