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France is a country bristling with paradoxes. It harbours global ambitions, but it invests huge amounts of money in supporting minor arts festivals in small villages. It is the undisputed home of revolutionary politics, but it has been overwhelmingly governed by conservatives in the last two centuries. It is a land synonymous with strikes and labour unrest, but it has one of the lowest rates of unionization in Europe. It is one of the world’s most advanced capitalist economies, but almost half of French people say they are opposed to the capitalist system. It is a place where citizens are deeply attached to their state, but do not hesitate to go into the street to protest the state’s irresponsibility. And it is a country in which millions of immigrants live, but which has one of the longest-standing extreme right movements in the Western world.

To outsiders, these paradoxes can be infuriating. Every society has contradictions, but those of the French provoke an unusually intense reaction. Eventually, all but the most passionate Francophiles end up complaining about French ‘hypocrisy’. The problem is usually one of dashed expectations. Starry-eyed left-wing students, taken in by the legacy of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune or the protests of 1968, come up short when they realize just how conservative the French are. Grand liberal reformers dream about the potential for France to become a truly great economy, only to despair at the apparent rigidity of the country’s administrative structures. Young scholars inspired by the great French tradition of feminist writing are immediately annoyed to find that rigid gender norms and sexism are still a part of everyday life. Even casual tourists experience some form of disillusionment. The picture-postcard image of France is one of fine dining, haute couture, beautiful architecture and people who belong on the set of a glamorous French film. But many French people eat hamburgers, dress in baggy joggers and do their groceries in warehouse-like hypermarkets – and almost none of them look like Brigitte Bardot.

To some extent, the French have themselves to blame for this persistent disappointment. From the nineteenth century onwards, they relentlessly packaged their cities, landscapes, gastronomy, wine and style for foreign and domestic consumption. This was usually accompanied by lofty rhetoric about France’s ‘genius’, ‘grandeur’ or ‘civilizing mission’, to which Europe and large parts of the world were subjected during periods of war or colonial conquest. In the realm of culture, too, the French exported their language, literary heritage and model of intellectual engagement. For much of the twentieth century, Paris was considered to be the world’s pre-eminent cultural capital. Anyone who aspired to be an intellectual in Prague or Dakar was expected to know something about Émile Zola or Jean-Paul Sartre. This naturally meant that foreigners developed strong preconceptions about France. Still today, those who know the country find it hard to be neutral. They either love it, hate it or feel both emotions at the same time.

The French, of course, have rarely conformed to the elevated image people have had of them. There has been a yawning gap between the grand ideals they are supposed to embody and the messy reality. For every moment of ‘greatness’ in modern French history there have been at least as many ugly ideological clashes, national humiliations and violent civil conflicts. Indeed, many of the most stirring invocations of France’s universal principles and historical destiny have come during or after moments of bitter political disagreement. The high rhetoric has usually been a desperate attempt to paper over irreconcilable divisions within French society. To take only one example, France’s long-standing obsession with national unity is often interpreted as a consequence of nationalist ideologies that go back to the early modern period, but it is at least as much a product of a profoundly disunited citizenry. Every person, party or movement that has tried to govern France has quickly realized that, rather than come together around common goals, the French are often at loggerheads with each other and sceptical of the grandiose oratory of those who rule them. Over time, this has led to one of the most visible paradoxes of modern French history, namely a state that repeatedly insists on an ideal of national unity and tries to impose it on a people who are often unable to agree on the most basic principles of citizenship.

For the historian, it is tempting to try to explain away these myriad contradictions and inconsistencies. Many books that provide an overview of twentieth-century French history offer a strong and coherent chronology built around wars, presidents and republics. Others proceed thematically by looking at different groups within French society or specific problems and debates. I have tried to do something a little different. Rather than treat paradox as a side-effect of France’s divided past, I have used it as a lens through which to understand the way the French have thought about politics, society and culture. In this book, I explore where France’s paradoxes have come from and why the country has struggled to live up to the image it has had of itself. I start from the basic assumption that most social processes and political events look different depending on who is talking about them. This is especially true of events like the Nazi occupation, the decolonization of Algeria or the protests of 1968, which gave rise to sharply conflicting memories, and incompatible historical interpretations. By acknowledging that these sorts of events were paradoxical from the very beginning, we can begin to explain why they happened – and why they proved so difficult to remember. In this way, paradox appears not as a form of hypocrisy but as a logical outcome of France’s fractured and complex history.

I am hardly the first scholar of France to identify paradox as a major theme of French history. In his classic five-volume study of France from 1848 to 1945, published in the mid-1970s, the historian Theodore Zeldin used binary opposites to structure his entire text. The titles of each volume – Ambition and Love, Intellect and Pride, Taste and Corruption, Politics and Anger, Anxiety and Hypocrisy – were designed to capture the contradictory aspects of French life. More recently, the historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has suggested that binary opposites have been a constitutive part of French thought since the Enlightenment, a legacy of a Cartesian tendency to think in rational and abstract terms about philosophical problems. In the same vein, a rich English-language literature about contemporary French republicanism and a stimulating French-language literature about the emergence of democracy have highlighted a range of paradoxes and unresolved tensions in French history.

