What I Saw in France
By Abdulsalam Mahmud,
I arrived in France with a quiet sense of awe, as though stepping into a place that had long lived in imagination and in history books. The air carried a weight of memory, for this was no ordinary land but a nation that had shaped much of Europe’s destiny.
From the moment my feet touched its soil, France felt less like a country and more like a stage on which centuries of triumph, tragedy, and renewal had been performed.
Paris was my first encounter, and like many before me, I was seduced by its poise. The River Seine flowed gently under bridges that seemed to whisper stories of kings and revolutionaries alike. Standing by Notre Dame, still bearing scars of the recent fire, I felt the resilience of a nation that rebuilds without forgetting its past.
In its Gothic spires and smoky stones, I saw both faith and defiance interwoven. France is never just about monuments, though; it is about moments. One evening, I sat at a café terrace watching Parisians linger over wine and conversation.
Their ease seemed effortless, but behind it lay centuries of philosophical inquiry, from Voltaire to Sartre, which had trained a people to question, to savor, and to resist the tyranny of haste. I was not merely drinking coffee; I was sipping history itself.
Yet France is also Gaul, older than Paris and older even than Christendom. I thought of Julius Caesar’s conquest, when Gaul was brought under Roman dominion, and how that encounter planted seeds of both civilization and rebellion.
Walking through the ruins of Lyon, once Lugdunum, I imagined Celtic tribes who resisted with fierce pride, only to be absorbed into the rhythm of empire. It struck me that France was born of both conquest and resistance, a paradox it still carries.
At Versailles, I encountered another paradox. The gilded halls of Louis XIV’s palace dazzled the eyes, but I could not help hearing echoes of hungry peasants beyond its gates. The Sun King’s grandeur was the very mirror of France’s brilliance and blindness, its genius and its arrogance.
The marble and mirrors reflected more than beauty; they reflected the conditions that would later explode into the Revolution. The Revolution itself haunted me most deeply. At Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine once stood, I felt the chill of radical justice.
Here kings lost crowns and heads rolled into baskets while crowds cheered. And yet, out of that terror arose a republic, fragile at first, but persistent in its claim that liberty, equality, and fraternity must be worth even blood. I could not look at the square without thinking of both horror and hope.
France is also Napoleon, and in Les Invalides, where his tomb rests under a grand dome, I felt the strange magnetism of ambition. He was a man who reshaped Europe, carving empires out of maps, spreading the Napoleonic Code, and then falling in spectacular defeat.
His resting place was both shrine and warning: that greatness and downfall often share the same path. But history in France does not only live in Paris. In Normandy, as I walked the beaches where Allied forces landed in 1944, the sand itself seemed alive with memory. The waves whispered of young men who crossed oceans to fight tyranny.
I looked at the rows of white crosses at the American Cemetery, each one a reminder that France has been both battlefield and beacon. In the south, Provence offered a softer face of France. Vineyards stretched under the Mediterranean sun, lavender fields swayed in the wind, and Roman aqueducts stood proudly among olive groves.
Yet even there, I felt history’s hand: the clash of Rome and Gaul, of Christianity and paganism, of empire and peasantry. France’s soil is never neutral; it always carries the imprint of a struggle. Bordeaux reminded me of France’s gift to the world: the art of living.
Its wines were more than drinks; they were culture distilled, patience bottled. In their aroma, I sensed the same discipline that had produced Gothic cathedrals and Enlightenment ideals — a French insistence that beauty and craft are inseparable.
But the France I saw was not trapped in the past. In Marseille, with its mix of African and Arab faces, I glimpsed a nation still negotiating its identity. Colonial histories echoed here, in the call to prayer mingling with church bells, in the cuisine where couscous met croissants.
France, I realized, is never finished; it is always becoming. I also saw scars of modern discontent. In conversations, Parisians spoke of strikes, protests, and the perennial tension between the governed and the governing. From the barricades of 1789 to the yellow vests of today, France has always believed that to protest is to be French.
The streets themselves are theatres of resistance. Yet, despite unrest, there was beauty in ordinary life. I saw it in the schoolchildren running past the Sorbonne, in lovers sketching each other at Montmartre, in bakers pulling fresh bread from ovens at dawn.
These were not scenes of grandeur, but of continuity, a quiet assurance that culture survives revolutions and wars. As these impressions deepened, I felt less like a visitor and more like a witness to a nation’s unfolding story. From Clovis to Joan of Arc, from Richelieu to de Gaulle, each page of its past seemed to walk alongside me through its streets.
And then it dawned on me. I had not truly traveled those boulevards or stood by those battlefields. What I carried were not photographs but pages, not footsteps but words. While researching for a piece on European history, I encountered Graham Robb’s “France: A History from Gaul to de Gaulle”. The book carried me across centuries and cities, until I felt I had lived them myself.
What I saw in France, through Robb’s literary masterpiece of historical scholarship, was not only a country, but the living pulse of history — vivid enough to make me feel I had been there myself.
That feeling of proximity was not entirely imagined. Between August 2021 and December 2023, I had the privilege of serving as editor of the IYBSSD2022 news website, an international project under UNESCO, headquartered in Paris. Though I never walked its boulevards, the work brought me closer to the French spirit of inquiry and intellectual exchange.
It was as if Paris, from afar, had quietly shaped the way I now see the world. And in that realization, I discovered that sometimes the greatest journeys are not taken with our feet, but with our minds, where words alone can carry us farther than miles ever could.
Mahmud, Deputy Editor of PRNigeria, wrote in via: [email protected]