Delivered. Since the creation of the “Que sais-Je? », To the University Press of France (1941), theHistory of Great Britain knew two authors. Paul Nicolle (1884-1951) from 1944, then André-Jean Bourde (1921-2000), who replaced this first version in 1961. Two modernists, one specialist in the Revolution in Normandy, the other in agronomy and agronomists in the Age of Enlightenment.
With Jean-François Dunyach, this is the first time that an academic who has devoted himself to the British worlds – since 2004 he has co-hosted a history seminar which brings together Paris and London – has taken up the challenge of synthesis, carried out until as of December 31, 2020, end of the post-Brexit “transition period”.
Carried out with a sobriety and a precision rarely taken in default, the presentation informs with a discernment which rejects any picturesque or taste for anecdote. We retain from the outset that, in the Paleolithic, British territory was not necessarily an island and that insularization did not make the Channel an obstacle, but an axis of circulation of men, ideas and goods which no longer denies itself. We see the toponyms appear very early on which will permanently designate this space (Albion from the 6the century, and Celtic Pritani, transmitted by Pythéas from the 4the Before our era).
Inexorable decline
We measure the linguistic fluctuations which lead, from the 12the century, to a trilingualism, between the Latin of the chancellery, the middle english of the popular classes and the Anglo-Norman of the curial elites which made the motto of Richard the Lionheart like that of the Order of the Garter sound French (“Dieu et mon droit” or “Honi est qui mal y pensie”) , until the assertion of English with Geoffrey Chaucer and Henri IV (1399-1413).
The confessional ruptures and commercial reorientation of the XVIe century, the political revolutions of the XVIIe, the imperial affirmation and its apogee when Victoria died (1901)… Nothing is missing, nuances included, such as the mention of the widened right to vote at the end of the Great War and its clear difference between men (21 years old) and women (30 years).
But the best lies in the analysis of the inexorable decline of a power given as perennial. The perceptible risks of bursting from the Irish nationalist protest (1916), relayed in Wales (1925) as in Scotland (1934), the economic decline, before and after the Second World War, and the waves of colonial emancipation which shrink the Commonwealth of grief, are only offset by the maintenance of scientific and cultural prestige (from Orwell and Tolkien to the Beatles, to JK Rowling and his Harry potter).
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