Hervé le Bras and Emmanuel Todd recently published an updated version of this classic work, first published in 1981. To me it was new, and when I first bought it I spent many hours of pleasure reading the text and flipping through the maps.
Instead of doing rough justice to the book by giving it a quick review, I decided to provide you with a simple translation of most of the preface. I hope it will give you an idea of Emmanuel Todd's and Hervé le Bras's wealth of knowledge and insight.
The translation is below. If a word or sentence sounds too French, or is not easy to understand, please let me know, possibly with a suggestion, and I will fix it.
"The industrialization of society has not destroyed French diversity. That is what is shown in the maps contained in this book, which come from the analysis of hundreds of indicators, ranging from the structure of the family to (prevalence of) suicide, from the frequency of children born out of wedlock to rates of divorce, from the average age of marriage to levels of alcoholism. Each one of the countries of France represents a culture, in the anthropological meaning of that word: that is to say in its ways of living and dying, its collection of rules that define fundamental human relationships; between parents and children, between men and women, between friends and neighbors. Today, the persistence of differences in birthrates between regions, and the stability of astonishing differences in life expectancy between French "départements", show that neither the railroad, the automobile, television or the internet have succeeded in transforming France into a homogeneous and undifferentiated whole. From the point of view of the anthropologist, Britanny, Occitania, Normandie, Lorraine, Picardy, the Vendée, Savoy or numerous other provinces are still very much alive.
This ongoing difference in anthropological systems could have been studied at the level of Europe, where birth and mortality rates continue to vary widely from nation to nation. France today gives birth to many more children than Germany. With the exception of Portugal, the number of deaths from cultural factors, principally alcoholism, is higher in France than anywhere else. If we have chosen to demonstrate the stability of the traditional anthropological systems inside the space that constitutes France, it is because the differences are particularly impressive and significant. Since the Revolution, France has had a unified system of administration, marvelously centralized and obsessed with rationality. From top to bottom and from left to right, in the "Hexagone" (a common name French people give to their country, because of its shape), the same forms are stamped, we sit the same exams, and we respect with maniacal attention to detail identical rules for spelling and grammar that we deem sacred. Nowhere else in Western Europe is the State also powerful or dirigiste. But if the State is strong in France, it is because it must guarantee the survival of a decentralized anthropological system. The Republic, which is one and indivisible, is an umbrella to one hundred distinct types of family structure, and one hundred different behavioral models--which are absolutely independent from each other.
The France which combines administrative unity and anthropological diversity is a historical exception, not only in Europe but in the World.
Some countries, such as Spain, are anthropologically diverse, without being unified linguistically or administratively. In most of the others, there is a fortunate coincidence of anthropology and administration. To each moral system corresponds a machinery of state. Cultural variations are either insignificant, as in countries such as England, Sweden, Poland or Russia; or are linear, as in Germany or Italy, where the differences between regions are organized on each side of a straight line: North/South in the case of Italy and North-East/South-West in the case of Germany.
France is neither unitary or bipolar. An opposition between North and South cannot summarize the diversity in cultures found between regions. Whatever the phenomenon under observation, the South appears most often divided between four or five components and the North into six or eight.
L'invention de la France--The Invention of France, is a book of a new genre, both atlas and essay, intimately linked. The map for us is not an object of curiosity, but a way of understanding and demonstrating. This conception of social science has led us to realize that France is a nation unlike any other. Anthropological analysis does not lead here, as it usually does in this noble discipline, to a simple summing up of strange and exotic customs. It leads us straight to a better understanding of our history, the myths we share collectively and to our most fundamental national conflicts.
Thus far, nobody has succeeded in explaining why, in France, in some regions it seems natural to vote for left-wing parties, and in others to vote for the Right. Economic sociology--whether Marxist and fanatical about the concept of social classes, or free-market, giving support to the idea of occupational categories--has nothing to say about these opposing attitudes. Some regions that vote for the Right are rich, and others poor. Some left-wing regions are very working-class, but most of them are rural or have a concentration of civil-service, small business or transport workers.
Political life in France is not guided by the economy. Nevertheless, both the Left and the Right, as they divided up French national territory between 1789 and 1889 (between the fall of the Bastille and the construction of the Eiffel Tower) did not choose their respective provinces haphazardly, and neither did they choose them for the quality of their cheeses or because of the folklore. The political segmentation of France has followed very precise anthropological force lines. Each of the great ideologies--Radicalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Catholicism, Communism--lodged itself in a specific system of kinship. Political preferences depend narrowly on the dominant mode of affection within the family.
More generally, more fundamentally, the examination of French anthropological diversity leads to a new interpretation of the useful, generous myth that is central to French national history, the revolutionary dream that did not die with the demise of the First Republic: that humanity is universal, identical to itself in all places and in all cultures.
Could this radical stance have been born anywhere other than France, an anthropologically diverse nation, where citizenship is not a simple legal reflection of a specific moral system, but the result of the desire of individuals and provinces to "live together" and the desire to dominate and annihilate anthropological determinism?
The invention of France is the process of making a nation from diverse and contradictory elements.
