Clinging tightly to the grandeur

French HistoryAs the race riots that wracked France for two weeks began to subside, President Jacques Chirac went on television to speak to his people.

"We belong to a great nation," Chirac said. "Great through her history, but also through the principles upon which she is founded. A nation that shines forth throughout the world." With images of burning cars, schools and police stations still prominent in people's minds, the affirmation of French grandeur seemed misplaced.

Yet frequent allusions to France's "republican values" were interspersed with colder assessments, such as that of the centre-right UDF deputy Jean-Christophe Lagarde, who told the National Assembly: "These events are the sign of a weak republic, of the absence of political will, of a system that has run out of breath." Grandeur or spent force? Modern France clings to her great power status, but is seemingly incapable of integrating African and Arab minorities, reforming her economy, tackling unemployment or renewing a political class dominated by the same politicians for 30 years.

The pendulum between confidence and self-doubt is one of many French paradoxes which the British historian and academic Rod Kedward examines in his ambitious history of 20th century France. Kedward could have used "plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose" as a subtitle, for the same issues crop up throughout the century. France this year celebrates the centenary of the 1905 Law on the Separation of Church and State, mostly forgetting the fierce antagonism that surrounded its passage, and the fact that its author, Émile Combes, was a failed priest.

Secularism, as Kedward writes, "was firmly established as the central pillar of the 20th- century republic." Since 1989 and the first bans on Muslim girls wearing headscarfs to school, the debate has returned with a vengeance. But now the secular republic confronts Islam rather than the Catholic Church.

Women's rights are another recurring theme. When the socialist politician Ségolène Royal recently announced that she will be a candidate for the presidency in 2007, her fellow socialists mocked her; one asked who would look after Royal's four children.

The National Assembly refused to even discuss the first proposal for female suffrage in 1900. Women represented 25 per cent of munitions workers and 75 per cent of staff in the Paris metro during the first World War. But it took another 27 years before they were given the right to vote, by Charles de Gaulle. Despite the celebrated law on parity in politics, only 6 per cent of French parliamentarians are women, putting France next to the bottom in Europe and 74th in the world.

Women's rights are closely linked to French anxiety over fertility. A national alliance to increase the population was first proposed in 1896. In 1913, a pro-natalist named Fernand Boverat said women who failed to give their country at least four children should be considered "no better than deserters". In the late 1930s, the Daladier government offered allowances for third and fourth children. With a fertility rate of 1.9 children per French woman, France now ranks second to Ireland in the EU. But old fears die hard. This September, the prime minister announced new financial incentives to encourage French women to have three or more children.

The debate between dirigistes and free marketeers goes back to the aftermath of the first World War, when economic liberals campaigned unsuccessfully for a US-style economy. Kedward's analysis of the French economic crisis in the 1930s is eerily similar to present-day critiques: "France was ill-equipped in both economic thinking and political willpower to face the lack of competitiveness in world markets due to outmoded, archaic habits and structure, including a mistrust of expansion based on credit," he writes.

French habits of work and leisure have changed dramatically over the past century. Workers first received Sundays off in 1906. The Popular Front established the first paid holidays and the 40-hour week in the 1930s. Today, the French work 35-hour weeks, enjoy at least five weeks paid holidays and retire at 60.

Perhaps more than anything else, France's attitude towards the outside world has changed. Kedward describes how a century ago colonialism was viewed positively, as a great and necessary adventure. Where France once saw opportunity, she now sees the shame of lost colonial wars, the onslaught of immigration, globalisation and the threat of lost jobs.

Kedward's prose is sometimes tedious, and he fails to convey the drama of events such as the assassination of Jean Jaurès or the Battle of Verdun. His tome is most valuable as an unerringly accurate reference book, replete with facts, figures and precious historical anecdotes.

Though Kedward is best known as a historian of the Resistance and occupied France, the passages on the French in Vietnam - with startling echoes of the US in Iraq - and the riots of May 1968 are the most interesting. He describes the communist leader Ho Chi Minh arriving in Paris in 1946, "where his charm, his ready reference to the French classics and his frail physique won him wide public sympathy and the sobriquet 'Oncle Ho'." May 1968 was the turning point, when the towering figure of Charles de Gaulle lost his hold over France. "Guardian of his own history as symbolic, de Gaulle made Resistance and Liberation into a fixture in the history of the whole nation," Kedward writes. "The sacrilege of May 1968 was that it asked whether this carefully nurtured history was no longer liberational but repressive."

Kedward ends his book with a reflection on French memory and identity over the past 15 years, with their raft of commemorations, books, investigations and trials touching on such painful subjects as the deportation of Jews by the former prefect and government minister Maurice Papon and the torture of Algerians by Gen Paul Aussaresses.

France's preoccupation with memory "was neither neutral nor innocent", Kedward writes. "It could carry exculpation or recrimination." Optimistically, he believes the fascination with memorialisation is "a collective act of reorientation, suggesting that identities should evolve."

Lara Marlowe is the France and Maghreb correspondent of The Irish Times. She has lived in Paris for much of the past three decades

La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 By Rod Kedward Allen Lane, 741pp. £30