Word: zeldin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...culture that the British have always had, a profound--and mostly unreciprocated--appreciation existing under the shadow of centuries-old contempt and mistrust. (It's no mistake that France 1848-1945. The best and most comprehensive book on French culture, should have been written by an Oxford professor, Theodore Zeldin.) Braithwalie is a Gallophile as only an Englishman can be, revelling in the wine-tasting, the pharmacies, the road signs, the myriad facets of everyday, life with a delight unmediated by the ever-present chauvinism of the French: "The light over the Channel, for instance, looks quite different from...
...Zeldin's loose sociological approach reveals itself in a strong chapter on class relations. Rather than particularize feelings along class lines, he concerns him-self with "how people perceive social relationships," reducing French society to three groups--those who like to lead others, those who hate or resent their boss, and those who opt out of the hierarchical system. The Duc de Brissac's "aristocratic" qualities are as easily found in M. Perrin, a worker in the Rossignol Ski Factory in Voiron, or in M. Cazeau, an engineer from Toulouse...
...highly placed in modern industry, where three-quarters of industrial managers are sons of the well-to-do, where only a fifth of the work force is unionized, and where the peasant still seeks to protect and work his own land, defining "aristocratic" values is no easy task. Zeldin judges the image of French egalitarianism "more false than true." Even the highly competitive school system reinforces ingrained notions of privilege: 65 percent of managers' children get into the prestigious option C of the baccalaureate program as compared to 5 percent of workers' children. Plus ca change...
...Zeldin's longstanding interest in regionalism fills his new work. "Culture," he notes, "now divides France instead of unifying it." Having passed through nationalist and internationalist phases. France is presently in a pluralist stage whereby culture "is a battle for the right to live freely," he says, quoting minister Jack Lang. This notion underlies much of Zeldin's analysis of social mores as well. Defining a French national culture is "an unattainable goal." Styles of life "are ceasing to be homogeneous." There is "French taste, and French good taste." Contrary to previous stereotypes. "There is no established French attitude toward...
...irrelevancy of using Loulou de la Falaise as an example of someone "undoubtedly elegant, chic" may be excused if one keeps in mind the impossibility of defining the French in an uncontroversial way. One might paraphrase Antishthenes: One can know such and such a Frenchman, but never Frenchness. As Zeldin puts it, the book's intent is to show "what absurdities follow" when one sums up the French or any other culture in a phrase or epigram