Georges Wolinski: ‘Virtue of His Contradictions’

Wolinski has played a significant part in demolishing what he calls the France of Marshal Pétain, whom he remembers having had to honour as a schoolboy. He is proud of the battles he has had with the censorship in the course of establishing the satirical magazines Harakiri and Charlie Hebdo. French law punishes not the distributors of ‘scurrilous’ literature but the authors and editors. That meant that personal courage was enough, commercial restraints were absent. He won the battles because he had a more powerful weapon: humour. He made the nation laugh at its own principles. But not the whole country, by any means. ‘Provincial France’ looked upon him and his kind as ‘intellectual terrorists’ and he admits to the accuracy of that description. He has been terrorizing those in power with his mockery, like a naughty child who pulls faces at a teacher. He was initially inspired by the cartoons of the American Harvey Kurtzman and the magazine Mad, but he has been much more radically satirical. Charlie Hebdo has been able to attack in a way that would be impossible in the United States, where subjects like religion may not be touched; Charlie Chaplin’s unpopularity in his later years, says Wolinski, shows that Americans refused to mock the very basis of their society. # Author

Georges Wolinski

By Theodore Zeldin

It is Georges Wolinski, whose cartoons appear daily in the Communist paper L’Humanité, who has produced what is perhaps the most scathing contemporary portrait of the Average Frenchman. Flaubert, in the nineteenth century, wrote a Dictionary of Clichés, to ridicule the banalities of ordinary conversation, what people repeated to each other all the time. Wolinski’s caricatures add up to a similar treasury of what old fogeys today in provincial France, la France profonde, regard as wisdom. He has created two characters, whom he calls the Two Dinosaurs or the Two Idiots. They are always seated at a café table, with a glass of wine in front of each. The large one is vigorous in his denunciation of the imbecilities of the age and florid in his nostalgia for the good old days. The small one meekly and readily agrees with him, for he is easily impressed by his friend’s fine phrases and he wants to be respectable at all costs; his petty preoccupations, his efforts to please his wife, act as a kind of unanswered accompaniment, for the large one never listens to him.

The Two Idiots are stern believers in maintaining order. They approve of the Riot Police (the CRS): the large one says, ‘you must be fair: the CRS are quite different from the SS’. ‘They are only doing their job,’ echoes the small one. ‘Decent people,’ says the large one, ‘do not pay taxes so that the prison cells of bandits should be decorated like holiday resorts, with prison warders to serve them like waiters, a white napkin on their arm: A little more champagne Sir?’ The small one timidly suggests that perhaps not everyone in prison deserves to be there: ‘judicial errors do occur sometimes’. ‘Perhaps,’ his friend replies, ‘but I would rather have the prisons full of innocent people than the streets full of criminals.’

The pair are agreed that the trouble with the country is that the old inhibitions have been destroyed, ‘nothing is forbidden; the French have lost their sense of honour.’ For example, one of the large man’s cousins, who got engaged to a charming girl, happened to have syphilis. Everybody knew this, except the girl, because she was well brought up and did not know about such matters. So the marriage took place, no one said anything, and in due course they produced an idiot boy. But ‘honour was saved’. ‘Do you not think that is carrying the sense of honour a little far?’ ‘Monsieur,’ the large man insists, ‘that is how our families behaved in the past: there were no limits to the sense of honour.’ That is the one thing where he is glad there are no limits. ‘It’s lucky they’ve invented penicillin all the same,’ murmurs the small one.

But change is something both of them hate. They are appalled by the antics of the young. They protest at having to subsidize universities which are only schools for sexual orgies. They hate trade unionists, ecologists, Marxists, intellectuals, unmarried mothers and nude bathers, just as they cannot bear foreigners, Jews, the mini-skirt, abortion, lenient judges and divorced parents, sensuality and sociologists. They are suspicious of people who claim to have more talent than others: ‘If God had wanted men to have talent, he would have given talent to everybody.’ They look back to an imaginary age, when people were satisfied with their lot, when the unhappy man was content with his unhappiness, when even the leper was happier than the modern executive overworking so as to give the impression that he is rich. Like Voltaire’s absurd Dr Pangloss, they say fear is needed because without it there would be no religion; hate is necessary, because without it there would be no need for an army. Without ignorance, there would be no distinguished people, comme il faut, who were superior to the ignorant. Without shame we would all go about with naked bottoms. ‘As at St Tropez,’ chirps in the small one. ‘It is folly,’ says the large one, ‘to believe that one can make a society better than the people who live in it.’ In the olden days, every village knew who slept with whom, who among the mayor, the chemist and the lawyer, were sexual perverts, cheats or Nazi collaborators; but they managed to live peacefully together all the same. What is the point of new-fangled interference, and technocratic computers? They are suspicious of modern inventions, and of all people who are not suspicious. The thought of having to bequeath France to the intolerable young generation appals them. But to whom else can they bequeath it? asks the little one.

