Volume 30, Number 18 · November 24, 1983
Gloom Over Gaul
By Richard Cobb
The French
by Theodore Zeldin
Pantheon, 538 pp., $17.95
Theodore Zeldin is described on the back of the present book as 'the world's foremost authority on Frenchness' (Time magazine). This may well be so. But in the present context, it is an odd comment, for the author spends over five hundred pages arguing that there is no such thing as the French, that they are just like other peoples, and that they do not exist in their own right, at least as a collectivity. The author has also recently discovered the individual Frenchman through a great many interviews; and we are glad for him about that. There is a strong hint at the beginning of this lengthy exploration of the un-French or the non-French that his next book is to be about Human Nature. Dr. Zeldin has a way of laying out his claims in advance; but I doubt if any other historian would be tempted to follow him—or indeed to get in ahead of him—in such a vast, frontierless terrain.
Review, 2069 words
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