French connection | 19 November 2015

It was as if Andrew Marr and his guests on Start the Week on Monday morning were standing on the edge of a precipice with no idea how far they would fall if they strayed too near the edge. Their conversation this week, Marr told us, would not, as usual, be a live discussion but had actually been recorded in Paris on Friday, just hours before the terrible events of later that evening. Their discussion, quite coincidentally, was focused on French history, society and identity as part of a new Radio 4 season inspired by the great 20-volume series of novels by Émile Zola, which create a fictionalised record of life in France at the turn of the last century. (Later on Monday, Glenda Jackson, the former actress and MP, introduced a feature programme about Zola as a backdrop to the forthcoming three-part dramatisation of the novels, in which she is going to play a leading part, her first acting role for decades.) But Marr and his guests — two novelists, a historian and a journalist, of French, British and Arab-French extraction — would make no mention of what had just happened because they had no clue of what Paris was about to witness. Should we still hear it?

Marr said Radio 4 had decided to go ahead, and wisely too. The conversation was not in the least redundant or anachronistic. On the contrary, it was unexpectedly gripping precisely because his guests were attempting to give us their understanding of where France stood at that time and how it had got there without any agenda. Mention was made of a society divided between Catholic right and secular left, between those of generational French descent and those whose parents and grandparents were immigrants, of the war in Algeria and the chaotic way in which France had got rid of its colonies.