Let’s start with the Dreyfus case.

The Dreyfus affair is a mythic event in French history. After the French Revolution, it created the most important social division in France before 1905, when the country was split in two over the separation of church and state and the secularisation of education. It divided France entirely and created unresolved conflicts in society that were fought out over the century to come. This is very rough and over-generalised but Republican France was always under attack in one form or another from those who never accepted the Republic, and the Dreyfus case is an exemplar of that.

Alfred Dreyfus, Jewish and a colonel in the French army, was wrongly accused and convicted of espionage. He served four horrific years on Devil’s Island and all this time people all over France, and indeed, the world, were fighting for justice for him. Ultimately Dreyfus was pardoned and the army was found guilty of fabricating the evidence against him, but it took years and years of oceanic battles.

This book is the first to tell the story of the entire Dreyfus family – taking them from their origins in Alsace to the Nazi death camps where some of Dreyfus’s descendants were murdered – sent there by the Vichy government. It’s a wonderful historical narrative which tells you all the background you need to know about the family before coming to your own conclusions – everyone comes to their own conclusions about the Dreyfus case. It’s the story of a remarkable family who suffered greatly at the hands of the French state but who also maintained absolute allegiance to it. They are the best example of what the French Revolution did for French Jews, which was to give them equal status – this, of course, did not happen throughout the rest of Europe until decades later. The family is quietly heroic and what is interesting is the number of French Republicans, thinkers, philosophers, intellectuals, who came out to defend them.

Now Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility.

Tony Judt is my hero. He died very recently. I think he is one of the most important and impressive English historians and philosophers of his time. People call him a dissident but I don’t think he was a dissident actually – he was more a defender of moral values in life, society, politics, history, war. He was a great thinker and a great humanitarian and in this book he describes three men of a similar vein, men he admires, and he brings out that great spirit of European honour and philosophical thought.

His first subject is Leon Blum, the first socialist prime minister of France and also the first Jew. He was an intellectual, a good man, a man of principle and an idealist who came to power at the most terrible time – the 30s were really an agonising decade for most Europeans and Tony Judt’s portrait of Blum reveals what it was like when the Popular Front ruled France.

Then we have Camus, a resistant but very much his own man, an independent thinker. What Judt points out are the resolute standards of morality and justice which Camus lived by and held to throughout his short life. And when it comes to the intellectual philosopher Raymond Aron, he does exactly the same thing. Aron was disapproved of by both right and left, as was Camus – none of the three were extremists; they were liberal thinkers. And what is important about this book is that it tells you about Tony Judt too. He would always see evil where evil lay. He was Jewish, raised in a Jewish family, lived on a kibbutz, and he spoke out about the injustices meted out by the Israeli government to the Palestinian people. And he was hounded because of it. In this sense this book about these three men echoes what happened to him in his own life.

Let’s move on to Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years.

Julian Jackson is today’s most important and prominent British historian of France. The way that the war is seen by historians changed completely with the publication of a book in the 60s by an American, Robert Paxton [Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944] – it was the bible for people who wanted to understand what happened in France during the Second World War. He showed for the first time that Vichy was a government of oppression in its own right; it didn’t require the German occupation to do the things it did. Today, the book which I think has replaced or rather expanded upon Paxton’s is France: The Dark Years.

One of the interesting things about it is the way it sheds light on how the French have dealt with the events of the war. What struck me when I first came here, and to France, of course, was how alike the British and the French are, but they don’t see it. To someone like me, an Australian, they seem to have much in common. One notable aspect of this is their exceptional nitpicking about each other. It’s because they’re so close, you know, like sisters. One of the things the British cannot get into their heads is that the French have faced up to what they did during the war – they know exactly what they did and they write about it endlessly.