Looking fondly across the Channel

BRITISH historian Alistair Horne has undertaken an impossible job and done pretty well with it. After a lifetime of writing a shelf of fine books about aspects of French history, he has in “La Belle France” attempted to tell in fewer than 500 pages the story of the whole country over the last 2,000 years.

There will be quibbles, nits small and large to pick. Overall, though, Horne’s explication of -- and hymn to -- his second country can serve as a useful and charming introduction to a nation that has oh-so-definitely helped make the modern world what it is. The Anglo-Saxons (as the French call us and the British) may fuss and fret, but we look upon the world through eyes partly, and undeniably, French.

We are in thrall to that particular and happy French blend of reason and sensibility that from the Enlightenment through the artists of the 19th and 20th centuries gives both philosophical edge and sensuous grace to the perceptions of even those of us who are not French. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States “the indispensable nation.” In the West that title is better deserved by France.

After a brief nod to Julius Caesar, Horne begins his story conventionally in the trackless wastes of what it is no longer polite to call the Dark Ages.

His tale picks up as the rich tapestry is lifted to display France’s entry into the Renaissance, and from then until the present he does not let you down. Like the country and its people the narrative is knotted and complex.

The reader should be warned that this is a history of France by an English historian, not a French one. It is, as one might expect, more descriptive than analytical.

Such analysis as Horne presents is more conventional than original. Thus he states the truism -- but truisms are after all true -- that the revolution of 1789 left issues that are unresolved in France to this day: class, governance, the division of the pie, the very meaning of what it is to be French.

Does that definition, in the spirit of universal liberty proclaimed by the revolution, include the 5 million Muslims, many from the former colonies, who now dwell in the home country? Horne does not dig deeply into the question.

Nor does he devote much space to the details of the social history of the common people. As he notes, this kind of history was practically invented and promoted by the French historians Marc Bloch and Georges Lefebvre and its leading living practitioner, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. This approach was the one taken by Simon Schama in “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution.”

Nonetheless Horne does a service in helping the reader navigate the complexities of French history in the modern world, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, where he sketches the main lines of plot and major characters with clarity.

It should be said that “La Belle France” is a handsomely printed book with four useful maps and 24 pages of arresting illustrations, many of them in good color. The first is of a charming equestrian statuette of Charlemagne from the 9th century; the last is a touching photograph of Francois Mitterrand’s beautiful mistress and their daughter together at his 1996 funeral.

This is one of those periods in which official American relations with France, as so often since the turbulent events of the late 18th century, are not as warm as they could be.

It is therefore most useful to have a level-headed Englishman’s brief look at the history of this, yes, truly indispensable and unmistakably one-of-a-kind nation.

Anthony Day, a former editor of The Times editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.