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15 July 2009 10:00 AM
Making a Nation
David Frum offers a characteristically interesting post on the rise of France:
Like the United States, France is a melting pot. But while on this side of the Atlantic newcomers came to the United States, on the other it was France that came to the newcomers.
For three-quarters of a millennium, the kings of France pursued a policy of determined and generally successful expansionism, engorging their small principality in the Seine basin into a domain stretching to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. Had history taken a slightly different bounce, what is now Burgundy might have been as independent as Belgium.
As slow as the process of expansion was, the process of digestion was even slower. On the eve of the French Revolution, the kingdom was divided by radical differences of law, time zones, tax rules, even by customs barriers. The language of Provence or Languedoc was at least as different from that of Paris as the language of Lisbon was different from that of Madrid. And within the old province, language differed from town to town, from village to village.
The Revolution was a Parisian event imposed on often violently resisting provinces. Nineteenth century French governments - whether royal or republican - ruled the provinces from above like an imperial power, each departement governed by a Paris-appointed prefect accountable to the ministers in the capital, not the population below.
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