I build on some of these insights by bringing them into the post-war period and applying them to politics and society more broadly. I address a series of important – and unresolved – questions about contemporary France. Why do the French cling to a vision of global power despite a succession of military defeats and the collapse of their imperial ambitions? Why has the legacy of French colonialism provoked such acrimonious memory wars? Why are the French so attached to a ‘republican’ political ideal that seems to be morally and historically bankrupt? Why do so many French voters still long for a great leader to solve their problems, despite their open hostility to a political system that is more presidential than almost any other? Why are the French so obsessed with the state? I will not pretend that this book provides any definitive answers to these questions. But it does offer clues as to why they should be questions in the first place.

To get at some of the underlying patterns and processes that have shaped France, I have chosen to structure my six chapters around some of the most striking paradoxes of French history since 1940. The first chapter explores the French experience and memory of the Second World War. I suggest that the war gave rise to two conflicting tendencies: on the one hand, a lingering sense of defeat, which was a result of the fall of France and the subsequent Nazi occupation; on the other, a vigorous spirit of ‘resistance’, which took many forms during and after the war. The paradox of a country that lived both with the scars of defeat and the promise of resistance explains the diverging responses to the huge social and political transformations that took place after the war. The second chapter introduces another important context for understanding post-war France: the history of colonial conquest and the powerful anti-colonial reaction to which it gave rise. This long predated the Second World War, but the post-war period saw the conflict between colonial and anti-colonial narratives come to a head, often in moments of extreme violence. The end result of this unsustainable paradox was the almost total collapse of the French empire in the early 1960s and an angry, multi-generational struggle over colonial memory.

In chapter 3, I tackle the period now commonly known as the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ – the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ of post-war economic growth. This sets the stage for one of the most familiar paradoxes of contemporary French politics: the contrast between the country’s supposedly ‘great’ destiny and the hard realities of economic contraction since the 1970s. The question of whether France has (or has not) been in decline in recent decades is guaranteed to incite polemic, but the only way to understand present-day anxieties about France’s place in the world is by exploring ideas of ‘grandeur’ that have their roots in post-war reconstruction and its most famous politician, Charles de Gaulle. The fourth chapter brings to the fore one of the best-known political cleavages in the modern world: the clash between left and right. These terms were first used during the French Revolution and they continued to resonate after the Second World War. Today the left–right divide has lost some of its intensity, but it remains a vital part of the story of post-war France.

The final two chapters address paradoxes that have become increasingly visible in French public life in the twenty-first century. The first of these is tied to French republicanism, a set of political values that form the basis of French political culture. In chapter 5, I discuss the glaring disparity between the most important values of French republicanism and the inequalities of French society. These disparities – and the way people have responded to them – offer a unique insight into the way the French have navigated the gap between ideals and reality. The second contemporary paradox relates to the tension between France’s strong local traditions and its unashamedly global outlook. As I show in chapter 6, few paradoxes are as acute today as the one between a French citizenry that wants more local democracy and a state that wants to be a European and global power. As the recent gilets jaunes protests clearly demonstrate, this paradox has not been resolved, and may well become more acute in future.

It will be obvious that these six chapters cannot do justice to the richness of French history since 1940. This is a very short book, and I have had to omit an enormous number of themes, personalities and events. I particularly regret that I could not say more about intellectual and cultural debates, environmental history, rural life, cinema and music, and the family. I have made a conscious decision to focus on politics, mostly because politics touches almost every aspect of life in France, but even here I do not pretend to have covered each topic in detail. Instead, I offer a series of arguments about how France works and how the French think. While many of these run through the whole book, the chapters do not necessarily have to be read as a single, chronological narrative that begins with France’s defeat in 1940 and ends with the gilets jaunes protests in 2018 and 2019. It is also possible to treat each chapter as an essay on a specific problem within contemporary French history, especially because several of them begin with a discussion of people, events and histories that predate 1940. There is a basic timeline at the start of the book to help readers navigate the chronology of modern France.

I should stress that the point of this book is not to offer a definitive account of contemporary French history. My aim is more modest. I want to use some of the exciting new work that is being published in the field to shine an unfamiliar light on familiar stories. I am assuming that my readers will have some interest in France, either as students, tourists, residents or aficionados of French culture. If this is the case, then I hope my arguments will stimulate further reading and reflection. I will be equally happy if they lead to disagreement and debate. Writing about contemporary France is a sure way to court controversy, and I expect that my ideas will be challenged by my readers and my colleagues. Nevertheless, if the only result of my book is to make the French seem a little less paradoxical, I will consider it a job well done.