France: Her People and Her Spirit

The pleasant land of France hides a deep ruthless realism beneath its amenities, and its philosophy, which tries to make life as agreeable as may be on the surface, is grave, sometimes bitter, beneath. The silent peasant of the North, the chattering southerner in his second-rate vineyards, the solemn, priest-like vintner of the great Médoc, the bullet-headed Auvergnat; the little bourgeois, the big bourgeois, the striving little shopkeeper, the man of big undertakings: they are all realists, they all have a great faith in life, perhaps a rather dry, hard, too shrewd faith, but because of it they anyhow try to make life more, not less, worth living. -from "Chapter II: The Land and Its People" As the chief Paris correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph, British journalist Laurence Jerrold was intimately familiar with the people and places of the Gallic nation, and his love of the country shines through in this beautifully written book. In what is as much valentine to the French as it is a deconstruction of their cultural character, Jerrold explores everything from the rich importance of family in the Gallic society-a couple doesn't merely marry, he explains, but rather "the man and the woman 'found a family'"-to her diverse cities, which, he warns the reader who makes unfair assumptions, "are not only Paris and are not all smaller Parises." Published in 1916, on the cusp of the worst years of World War I, this is a lovely portrait of nation and a celebration of her indomitable spirit just as it was about to face one of its greatest, most tragic tests. OF INTEREST TO: students of French history and World War I, armchair travelers LAURENCE JERROLD (b. 1873) also wrote The Real France (1911) and The French and the English (1913).