Children of the Revolution: The French 1799-1914 By Robert Gildea Penguin/Allen Lane, 540pp. £30Children of the Revolution: The French 1799-1914 is a spectacular new study of the French by Robert Gildea, award-winning author and professor of Modern History at Oxford. As the title implies, the focus is on those generations of French people who lived in the social and political wake of the 1789 revolution.
Gildea's aim is to dissect the origins of modern French nationhood across a long 19th century, through fascinating analysis of the various movements that waxed and waned in the towering shadow of the revolution. In essence, this new study reaches far beyond the dates and events of the well-worn tale of 19th-century political history in turmoil. Unquestionably, the magnetism of Gildea's epic work of history is couched within its very human social focus, which swivels with ease from peasants to painters, from rusticity through religion, and from French feminism to its frustrations.
Gildea divides his book neatly into twin studies: 1799-1870 and 1870-1914. Each section starts within a quagmire of social chaos and political anarchy, triggered by the 1789 revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune rebellion respectively. The long century is thereby imbued with an acute sense of repetition mirroring its cyclical interchanges of monarchy, empire and republic. Both sections begin by charting the political struggle to emerge beyond a moment of crisis and to reconstruct Frenchness from out of the rubble. The focus subsequently travels far beyond Paris and politics, delving deep into the provinces, and even examining the image of France as mirrored in its relationships with Europe and the Orient. In the style of Theodore Zeldin, Gildea offers original, gripping vignettes, zooming in on memorable, cameo-like details, to illustrate the broader vision of history in the making.
The terrain covered is simply vast. This story starts within the revolutionary morass of 1789, travels via Gambetta's dramatic escape from the 1870 German siege of Paris in a hot-air balloon, and ends up with Catholic writer, militant socialist and Dreyfusard poet Charles Péguy dying a symbolically patriotic death in the trenches of the Marne. In his chapters on political history, Gildea depicts successive generations who strove feverishly to achieve the revolution's aims, while others sought anxiously to reverse its results.
Gildea's introduction alone will provide any student with a solid grasp of 19th-century French political movements, where tensions between rival camps and their political progeny resulted in a relentless succession of mini-revolutions and power changes: from the revolution to the Terror, through Napoleon's Empire, the Bourbon Restoration of monarchy (1814-30), Napoleon's "100 Days" of 1815, monarch Charles X, the July revolution (1830) and Orleanist Monarchy (1830-48), the Second Republic (1848-52), the Second Empire (Napoleon III), the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune rebellion (1871) and into the Third Republic. Despite myriad regime changes, each new beginning offered scant hope of progression, stability, or closure.
This book is teeming with anecdotes, gems and intriguing details. Complex tensions arise within French feminism where aggressive feminist tactics led to isolation from French men, from traditional "wives and mothers", and even from other feminists who did not want to sacrifice their femininity. Describing the shocking events of the Terror, Gildea records that hundreds of priests were bound and herded onto barges that were then sunk in the Loire estuary in December 1793. He later provides cameos of the influential curé de campagne and traces the church hierarchy's reaction to the interface of religion and superstition at Lourdes.
Typical of Louis-Napoleon's regime was Georges Haussman, who became prefect of the Seine in Paris in 1853 and immediately set about redesigning the imperial capital as might befit the capital of a great nation. The resulting broad boulevards, with long perspectives between monuments, were achieved through brutal disembowelling of the medieval city. Yet they comprise the stunning beauty of modern-day Paris. Similarly, for the modern reader, this history is peppered with current Parisian place names: Austerlitz or Ulm commemorate battles, while métro stops Ledru-Rollin, Gambetta, or Louise Michel celebrate great political figures of their day.
Two stylistic elements strike the reader from the outset of this book. Firstly, Gildea's tonal neutrality is initially slightly disconcerting. For a text that is crystal clear and deceptively easy to read - despite a challenging density of reference - the deliberate lack of a distinguishable authorial voice is remarkable. It means that in the Introduction there are no textual markers or signposts and few concessions to novices. Yet, through this very neutrality, the reader is mesmerised by the authority of the text. Herein lies the second stylistic trope, because Gildea's narrative is both smooth and enticing. Yet such easy fluency belies an immense wealth of erudition and experience, merely hinted at in extensive endnote references.
Aside from his wide-ranging geographical, political, artistic and social focuses, Gildea draws extensively on literary texts, authors and characters in a history that is equally at home discussing Balzac's Comédie humaine, contextualising the shooting of Flora Tristan by her husband, or depicting the icy reception given to a verbose Oscar Wilde in Mallarmé's literary salon.
Gildea's trajectory towards French nationhood is a road well worth travelling. Lacking the controversy of his Marianne in Chains, this epic journey traces French cultural memory from Joan of Arc and Vercingetorix, through the vast diversity of post-revolutionary ideologies, to the complex construction of a modern model of French national identity. Nationhood may be a nebulous concept, but Gildea's magisterial book reveals the roots of modern Frenchness on a breathtakingly grand scale.
• Síofra Pierse is a lecturer in French and Francophone studies in the school of languages and literatures, UCD Dublin. Her book Voltaire Historiographer: Narrative Paradigms has just been published by the Voltaire Foundation, Oxford