Wolinski has spent his life attacking these kinds of average Frenchmen, who are Colonel Blimp in England and ‘petty bourgeois’ in France. He is the enemy of taboos and principles, of the assumption that the poor do not want to live like the rich, or that women should keep their eyes lowered, that children should not speak at table unless they are spoken to, that pornography and drugs should be available to the upper classes only, and that the best jobs should be reserved for those whose parents had the best jobs. He has not invented these conservatives; they have had a part in his own life. His father was a small employer who was killed by his communist workers during the Popular Front of 1936. His step-father was a ‘typical Frenchman’ who read the right-wing Figaro and the sporting daily L’Equipe. He was brought up by his grandfather, a pastry cook, in the European quarter of Tunis. (It is important to remember that to the previous generation, France was not just a corner of Europe, but an international empire of a hundred million inhabitants; that a proportion of Frenchmen are a Mediterranean, not northern people, and that both the Archbishop of Paris and the leader of the largest trade union are of Polish origin.) Old-fashioned ideals of respectable family life were piously preserved there: the colonial French, the Jews, the Mediterraneans each kept to themselves, but they shared similar attitudes. In Wolinski’s childhood, women looked after the house, knitted, sewed and ironed, leaving the hard work to Arab servants; the men lived separately, going to the café to play cards and talk. Children were forbidden to swear and parents were careful to say nothing improper in front of them. The only rude jokes that were tolerated were about the bottom, excreting and farting, but not about sex. Wolinski discovered pornography by prising open a cupboard in which were kept the military decorations of an uncle killed in the war, and where he found the Decameron and Lady Chatterley secretly hidden. But he could barely understand them. He grew up chaste and prudish, and the chaste American films of those years, which he loved, suited him perfectly. It was only later on a motorcycling holiday in Italy that he discovered the joys of sex, in a Genoese brothel.

One of the great differences between that world and today’s world, for him, is that it is now possible to mention such subjects publicly. Fifteen years ago the male magazine Lui was banned for a photograph that revealed too much breast. Now sex is a frequent subject of humour, and major cartoonists have produced what in other countries would be labelled pornographic humour. Wolinski has played a significant part in demolishing what he calls the France of Marshal Pétain, whom he remembers having had to honour as a schoolboy. He is proud of the battles he has had with the censorship in the course of establishing the satirical magazines Harakiri and Charlie Hebdo. French law punishes not the distributors of ‘scurrilous’ literature but the authors and editors. That meant that personal courage was enough, commercial restraints were absent. He won the battles because he had a more powerful weapon: humour. He made the nation laugh at its own principles. But not the whole country, by any means. ‘Provincial France’ looked upon him and his kind as ‘intellectual terrorists’ and he admits to the accuracy of that description. He has been terrorizing those in power with his mockery, like a naughty child who pulls faces at a teacher. He was initially inspired by the cartoons of the American Harvey Kurtzman and the magazine Mad, but he has been much more radically satirical. Charlie Hebdo has been able to attack in a way that would be impossible in the United States, where subjects like religion may not be touched; Charlie Chaplin’s unpopularity in his later years, says Wolinski, shows that Americans refused to mock the very basis of their society.

