Histoire de la France was published by Albin Michel in 1947, two years after the Liberation, and it carries the emotional weight of that moment: a Frenchman who had spent the war in American exile, looking back at the long arc of his nation’s history and trying to understand how France — the country of Voltaire, of the Revolution, of the Rights of Man — had collapsed in 1940 and endured four years of occupation and collaboration. The English translation appeared as A History of France (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956) and was widely adopted as a university textbook in English-speaking countries.
Maurois covers two thousand years in a single volume of manageable length — roughly 600 pages — by deploying the same narrative technique that served him in biography: selecting key episodes, dramatizing turning points, and providing psychological portraits of the figures who shaped events. The Hundred Years’ War is told through Joan of Arc and Charles VII; the Renaissance through Francis I and the building of Chambord; the Wars of Religion through Henri IV’s conversion and the Edict of Nantes; the Grand Siècle through Louis XIV’s construction of Versailles; the Revolution through the personalities of Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre.
The approach has obvious limitations — economic and social history receive less attention than political and cultural narratives — but it makes for compulsively readable history. Maurois writes with the assumption that his reader cares about ideas, art, and personality, not just dates and battles. His account of the Enlightenment, centered on Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes, is particularly strong, reflecting both his personal affinity with the tradition of skeptical humanism and his awareness that the Enlightenment’s contradictions (its universalism coexisting with colonialism, its rationalism feeding revolutionary terror) are still unresolved.
The final chapters, covering the Third Republic, the Great War, the between-wars period, and the fall of France in 1940, are the most personal and the most painful. Maurois, who was Jewish and had to flee France in 1940, writes about Vichy and the collaboration with a restraint that is more devastating than outrage. His concluding pages, written in the cautious optimism of 1947, express a faith in France’s capacity for renewal that subsequent history — the Fourth Republic, the Algerian War, de Gaulle’s return — would both vindicate and complicate.
Collecting A History of France
First French edition (Albin Michel, Paris, 1947): Histoire de la France.
First English edition (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, 1956): Translated by Henry L. Binsse and Gerard Hopkins.
Market values:
- French first: $15–$40
- English first in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Later paperback editions: $3–$8
Widely available in both languages. Not a collector’s item in the usual sense, but a book that rewards rereading.