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Ten Events to Understand Contemporary France

High school kids know or don't know important things about history, and I'd give myself a concussion every day if I banged my head on my desk in disbelief. I might be happy if they knew of the revolution, that it had something to do with defining democracy and liberty. Undergraduates should know more; too bad the university won’t always compel them to learn it. David Gelernter has more faith in our high school and college graduates: they should know the Dreyfus Affair!

Matt Yglesias feels that the Dreyfus affair is too obscure.

But seriously, the Dreyfus Affair would fall pretty low on my list of "need to know" historical events. ... But it makes perfect sense for lots of people's historical knowledge to not be oriented to these things. There's only so much you can expect a given person to be well-informed about and the sort of thing that I (and, apparently, Gelertner) happen to think is interesting isn't obviously the most important part of the human saga.

Never mind that it is probably the most significant event in Modern Jewish history, after the Holocaust and founding of Israel. The Dreyfus Affair carries deep significance for gauging attitudes on ethnicity, religion, gender, and civil rights. I have used it numerous times to explain ethnic unrest and the limits of tolerance. It is more than a lens from which to see attitudes and opinions; Dreyfus significantly shaped political alignments and ideas about secularism and assimilation.

That got me thinking about what I would want people to know about French history: not in the sense of having a broad understanding of the past four hundred or more years, but enough to understand contemporary issues. I also thought about why French history is current and relevant.

So here is my list, in order, of ten things I would teach someone about French history to help them understand contemporary France:

La Revolution
Liberation
Dreyfus Affair
Bonapartism, round II
Making the Versailles Court
War in Algeria
Code Napoleon
Ruhr Crisis
Franco-German Rapprochement
1914

I think that if I could get students to understand these ten events, they would have an excellent grasp of French politics, culture and society. Looking at the list, I realize that knowledge of French history is not valued as much as it used to be. The Liberation is probably better known than the Revolution, more for de Gaulle than anything else, but I can expect no awareness of anything else on the list. And I can tell that class sizes have shrunk in recent years as interest has declined.

What France does and why it are questions that are bandied about so much that our understanding of French (political) history ought to be deeper. Why does France insist on alliances, cling so closely to Germany, deploy troops to some parts of the world and not others? ‘What’s wrong with France’ is discussed so much in conservative circles that ‘what happened to make this state of affairs’ should be more familiar.

Posted on Monday, January 2, 2006 at 12:59 PM | Comments (17) | Return

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