When you want to weigh on the fate of France, you might as well know its history, that of its avowed errors and supposed triumphs. If the Maurrassians awaited in vain the “coup de force” which would return “the real country” to its kings, they had the opportunity to agree with the past of the “national story” by some authorized bards. Best Seller published in 1924 at Fayard, the history of France, from Jacques Bainville (1879-1936), specialist in foreign affairs to the daily Action Française, remains the paragragon. Far from the polemical edge of Maurras (1868-1952) or the blood euphoria of a Léon Daudet (1867-1942), using a clarity of peaceful words (Michelet, surprisingly, is praised for his “right impression” Facts) and straight, the monarchist Bainville popularizes, from king to crisis, from battle to reform, French gestation. It evokes the emergence of a France still under construction, ideal in its principle and its extent, land whose advent is accelerated or delayed depending on whether the time is strict management or dementia, to the duties of the throne or at the reign of the street.
But what strikes the most is his vision of historical time. For him, “the life of peoples has fixed laws”, archetypal events which are updated over the centuries, the Dreyfus affair “repeating” the reform, the sling or 1789. reissued with the illustrations of Job (1858- 1931), the history of France, Bainville, is today due to Atlantis and the “place of memory”.
The year of grace 1923 saw Maurice Barrès out of stage (1862-1923) and born François Cavanna (1923-2014). I do not know that the director of Hara-Kiri and columnist of Merovingian times made his honey from the first or the work of Bainville. However, there is a point on which their agreement would have been full and whole, it is that “the reign of Charlemagne [was not] a golden age where men obey with joy” (History of France). It is in fact to the literary enjoyment of a delectable mess and a appalling charivari that the reader of the Carolines (1986) and the crown of Irène (1988). This “Carolingian diptych”, a romantic galimafrée de high -dress, takes place, the year 793, between digging of an absurd channel in southern Franconia and invasion of the Vikings, the Rabelais adventures of the Knight Renaud, his squire Bertrand and the Slavonne Tamara . Cavanna descends into the press to tread a sapid and gargling tongue, a big Frenchman who does not smell the rose, but stains and does wonder.
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