France on the Brink

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

There are more facts and stories in Fenby's primer on what ails France than there are bubbles in a magnum of champagne. Fenby, a British journalist who reported from France for 30 years, methodically and relentlessly undermines France's notion of itself. Most of the critiques are not novel (we know that not nearly as many French people belonged to the Resistance as claim they did), but they have never been collected in one place with such remarkable detail and insight. Fenby's most biting criticism is reserved for the rampant corruption in former president Mitterrand's socialist regime, which publicly eschewed the lure of money while privately putting cash in the pockets of its loyal followers. Fenby is especially trenchant when writing about France's blindness to the dark side of its soul that permits the racist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen to consistently garner between 10% and 20% of the vote in regional elections. Even Fenby's guardedly optimistic conclusion reads like forced cheer: that the "cohabitation"--the term used by the French to describe a regime in which the prime minister and the president belong to different parties--of France's current government could force France's warring factions to cooperate in the salvation of their country. Fenby's fear is that France--in its nostalgia for its cultural glory, in its obsolete insistence on heavy-handed government regulation, in its Gaullist exceptionalism--is ill-prepared to take its place in a unified Europe. Observant and knowledgeable, Fenby tops off his sober tour de France by revealing that, today, more fois gras is made in Eastern Europe than in the Dordogne region that made it famous. (July) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This is a fascinating, provocative, and highly readable book that should appeal to all those interested in contemporary French society and culture. The author, a well-known British journalist who has been reporting from or about France for over 30 years, has assembled a meticulously researched and strongly convincing compendium of the ills he believes beset today's France. Pessimistic and sure to prove controversial, his account presents a "nation at risk" whose decline he traces over the last three decades. Fenby provides a wealth of examples: a criminal justice system in crisis, the waning of country customs, changing demographics, an aging population, the plummeting status of politicians, and a debilitating nostalgia for the past. Most intriguing is Fenby's presentation of the disconnection he sees between vital elements of the French national image and the way the French actually live. What's needed now is new national vision and new national leadership, he concludes. For public and academic libraries.--Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Alan Riding

[Officials in London and Washington] may argue that France must modernize its economy and political system, but they also mourn the passing of the old France; they too fear that a new France will be less French. Jonathan Fenby speaks for this point of view....[T]he entire book serves as a valuable introduction to contemporary France....He demonstrates that he cares passionately for France, but he ends his book with France still ''on the brink.''
— The New York Times Book Review

Peter Ford

...[A]n exhaustively researched and sometimes exhaustingly detailed account of all this is wrong with Europe's most complicated country....At the end of the book...Fenby gives in to his evident love for the country and allows himself to hope that the French may yet find their own way to solve their problems.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Kirkus Reviews

A rich, masterful study of modern France—its politics, national characteristics, and people. The author's 30 years of experience reporting on France and his marriage to a Frenchwoman have prepared him well for describing contemporary French life in all its facets. Fenby (editor of the South China Morning Post, and formerly a reporter for Reuters and the Economist, among other) shows a facility for combining narrative, anecdote, and analysis. He provides the historical context needed to take a critical look at France today by making frequent reference to its foundations in the French Revolution and the turbulent 19th century, and he examines how the nation survived the dissolution of its Third Republic and the Nazi collaboration of its Vichy regime. Postwar political figures loom large in the rebuilding of France (de Gaulle) and in its modernization (Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand, and Chirac).This modernization is increasingly an Americanization the French are loath to acknowledge but from which they cannot turn away. Like Germany, France has successfully melded the old world with the new. This coexistence of opposites—McDonald's and Disney alongside the classic café and the Louvre—has transformed the nature of French life. Small family businesses are giving way to supermarkets and megastores run by national or multinational chains. Yet as the French adjust to the quick meal on the run or the divorced family, they are steadfast in their love for their sumptuous cuisine and traditional family life. Regionalism, racism, and corruption must be resolved if France is to remain influential. Reform in economics and politics has come slowly to a country with frequentmassive labor strikes and political demonstrations that all but paralyze daily life. France's leaders must find a way to exploit what is most useful in American-style modernization while promoting the national traits most worthy of preservation. A better guide than Fenby could hardly be found to weigh the opportunities and dangers that face France in the coming century.