‘TOUTE MA VIE, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France.’* The opening words of General de Gaulle’s memoirs have become world famous. I too, in my own infinitely humbler way, have always cherished just such a conception. It stems, I suppose, from my first visit, as a child of nearly seven in September 1936, when my mother took me for a fortnight to Aix-les-Bains, largely in an attempt to wean me from my English nanny. I can still feel, as if it were yesterday, the excitement of the Channel crossing; the regiment of porters, smelling asphyxiatingly of garlic in their blue-green blousons; the raucous sound all around me of spoken French (which I already understood quite well, having had twice-weekly French lessons since the age of five); the immense fields of Normandy, strangely devoid of hedges; then the Gare du Nord at twilight, the policemen with their képis and their little snow-white batons; and my first sight of the Eiffel Tower. We fetched up at Aix in a modest pension with a pretty garden, and a young girl called Simone† looked after me while my mother was doing the cure and talked French to me from morning till night.
There were two more pre-war trips, one with both my parents for a week in Paris during which we did all the usual things. We took a bateau mouche down the Seine, went to the Louvre which bored me stiff and to the sewers which I found fascinating, climbed on to the roof of the Arc de Triomphe, where you get a far better view of Paris than you do from the Eiffel Tower, which is like looking at it from an aeroplane. Of course we did the Eiffel Tower as well, not only going up to the top but having lunch in its extremely smart restaurant, which my father claimed was his favourite in Paris because it was the only place you couldn’t see it from. I remember being astonished at the number of restaurants all over the city, at many of which people were eating outside; in pre-war London there were comparatively few, and tables on the pavement were almost unheard-of. My other memory is that almost every teenage boy wore a beret and plus fours, hundreds of them meeting regularly at a huge market for collectors of postage stamps at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées.* Eight years later, when my father became ambassador, we led a very different sort of life. I was still at school, but now holidays were always spent in France – including Christmas 1944, when the war was still on – and in a palace. The Hôtel de Charost (to give it its proper name) on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is, I believe, the most beautiful embassy of any country in the world. Previously owned by Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese, it was bought by the Duke of Wellington when he was briefly ambassador after Waterloo and has been the British Embassy for the past two hundred years. The weather that winter was bitterly cold, and it was one of the few warm places; it could also provide limitless quantities of whisky and gin, which had been non-existent in France since the war began, it was full every night with the Parisian beau monde from Jean Cocteau down. Soon it became a sort of institution, known as the Salon Vert. The queen of it was the poetess – and my father’s mistress – Louise de Vilmorin, who would stay in the embassy sometimes for weeks at a time. (My mother, who had no conception of jealousy, loved her almost as much as my father did, which was no surprise: she was one of the most fascinating women I have ever known. We became great friends, and she taught me lots of lovely old French songs, which I would sing to the guitar after dinner.) There were very few politicians, but writers, painters and actors in plenty. I remember the stage designer Christian Bérard, always known as Bébé, another regular attender. One evening he brought his little pug, which instantly deposited a small dry turd on the carpet. Without hesitation he picked it up and put it in his pocket; my mother said afterwards that it was the best manners she had ever seen. But the company was by no means only French; there were visiting English, and Americans, and anyone whom my parents knew and happened to be passing through.
Looking back on those days, I have only one regret: I was two or three years too young. I was, I think, moderately precocious for my age, but all these celebrities were only names to me; I called Jean Cocteau Jean and mixed him dry martinis, but I had never read a word he had written. Had I been eighteen in 1944 instead of fifteen I would have known – and learnt – so much more. But there: no complaints. I was lucky to have been there at all.
My father deliberately scheduled his official tours to coincide with my holidays, so we visited every corner of the country. At Easter 1945, just as the war was about to end, we drove south – past the occasional rusting and burnt-out tank – for my first sight of the Mediterranean, the blueness of which – after the green-grey Channel – I shall never forget. In 1946, with a school friend, I bicycled through Provence from Avignon to Nice; but the combination of the intense heat, the battle-pitted roads and the endless punctures (thanks to synthetic rubber inner tubes) made the journey only a partial success. In 1947, while waiting to join the navy, I also spent six months living with a delightful Alsatian family in Strasbourg, attending lectures in German and Russian (which I had begun with a Linguaphone course at the age of twelve) at the university. I enjoyed Strasbourg enormously, apart from the hideous embarrassment caused by my landlady’s constant attempt to de-virginise me, often five minutes before her husband was due home. (Now I come to think of it, she probably told him all about it every night in bed, to their combined chuckles.) When we left the embassy at the end of that year, we lived permanently in a lovely house on the lake just outside Chantilly. By this time, France had become my permanent home, the only one I had; and I grew to love it more and more.
