THE TWO CENTURY WRONG TURN:

Triumph of the clerks: a review of The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Jonathan Sumption, 10/10/07, The Spectator)

The French nation is the creation of the state to a degree which is unique among European nations. It owes its existence to imperial notions of central authority preached to an indifferent population by the servants of the medieval monarchy and transmitted intact through generations of public servants. The revolutionaries, bent on eliminating older and more intimate loyalties and on mobilising the full resources of the country for war, imposed a rapid and forcible programme of integration and bureaucratic centralisation to which the population did not take easily. Nineteenth-century historians, like Michelet and Lavisse, added the great national myths and that sense of historical destiny which is peculiarly French. Roads, railways and broadcasters have done the rest. In spite of a growing interest in local history, dialects and folklore, modern France has become a remarkably homogeneous society.

Graham Robb claims to have discovered an older and more variegated France still living beneath the uniform exterior. Readers who know the country will be sceptical about that. But what he has actually written is something far more interesting, namely the story of how these ancient differences were gradually extinguished in the name of enlightenment and national unity.

Meanwhile, the bureaucrats can't even impose metrics on the Anglosphere.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 10, 2007 7:26 AM