But Wolinski does not represent the triumph of the new open-minded young France against the old France, which is an absurdly simplified contrast. Though he works for the official communist daily newspaper, he is not a member of the party. He feels most comfortable among the communists because he likes the warmth of their human relations, their unpretentiousness. Among socialists he meets too many well-educated people, who come from the same social background and the same schools as the Giscard technocrats, who are not his sort. The communists are more often self-taught like himself, rejected by their schools as hopeless failures; they have built up their own popular culture. Wolinski is not impregnated by the classics of French literature: as a boy, he liked American films and comics, English and American books, Edgar Allan Poe, Kipling, Jerome K. Jerome, Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper. ‘No French book made me laugh as a boy.’ He believes he appeals to the same sort of ‘uncultured’ people, to the inhabitants of the working class suburbs, where dreary highrise buildings have very little that is French about them. He produces three books of cartoons a year, and he sells 50,000 of each, easily outdoing more fashionable novelists and philosophers. Altogether he has published thirty books. His first film was seen by one-and-a-half million people. He admits that working for the communists means there are subjects that cannot be mentioned; he has learnt instinctively to recognize what the party line is; but he feels amply compensated by the friendliness of his readers, whom he meets at party festivals. He likes them because they are not snobbish, they are not ascetics either, they want to enjoy a good life like everyone else; he finds their company relaxing. If he worked for a large circulation paper, he would hate the fierce competitiveness, the life with daggers drawn; in L’Humanité the quarrels are ideological, but there is less struggle for money, for careers. He once aspired to be in charge of an important newspaper, but he has now decided that he does not like giving orders, or being a leader. He values his independence most of all, which means he values the right to be himself. He has achieved that right, because he feels that he is now at last in power, in the sense that his generation, who were teenagers in 1960, have now become successful pop stars of one sort or another. Now they are accepted as part of the middle-aged establishment; they have achieved their victory.

Humour for Wolinski today involves lucidity on the one hand and provocation on the other. He does not think there are specifically national forms of humour. Humour is the ability to see through the veils of convention. Humour is dangerous because it can reveal everything as absurd, which is why so many comics commit suicide. But it is also a kind of maturity. Though he is so scathing in his commentary on the world, he lives very calmly in it. He does not get excited. ‘I have no complexes.’ He is amazed at the way his wife gets worried by minor problems. Everything is a worrying problem, he thinks, but that means that perhaps nothing is a problem. There is no saying what is a real problem, and even if one knew, one would not know how to solve it. It is best not to try to understand too much. ‘If you want to make mankind happy, start on yourself.’ He thinks happiness is not achieved by a policy of self-sacrifice and loving others: it is made up of mere moments of pleasure, as when a hungry man gets a bowl of rice; it is a smile, and a note on a guitar, the promise that one will not be tortured today, a cool hand on a burning forehead, and of course reading the works of Wolinski while lying on a sofa, eating a bar of chocolate. However, it is never quite possible to believe what Wolinski says: he refuses to avoid contradicting himself, since he thinks now one thing and now the opposite. His challenge to accepted ideas means that he can challenge his own ideas too: a person who has definite ideas, he says, becomes either a fascist or a believer. That makes Wolinski one of the most terrifying of humorists because he makes a virtue of his contradictions. For example, he makes one of his characters say: ‘If to be racist is not to like people who are different from one, well, then I am a racist.’ His defence is that truth needs to be exaggerated, and pursued to its extremes; by this means he shows that everyone including himself has something of the racist in him. His is a humour that seeks to destroy all defences, and not to spare his own. It is different from Bouvard’s cynicism, which is defensive; Wolinski is on the contrary a terrorist who blows up all certainties and himself in the process.

Behind his grenades, he is, of course, a quiet home-loving man, whose two main interests are his family and reading books. His little daughter trips into the room, saying she has a message for him; she kisses him and runs out. ‘Is that your message?’ The telephone rings all the time, but he knows it is for his wife, a journalist, who is Le Monde’s specialist on feminist affairs. He leaves it to her to answer. In his booklined study he seems cut off from the world, but he hates being alone. He and his wife, in nine years of marriage, have not spent more than three nights in separate beds. The one thing he has not succeeded in blowing up is the ‘phallocrat’ that resides deep inside him. He admits that when he married he treated his wife as a pretty toy; he says he cannot take women seriously because he always wants to touch them. He used to infuriate his wife by staring at other women: he tries to be more careful now, but he remains persuaded that if men have eyes, it is above all to look at women. He would give the sight of all the sunsets of Venice for that of a woman’s bottom. If one could weigh men’s staring at women, he says, how many kilos of stares would a woman count at the end of a day; and they would be stares weighing very different amounts, depending on whether they came from a Yugoslav window cleaner, an adolescent with complexes, a lorry driver whose cabin is full of pinups, or the woman hunter who is certain there is always one in a hundred who will respond to his advances. Wolinski is fascinated by all the traditional women’s stratagems: ‘I would be unhappy in a society that rejected flirting, high heels, transparent clothes, perfumes, and trousers that hug bottoms. I believe I am not the only one of my species.’ He is quite unable to get used to the new feminist theories, which is inconvenient, because his wife, having refused to remain the housewife he would have preferred her to be, has become a leading activist in the feminist movement. He insists that he needs to feel loved, to imagine that she regards him as an idol, ridiculous though that may be. She treats him rather toughly. ‘You really are the woman I need,’ he retorts, ‘because I have no will power; thanks to you, I appear to have it. Alone I would have spent my nights crawling round bars. I would have become fat, dirty and alcoholic. I believe that all that men do which is good, they do to try to impress their wives. What luck that there are wives.’ But it is becoming more and more difficult to impress them. Men are becoming more like teachers whose pupils suddenly laugh at them. To laugh at his teachers was precisely what Wolinski did in his youth. So, ultimately, he is proud of his wife being what she is, and he is sorry for all those women who are not fortunate enough to have a husband as nice as himself. Having thrown grenades throughout his life, he is bemused by the fact that he has been standing on a feminist grenade all the time.

