France 1848-1945

"It’s not really a book where you’re meant to read the whole thing. It’s a good bedside book, very easy to dip into. It has all kinds of strange juxtapositions. The volume I’ve got here on my desk is called “Taste and Corruption”. If you turn to the contents page it’s divided into “Good and Bad Taste”, “Conformity and Superstition”, “Fashion and Beauty”, “Newspapers and Corruption”, “Science and Comfort”, “Happiness and Humour”, “Eating and Drinking” and “Guide to Further Reading.” It’s deliberately eccentric in its approach or it’s a particular kind of approach to French history, a kind of cultural/social approach that revolves a lot around the peculiar juxtaposition of different things. It’s a very stimulating book to read. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It struck me when I was doing the list that a lot of my books were published in the 1970s. Looking back, that was a time of intellectual ferment. Zeldin’s book is an exciting book. I can remember reading it as an undergraduate and it was almost like punk rock—I thought, ‘I didn’t know you were allowed to do this.’ It was so different from everything else one read. It was so conspicuously useless for the purpose of passing exams. It was also a book that begins with this rather apocalyptic view that history itself is no longer being written in a conventional way. It’s as if Zeldin is saying, ‘This is the last throw of how you might write history.’ Looking back it’s ironic. Zeldin said, ‘Now people look for their general explanations to sociology’, but actually throughout the 1980s, there was a huge revival of straight narrative history. Very few people, I think, would look to sociology for big, general explanations now. Nonetheless, it was as if the historical profession was cornered, and he was coming out fighting. That’s one of the things that makes it exciting. You could find it, but it’s all in strange places. If you want to know about Vichy it’s under “Gerontocracy.” He himself says that you don’t have to read the book in order."