A love letter to France

When John Julius Norwich was a boy, his father was British ambassador in Paris.School holidays were spent in the exceptionally beautiful embassy which had been purchased by the Duke of Wellington from Pauline Borghese. He would mix dry martinis for Jean Cocteau, and sing songs to the dinner guests which he had been taught by his father’s mistress, the poetess Louise de Vilmorin, who got on famously with his mother, Diana Cooper. It makes you long to have been there. This warm, delightful short history of France, aimed convivially at the general reader, is his love letter to the country he knew so well: and, he writes, most probably his final book.

In energetic style, we are transported from the primitive stockades of the Gauls (‘carnivores through and through’), via the boorish, dissipated and exceptionally complicated Merovingians; in France, Norwich drily notes, the dark ages ‘were very dark indeed’. We gallop past Charlemagne and his five legitimate and four ‘supplementary’ wives, who invested the previously bickering kinglets and princelings with the grandeur of empire; we wave at Hugh Capet, whose name ‘sounds remarkably plebeian, as indeed it is’. It was Capet who constructed France as a nation — ‘although inevitably, he left the job unfinished’.

The chapters on early modern France are well contextualised and full of delicious fodder, especially those on the Crusades and the interactions of the French with the Byzantines. I had not known that in 1216 Louis VIII not only claimed the kingship of England, but landed at Thanet, took Winchester and ended up controlling more than half the country. It is so easy to forget how impermanent national boundaries are; and how closely France and England have been intertwined over the centuries. Later on, of course, our own Henry VI was crowned King of France in Paris: the service, however, was ‘poorly attended’.