In 1981, at the time of publication of the first version of our research, France was wary of a rising tide of racism, specifically anti-Semitism. The country saw itself as feverish and anguished. The fears then were without serious foundation. The country's very special anthropological structure does not permit xenophobia. France is a patchwork of customs and moral attitudes that does not provide fertile ground for racist ideology, whose real influence doesn't reach further than a few small circles of intellectuals who have no power to influence political processes. Racism is too dangerous for national unity. Even anti-Semitism, which could, in theory, be practiced in the same way by every province in France is, in practice, difficult. To develop fully, it needs not one, but two, opposing stereotypes: the first one applied to the Jew and the second one applied to the opposite of the stereotype of the Jew, the "ideal man": Aryan, blond, green or pink. In practice, France cannot indulge this second stereotype: the country is too diverse to find one in its midst. In the "Hexagone", because the Frenchman or woman does not exist, neither can the "Jew" exist.
But political fantasies live on. The fact that French homogeneity is nothing more than a myth, does not mean that, in 2012, the dominant ideology hasn't come to resemble the defense of a uniform identity that is under threat or, among the most radical thinkers, the dream of a return to a lost oneness. The self-selected defenders of national identity do not understand the history of their own country. We dare to say that they are blind to the subtleties and the truth of what constitutes French national greatness, the combining of unity of national purpose with the pragmatic management of diversity.
Why shouldn't we be able to supplement what already exists with a few more differences, some of them major; a few new mental provinces--North African, African or Chinese, to mitigate and tame them over time, as we have always done in France? ...
The collapse of Catholicism and then of Communism have resulted in a religious and ideological vacuum, which has finished by covering the whole "Hexagone". It is therefore possible, to talk of a new homogeneity, that of the vacuum--which explains the appearance, among other things, in a country where French people of the Muslim faith practice their religion as little as people of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish origin, to a form of secular-christian islamophobia. This islamophobia is paradoxical, to say the least, because it posits that the only true way not to believe in God is the Christian way...
The result of the evidence we have accumulated is that all the phantasmagorical thinking about a unified French anthropological ideal type, which certain politicians tried to push during the recent debate about "national identity", constitutes a threat for the very real people who actually live in the provinces of France--Occitanians, Bretons, Basques, Artésiens, Berrichons, Alsatians--and who continue, imperturbably, to enjoy their differences. For as long as French diversity lasts--and, from our evidence about birth and death rates, it is set to last for a very long time--France will be condemned to tolerance."
If you have found this blog post useful, you may be interested in an article I published a while back about Philippe d'Iribarne's book: L'étrangeté française - French Strangeness.
Instead of doing rough justice to the book by giving it a quick review, I decided to provide you with a simple translation of most of the preface. I hope it will give you an idea of Emmanuel Todd's and Hervé le Bras's wealth of knowledge and insight.
The translation is below. If a word or sentence sounds too French, or is not easy to understand, please let me know, possibly with a suggestion, and I will fix it.
"The industrialization of society has not destroyed French diversity. That is what is shown in the maps contained in this book, which come from the analysis of hundreds of indicators, ranging from the structure of the family to (prevalence of) suicide, from the frequency of children born out of wedlock to rates of divorce, from the average age of marriage to levels of alcoholism. Each one of the countries of France represents a culture, in the anthropological meaning of that word: that is to say in its ways of living and dying, its collection of rules that define fundamental human relationships; between parents and children, between men and women, between friends and neighbors. Today, the persistence of differences in birthrates between regions, and the stability of astonishing differences in life expectancy between French "départements", show that neither the railroad, the automobile, television or the internet have succeeded in transforming France into a homogeneous and undifferentiated whole. From the point of view of the anthropologist, Britanny, Occitania, Normandie, Lorraine, Picardy, the Vendée, Savoy or numerous other provinces are still very much alive.
This ongoing difference in anthropological systems could have been studied at the level of Europe, where birth and mortality rates continue to vary widely from nation to nation. France today gives birth to many more children than Germany. With the exception of Portugal, the number of deaths from cultural factors, principally alcoholism, is higher in France than anywhere else. If we have chosen to demonstrate the stability of the traditional anthropological systems inside the space that constitutes France, it is because the differences are particularly impressive and significant. Since the Revolution, France has had a unified system of administration, marvelously centralized and obsessed with rationality. From top to bottom and from left to right, in the "Hexagone" (a common name French people give to their country, because of its shape), the same forms are stamped, we sit the same exams, and we respect with maniacal attention to detail identical rules for spelling and grammar that we deem sacred. Nowhere else in Western Europe is the State also powerful or dirigiste. But if the State is strong in France, it is because it must guarantee the survival of a decentralized anthropological system. The Republic, which is one and indivisible, is an umbrella to one hundred distinct types of family structure, and one hundred different behavioral models--which are absolutely independent from each other.
The France which combines administrative unity and anthropological diversity is a historical exception, not only in Europe but in the World.