It was during those embassy days that I had my first and last meeting with General de Gaulle. On 6 June 1947, the third anniversary of the D-Day landings, a commemorative service on one of the beaches was followed by a huge buffet lunch in an adjacent hotel. For some reason I could not get there, as my parents had, the night before; I therefore drove up on the morning of the day itself. I was seventeen, and it was my first long solo car journey. I had been hoping to arrive in time for lunch; but I got hopelessly lost among the narrow, unmarked lanes of Normandy and arrived only as the meal was ending. On my arrival my father introduced me to the general, who, much to my surprise, stood up to greet me, unwinding all six foot five of him. I was deeply honoured, but also ravenously hungry and all the food seemed to have been cleared away. One plate only remained: the general’s, on which lay a large slice of apparently untouched apple pie. I was transfixed by the sight of it. ‘Do you think he’s going to eat it?’ I asked my mother. ‘How should I know?’ she replied, ‘you’d better ask him.’ There followed a short battle between hunger and shyness; hunger won, and I went up to his table. ‘Excusez-moi, mon général,’ I said, ‘mais est-ce que vous allez manger votre tarte aux pommes?’ He immediately pushed the plate over, with a faint smile and an apology that he had spilt his cigarette ash all over it. Realising, I think, that I might be going a little too far, I said that it would be an honour to eat the general’s ash – a remark that proved a distinct success. It was my only conversation with the great man; unlike most of those he had with my father or Winston Churchill it could hardly have been more friendly.*
This book is not written for professional historians, who will find nothing in it that they do not know already. It is intended only for the general reader, to whom the French rather charmingly refer as l’homme moyen sensuel, and is written in the belief that the average English-speaking man or woman has remarkably little knowledge of French history. We may know a bit about Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Louis XIV, but for most of us that’s about it. In my own three schools we were taught only about the battles we won: Crécy and Poitiers, Agincourt and Waterloo.
So here is my attempt to fill in the blanks. I want to talk about the fate of the poor Templars at the hands of the odious Philip the Fair, and what happened to his daughters in the Tour de Nesle; about the wonderful Madame de Pompadour and the odious Madame de Maintenon; about Louis-Philippe, almost forgotten today but probably the best king France ever had; and that’s just for a start. Chapter 1 covers the ground pretty fast, taking us from the Gauls and Julius Caesar to Charlemagne, about eight centuries. But as we continue the pace inevitably slackens. Chapter 21 deals only with the five years of the Second World War. And with that we stop. All history books must have a clearly defined stopping place; if they do not, they drag on until they become works on current affairs, and though I might possibly have gone on to cover Vietnam and Algeria, nothing would have induced me to take on the European Union. No: the year 1945 closed one era and started a new one. The Fourth and Fifth Republics must find another chronicler. (Indeed, they have found several already.)
In introductions like this one, the author is generally allowed to include a personal note; such liberties are not however normally expected in the book itself. I have to admit that in my last two chapters I have occasionally broken this rule. In 1937 my father, Duff Cooper, was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty – the splendid name then given to the Minister for the Navy – an office which he resigned in protest against Neville Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler at Munich; in 1940 he joined Winston Churchill’s cabinet as Minister of Information; then, after a period first in the Far East and then later doing secret work in London, in January 1944 he became British representative to General de Gaulle’s French Committee in Algiers – going on immediately after the liberation of Paris in August to be Britain’s first post-war ambassador there. In all these positions, in one way or another, he comes into our story. I could hardly leave him out.
I have transgressed in other ways too, notably in the matter of consistency, a virtue I have always deplored. In the pages that follow the reader will find dukes and ducs, counts and comtes, Johns and Jeans, Henrys and Henris. The choice has been dictated occasionally by risks of confusion, but more often by simple euphony – and I am well aware that names that sound right to my ear may well sound hideously wrong to others. If they do, I can only apologise.
I know I have said it before, but this is almost certainly the last book that I shall ever write. I have loved every moment of the work on it, and see it as a sort of thank-offering to France for all the happiness that glorious country has given me over the years.
John Julius Norwich
London, March 2018
* ‘All my life, I have had a certain conception of France.’
† Later she had a baby (I think by an American GI) whom she called ‘Diana Welcome’ after my mother.
* I used to be an avid collector myself, until a Chinese friend pointed out that philately would get me nowhere.
* My father used to say that talking to de Gaulle was exactly like talking to the Eiffel Tower.