Theodore Zeldin

His two-volume history, France 1848– 1945 (1973, 1977), received international acclaim: The Times called it “brilliant, original, entertaining and inexhaustible”; Paris Match said that it was “the most perspicacious, the most deeply researched, the liveliest and the most enthralling panorama of French passions”. His other books include the novel Happiness (1988). Theodore Zeldin has been awarded the Wolfson Prize and figures on Magazine Littéraire’s list of the hundred most important thinkers in the world today.

Excerpt from Theodore Zeldin’s  Book  ‘The French’  (1983)

Cabu: Doubts are Essential, I Hate Them Who Claim to Know Everything

“Cartoonists make a living out of people’s stupidity, a trait that only seems to be on the increase with the passing of the years.”

Cabu with his cartoon character Le Grand Duduche
Photo: LYDIE/SIPA/REX

By Theodore Zeldin

‘WHAT DO YOU want to do when you grow up?’ asks the harassed father of his little boy with a vacant face. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Don’t know! Don’t know! That is no answer: Think. At your age, you must know what you want to do.’ So the little boy promises to think. He goes and asks his little girlfriend, but she does not know what she wants to do either. He goes and asks his doddering grandfather what he wants to do in the future, but he does not know. He goes to the kitchen and asks the cook. ‘If the pigs don’t eat me, I’ll get my pension and retire,’ says she. ‘That’s not so silly,’ thinks the little boy. He goes back to his father, who is sitting at a desk, by a telephone, with graphs on the wall and glum despair on his face, and tells him: ‘When I grow up, I shall retire, and raise pigs, but I’ll take care not to let them eat me.’ This boy could serve as a mascot for the third category of French people: those who are involved neither in the rat race, nor in traditional working-class protest, those who do not want power over others. What will there be to distinguish him, in due course, from the international fraternity of drop-outs?

Jean Cabut, who drew the strip cartoon containing this story, is now forty-four, and he does not know what he will do when he grows up either. The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has called him ‘the best journalist in France’: he is certainly being a faithful reporter when he presents the dilemmas of his countrymen in pithy moral tales of this sort. But it is not surprising that he can give no better answer himself than the little boy did. The basis of his view of life is that he does not like people who know the answers. He considers them dangerous: they never ask themselves questions; they never know doubt and Cabu (which is how he signs his cartoons) insists that it is essential to have at least some doubts. He has created a famous character, Mon Beauf (my brother-in-law) who incarnates all the complacency of provincial France. This only half-fictitious person is partly based on Cabu’s real brother-in-law, who is an insurance man in the Vosges (Cabu’s sister is a gym mistress), though the face has some resemblance to the Mayor of Nice, Médecin, who once sued Cabu for libel and whom Graham Greene is now annoying in a different way. Cabu is a journalist as well as a cartoonist, because he does not deal in imaginary stereotypes, but always bases himself on real people around him; he is an eavesdropper who has no need to resort to fiction. Every time he goes to see his brother-in-law he comes back with a bag of gems. It was while still at school that he came to hate that type: he started a magazine called Le Petit Fum, short for fumiste (meaning those who do nothing seriously and on whom one cannot count); that was the label the scientists gave the classicists, on the ground that they did not work much. Cabu hated the scientists because they were always fascinated by how things worked, but never asked themselves the questions, what good does it do? What purpose does it serve? He is one of those who always calls into doubt every aspect of civilization, and he does not spare himself.

