A History of France Revisited by Its Famous Foreigners

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Patrick Lemoine

Français mais pas Gaulois - Des étrangers qui ont fait la France
[French but not Gauls – Foreigners who have made France; in French]  
Robert Laffont, Paris, 2023

A history of France from the 20^th century to the present day, original and subjective, through the prism of its famous foreigners. "I was born on April 4, 1945, in Montauban to German parents, who waited more than six months to declare my coming into this world – too late! This made me a stateless person, who grew up in the 15^th arrondissement of Paris with the last black hussars of the Republic, was an unconditional supporter of Raymond Kopa's French team in 1958, before arriving in Frankfurt and taking German nationality... to avoid military service. Returned to France for my studies, I was expelled in May 1968 – a residence ban lifted ten years later.

Since then, my life has been a sort of bridge between Germany and France, and in 2015 I obtained the right to become French as well. Being able to play with both shirts now corresponds quite well to my state of mind: France owes a lot to its foreigners, without whom its history would have been completely different. Thus, it is also the Great History which takes shape through them: because all arrived according to the political, economic, scientific, cultural movements... and also sport movements”.

It is this journey that the two authors retrace, stopping here with an Émile Zola dying at the dawn of the Belle Époque, there at the crowning in Cannes of the movie Indigènes by Rachid Bouchareb; and, always, at the side of these men and women who, coming from elsewhere, have for one hundred and fifty years contributed to the glorious and laborious endeavor of making that country.

But this book, apparently historical and matter-of-fact, brings out two themes that in the present time are quite hot in France and in other countries too: that of national and cultural identity, and that of immigration. So it prompted in France many interviews in TV talk programs, articles in the press and, alas, hate-messages in social media, also because, perhaps, the author Cohn-Bendit (one of the leaders in 1968 of the students movement, then elected four times to the European Parliament, and now Vice-President of the Greens) is still a well-known, if evidently divisive, public figure both in France and in Germany. On this occasion, however, he acted simply as the voice of reason, using also a bit of the charisma he still possesses.

All in all, books like this one can be a welcome counterbalance to the irrational arguments of the nationalists. (l.c.)