France on the Brink

June 28, 1999
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.

May 15, 1999
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.