He is not sure whether he is a utopian with his head in the clouds or a prematurely senile old fogey worshipping nostalgia. He regards adolescence as the best years of life, because everything seems possible then, because the adolescent lives in a world of dreams, imagining all sorts of wonderful situations, and everything he encounters in the real world has the unspoilt taste of novelty. The first girl Cabu took in his arms, the first cartoon he sold to a newspaper, are memories of ecstasy he has not repeated. Le Grand Duduche, Cabu’s most famous cartoon character, is about seventeen, but he is not just a representative of the young generation. Duduche provides one of the most accurate histories of the young over the last two decades, because Cabu has observed them very precisely through his own son and the four children of his wife, but Duduche is much more than an heir of Billy Bunter. He is not a greedy, naughty child, but a naive observer of the law of the jungle that school life is, and through his adventures at school, shows life outside school to be a similar kind of jungle. Duduche is in many ways Cabu himself, still marvelling at the inexplicable imbecilities of those who pretend to be adults. The events of 1968 were the great moment in Cabu’s life: ‘that was my Great War of 1914’; adolescence he describes as a permanent revolution of 1968 that constantly repeats itself. He would like to keep that spirit alive. But of course he has his doubts. Why is it that 1968 did not usher in a new world? Here Cabu shows that both he and Duduche, while having an irrepressible faith in man, are also disappointed with him. The rebels of 1968 made the same mistake as their fathers; they used violence, and that is self-defeating; they became greedy for power, and that corrupts; and above all they did not realize that they were really just like their parents, and they have now in middle age developed all the awful vices of their parents. Duduche is in love with his headmaster’s daughter, and she is a silly girl he has nothing in common with: Cabu himself as a young man always fell in love with prim, Catholic girls: ‘we are all like that, our ideas and our behaviour don’t coincide.’ When Duduche goes to the first communion party of his young cousin, he watches all the relatives pile their expensive gifts on a table – radios, walkie-talkies and toy cars; the cousin accepts politely, and then paints his revolutionary slogan of protest on the wall: Down with the Consumer Society. The pleasures of adolescence are, of course, all to be obtained outside the school syllabus: Duduche is a marginal who does not like syllabuses or systems and so is Cabu: ‘it is very important for me that each one of us can have solitude when he wants it – as Sartre said, hell is other people; solitude is necessary for reflection; but solitude only works if you feel comfortable with yourself.’

The worst experience of Cabu’s life was therefore, not surprisingly, his period of military service. He could not bear that the army should tell him what to do and dress him from top to toe. (He has printed a marvellous, deadly serious, long army report on the relative merits of different kinds of underpants for conscripts.) He was given no responsibility: he felt diminished in the army, as though forced to acknowledge his weakness before the powers that be. Such an admission is all the more painful for him, since he is very conscious of man’s fragility: another of his cartoon characters is a mongol boy – he had one for a neighbour – who symbolizes the narrow line that separates success from failure: that is so frightening that he has to laugh. It was the callousness of the army that turned him into an anti-militarist. He was sent to fight in Algeria: he and his mates had been on duty for two weeks, day and night, and were dying of thirst in the boiling heat: a helicopter came to give them water, but it landed half a mile away from them, and they had to bring the water up in jerry cans on their backs. Then they saw another helicopter land on the doorstep of the commander’s post: a general emerged from the plane bearing a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket: he presented it to their colonel and flew off. ‘That day, I understood that the military really constitute a caste apart.’ Cabu has been a relentless champion of non-violence ever since: he believes one solution for the world’s ills that has not been tried is passive resistance; he has demonstrated for unilateral disarmament; his book of cartoons, Down With All Armies, has sold 75,000 copies. He has not hesitated to descend to vitriolic insult of soldiers and strident caricature, but he has also published conversations with real soldiers who are perfectly decent people, who claim to be left-wing, who can even quote Mao, and who say they are only doing a job like any other, that offers security and a pension. That only makes it worse from his point of view, that they should spend their lives collecting medals ‘for having destroyed a battalion of flies on a dung heap with no thought for the danger involved’. Cabu protests also against nuclear power. He protests against the pollution of the environment. He resents modern concrete architecture, and protests that his home town, Châlons-sur-Marne, should have had all its character destroyed by expansion and rebuilding. He sees no need for supermarkets: ‘the little old shops were perfectly adequate.’ He knows life in the past was awful for most people, but he regrets something in it all the same. He prefers jazz to rock, and Charles Trenet to any modern singer. He prefers cars made in the 1920s. He contradicts everything he says about his love of youth by complaining that France’s old civilization should stoop to borrow from America, which is a mere 200 years old.