Some countries, such as Spain, are anthropologically diverse, without being unified linguistically or administratively. In most of the others, there is a fortunate coincidence of anthropology and administration. To each moral system corresponds a machinery of state. Cultural variations are either insignificant, as in countries such as England, Sweden, Poland or Russia; or are linear, as in Germany or Italy, where the differences between regions are organized on each side of a straight line: North/South in the case of Italy and North-East/South-West in the case of Germany.
France is neither unitary or bipolar. An opposition between North and South cannot summarize the diversity in cultures found between regions. Whatever the phenomenon under observation, the South appears most often divided between four or five components and the North into six or eight.
L'invention de la France--The Invention of France, is a book of a new genre, both atlas and essay, intimately linked. The map for us is not an object of curiosity, but a way of understanding and demonstrating. This conception of social science has led us to realize that France is a nation unlike any other. Anthropological analysis does not lead here, as it usually does in this noble discipline, to a simple summing up of strange and exotic customs. It leads us straight to a better understanding of our history, the myths we share collectively and to our most fundamental national conflicts.
Thus far, nobody has succeeded in explaining why, in France, in some regions it seems natural to vote for left-wing parties, and in others to vote for the Right. Economic sociology--whether Marxist and fanatical about the concept of social classes, or free-market, giving support to the idea of occupational categories--has nothing to say about these opposing attitudes. Some regions that vote for the Right are rich, and others poor. Some left-wing regions are very working-class, but most of them are rural or have a concentration of civil-service, small business or transport workers.
Political life in France is not guided by the economy. Nevertheless, both the Left and the Right, as they divided up French national territory between 1789 and 1889 (between the fall of the Bastille and the construction of the Eiffel Tower) did not choose their respective provinces haphazardly, and neither did they choose them for the quality of their cheeses or because of the folklore. The political segmentation of France has followed very precise anthropological force lines. Each of the great ideologies--Radicalism, Conservatism, Socialism, Catholicism, Communism--lodged itself in a specific system of kinship. Political preferences depend narrowly on the dominant mode of affection within the family.
More generally, more fundamentally, the examination of French anthropological diversity leads to a new interpretation of the useful, generous myth that is central to French national history, the revolutionary dream that did not die with the demise of the First Republic: that humanity is universal, identical to itself in all places and in all cultures.
Could this radical stance have been born anywhere other than France, an anthropologically diverse nation, where citizenship is not a simple legal reflection of a specific moral system, but the result of the desire of individuals and provinces to "live together" and the desire to dominate and annihilate anthropological determinism?
The invention of France is the process of making a nation from diverse and contradictory elements.
In 1981, at the time of publication of the first version of our research, France was wary of a rising tide of racism, specifically anti-Semitism. The country saw itself as feverish and anguished. The fears then were without serious foundation. The country's very special anthropological structure does not permit xenophobia. France is a patchwork of customs and moral attitudes that does not provide fertile ground for racist ideology, whose real influence doesn't reach further than a few small circles of intellectuals who have no power to influence political processes. Racism is too dangerous for national unity. Even anti-Semitism, which could, in theory, be practiced in the same way by every province in France is, in practice, difficult. To develop fully, it needs not one, but two, opposing stereotypes: the first one applied to the Jew and the second one applied to the opposite of the stereotype of the Jew, the "ideal man": Aryan, blond, green or pink. In practice, France cannot indulge this second stereotype: the country is too diverse to find one in its midst. In the "Hexagone", because the Frenchman or woman does not exist, neither can the "Jew" exist.
But political fantasies live on. The fact that French homogeneity is nothing more than a myth, does not mean that, in 2012, the dominant ideology hasn't come to resemble the defense of a uniform identity that is under threat or, among the most radical thinkers, the dream of a return to a lost oneness. The self-selected defenders of national identity do not understand the history of their own country. We dare to say that they are blind to the subtleties and the truth of what constitutes French national greatness, the combining of unity of national purpose with the pragmatic management of diversity.
Why shouldn't we be able to supplement what already exists with a few more differences, some of them major; a few new mental provinces--North African, African or Chinese, to mitigate and tame them over time, as we have always done in France? ...
The collapse of Catholicism and then of Communism have resulted in a religious and ideological vacuum, which has finished by covering the whole "Hexagone". It is therefore possible, to talk of a new homogeneity, that of the vacuum--which explains the appearance, among other things, in a country where French people of the Muslim faith practice their religion as little as people of Catholic, Protestant or Jewish origin, to a form of secular-christian islamophobia. This islamophobia is paradoxical, to say the least, because it posits that the only true way not to believe in God is the Christian way...
The result of the evidence we have accumulated is that all the phantasmagorical thinking about a unified French anthropological ideal type, which certain politicians tried to push during the recent debate about "national identity", constitutes a threat for the very real people who actually live in the provinces of France--Occitanians, Bretons, Basques, Artésiens, Berrichons, Alsatians--and who continue, imperturbably, to enjoy their differences. For as long as French diversity lasts--and, from our evidence about birth and death rates, it is set to last for a very long time--France will be condemned to tolerance."
If you have found this blog post useful, you may be interested in an article I published a while back about Philippe d'Iribarne's book: L'étrangeté française - French Strangeness.