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A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France

This book is an important new study of how the terms of mainstream political debate have been transformed in France since the 1970s. With the end of thirty years of post-war economic growth, deindustrialisation and the impact of mass immigration from France’s former colonies, this has been a period of profound socio-economic change. At the same time, the intellectual collapse of Marxism and the inexorable electoral decline of the French Communist Party, coupled with the disintegration of Gaullism after the death of the general in 1970, have transformed the political landscape. French history since the 1970s has thus entered what Emile Chabal calls an ‘age of uncertainty’, and it is the aim of this book to show how the political language of the French political and intellectual elite has responded to the demands of this new age. Rejecting the claim, common to the radical left and right, that contemporary French politics has descended into a state of bland, post-ideological consensus, Chabal argues that the last forty years have seen the emergence of a variety of attempts to reformulate a consensual language of politics in the competing vocabularies of republicanism and liberalism. This focus on political languages as opposed to, say, traditions, is partly a way of avoiding misleadingly rigid dichotomies. Early in the book Chabal writes that ‘despite making a sustained conceptual distinction between a “republican” and “liberal” language of politics in France ... it is perfectly possible for political actors to use both languages at different times or for different audiences’ (p. 6). Although Chabal does not deal explicitly or at length with any instances of such political bi-lingualism, this point is well made because several of the individuals discussed in the first part of the book, which is dedicated to republicanism, as ‘counterfactuals’ seems to contradict his own past-tense definition of a counterfactual, which appears on page 2). One other point worth addressing is Black’s claim that the recent popularity of counterfactuals reflects a growing ‘awareness of change.’ This claim is certainly preferable to the insistence of critics that it is a symptom of ‘conservative antimodernism’ or ‘fashion for irrationality’ (p. 181). Yet the pace of change was no less perceived by westerners a century ago, when counterfactuals were far less common. One would like to see Black pay more attention to the role played by the demise of metanarratives, whose teleological orientation once directed attention towards confident futures, but which have lost credibility since the dawn of our postmodern era. All in all, Black’s study never fails to fascinate in discussing the many ways in which counterfactuals are crucial for historical understanding. While its balance is at times uneven, and while it poses many more questions about ‘what if ’ scenarios than it can possibly answer, it is an indispensable defence of counterfactual history and a convincing plea for ‘pluralism in interpretation’ (p. 19) that all historians would do well to heed.