Of course, he is horrified by what he says; he cannot stand Arab music, that is one sign of his Frenchness, but he thinks it really is time he learnt to appreciate it. He feels French because he loves the countryside and the architecture, but he is ashamed that he has not travelled more. His friends think of him as quintessentially French, because of his passion for its old houses and its little shops, and because he makes a virtue out of his nostalgia, but it is not difficult to imagine him attending Aldermaston nuclear demonstrations in Britain, and living in a Suffolk village, for he is not only a vegetarian, but seldom drinks either, so the inevitable excuse of the Frenchman, that he cannot be separated from his wine or his mother’s cooking, does not apply. Cabu is puzzled by the behaviour of his son, who mocks him for having made no real difference to the world, despite all his endless protesting. He thinks that perhaps history goes in cycles, and that the young will one day return to the idealistic spirit of 1968. But he is well aware that he is not fulfilling his vision of adolescence, of being always open to new ideas. He admits he might be in a rut himself, that he may be guilty of precisely the same obstinacy for which he criticizes his brother-in-law. So what he does with the second half of his life will be the real test of his philosophy. Is it possible, or desirable, to go beyond passive resistance to the rat race and other forms of violence? There might well be interesting developments when Cabu is a grandfather: that will produce for the first time in history a combination of a sizable group of radical pensioners – in good health and with a long expectation of life, with plenty of frustrated energy for more experiment – and a new generation of precocious grandchildren who will have no grudge against them, as they might against their parents: together they might do more than engage in the traditional spoiling of grandchildren.

Dissatisfaction both with the consumer society and with traditional forms of protest against capitalism started when prosperity was at its peak. In 1968, in a profound revolution that has been played down with the modest title of the Events of May, many young people suddenly called the bluff of those in authority. Students rioted, workers occupied factories, life came to a temporary standstill. It resumed after a few months, but for a while the whole country was led to question its values, and it emerged that quite a few people did not accept them. The graffiti on the walls of Paris proclaimed: Pleasure not Power. I reject the Past. I want Dialogue. The Right to Enjoyment. Revolution is Orgasm. An End to Metro, Boulot, Dodo, i.e. to a life that consisted simply of travel, work and sleep. The search was now not for money, or promotion or material comforts, but for a more elusive sense of fulfilment, for a combination of security and excitement, for the Good Life, or as it was now called, the Quality of Life. This was not specifically French. The Americans had reacted against their greater prosperity even earlier, and the hippies were the predecessors of the new French marginaux, the people who opted into the margins of society. The magazine Actuel which kept these people in touch and enabled them to do things in common was partly modelled on New York’s Greenwich Village Voice. Since then the daily newspaper, Libération, and the magazine Autrement have sustained and co-ordinated the urge to experiment with new ways of life. But 1968 has cast graduated ripples far beyond the small groups who have actually withdrawn completely into rural or intellectual independence. Many of those who were in their twenties in 1968 have been permanently marked by their experiences; they are less dogmatic, less political, less brutal than they would otherwise have been. And in society at large, even among those who reacted in horror against the revolt, the sense of hierarchy is less pronounced, personal relations are less liable to be contemptuous; even the prefect of police speaks with a gentler voice. The ‘right to be different’ is respected more than it used to be, at least theoretically.

The generation of 1968, or more precisely the affinity of 1968, since it is less an age group than a tendency, are worried by their inability to fulfil their promise, in the sense of showing more practical, concretely identifiable results from their agitation and experiment. Cabu says there is something of the old schoolmaster in him (his father was one) wanting to make people happy despite themselves. That is the source of the dissatisfaction that gnaws at him and those like him. They cannot accept that they have achieved a lot simply by living their own lives with greater decency; they cannot measure the moral contagion that has introduced more gentleness into human relationships by the presence of people who are not willing to use violence, and are not inspired by greed for money or power. They cannot reconcile themselves to the thought that what distinguishes them from the rest of society is their acknowledgement that the same ideals cannot suit everyone, so that they would be unlikely to ‘make everyone happy’ if they did have more influence. They represent a temperament, not a solution. Is not Cabu worried by people who know what the solutions are?

Theodore Zeldin

His two-volume history, France 1848– 1945 (1973, 1977), received international acclaim: The Times called it “brilliant, original, entertaining and inexhaustible”; Paris Match said that it was “the most perspicacious, the most deeply researched, the liveliest and the most enthralling panorama of French passions”. His other books include the novel Happiness (1988). Theodore Zeldin has been awarded the Wolfson Prize and figures on Magazine Littéraire’s list of the hundred most important thinkers in the world today.

Excerpt from Theodore Zeldin’s  Book  ‘The French’  (1983)