Different readers will inevitably regret the omission of different things. A longer Children of the Revolution might have discussed the way Romantic individualism (or Coleridge’s “age of personality”) warred with an awareness of collective destiny. Gildea’s discussion raises many other, only apparently unrelated, questions. How precisely did ennui and its accompanying sense of futility – the mal du siècle – interact with an awareness of material empowerment? Is this opposition the consequence of a peculiarly French mentality, and if so, does it help explain the very phenomenon of recurrent revolution-mindedness that is Gildea’s subject? Why were rational reflection and empirical experience never sufficient to teach the nation that sudden revolutions were likely to be unstable? Did “soft” Impressionism in visual art develop, deliberately or not, to counteract the “hard” images of industrial reality? How does this muted style of painting contrast in that respect with imaginative literature, with the realism of Balzac or Flaubert and the naturalism of Zola?
One may remain, as I do, unsure about the validity of the overall thesis argued in Children of the Revolution, that France rediscovered its integrity, ideational and practical as well as moral, only in the collectivist action of the Great War, which finally laid to rest its unease about the coherence of the national self. Gildea does not explain how, as industrial techniques were introduced to France from England, the new and often dehumanising mercantilism of the age affected the average Frenchman or -woman’s sense of national identity.
Yet Children of the Revolution is a remarkable, vigorous and far from schematic presentation of key aspects of what it was to be French in political, historical, philosophical and psychological terms over the “long” 19th century. It is bound to influence future interpretations in a very wide range of disciplines.
