Remembering Douglas Johnson

Simon Hoggart writes:
Douglas Johnson, who has died at the age of 80, was one of the most distinguished — and most entertaining — of the academic writers who have appeared in the columns of The Spectator. In fact, the word ‘academic’ has perhaps the wrong connotations, for in spite of Douglas’s great scholarship, few people working in university education were less remote; as a lifelong student of France, he was fascinated by the real life and real people of that country. For instance, many historians who have written about the Dreyfus affair used it to create ponderous studies of social and political change. Douglas knew that it was fundamentally a tremendous story and a great drama, which is why his book on the subject, France and the Dreyfus Affair (1966), conveys the feel of the country and its era far more vigorously than screeds of dense, ideological analysis.

He knew many French politicians personally. His elegant essays on modern French politics, as well as recent and more distant French history, were sharp, illuminating and expressed with a lucidity and wit which meant that his name over a Spectator piece immediately drew even those readers whose interest in France mainly concerned food and property. To him, French history was a continuous tapestry, and could not be chopped into separate centuries or discrete events. You could not fully understand the Revolution without understanding Mitterrand; you could not understand Mitterrand without an awareness of the Revolution, Napol-eon, the Commune and the Occupation.

Like many people who have a foot in both countries — his widow, Madeleine Rébillard, is French and they lived both in Paris and London — he was always described as a Francophile. He was, but unlike some he never allowed his love for the country to turn into unqualified adulation.