France is not simply a nation of rugby anti-heroes we love to hate. It’s a nation to whom we are bound by strong ties of affection. 

Two books brought this home to me: Keren Chiaroni’s The Last of the Human Freedoms and Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live – A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. 

Dr Keren Chiaroni is a senior lecturer at Victoria University. Her story recalls the assistance given by French men and women to New Zealand airmen, shot down over France during the Second World War. Among them was Raymond Glensor, a member of our New Zealand Baptist family, whose diary occupies a significant section of the book. 

The book’s a collection of moving personal histories of Kiwi airmen saved by the French Resistance, but it’s also a heart-warming record of significant and courageous human choices that cross boundaries of nationality and creed. 

The book’s title comes from Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl, who wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any set of circumstances.” 

When Kiwi airman John Sanderson was shot down in May 1944, an ordinary French family was asked to shelter him. They chose to help with dire consequences. This book examines what it means to be human when everything we value, including our liberty, is taken away. 

Sarah Bakewell, an author and part-time cataloguer of rare books at the National Trust in London, reaches back to French 16th century nobleman, essayist and wine grower Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, to discover his guidance on what it means to be human.

It is, says one reviewer, “an unorthodox biography of a fascinating and charming man. It relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. At the same time, it is the story of his many readers, who, over the centuries, have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of possible answers to the question that concerned them as it does all of us – how to live?” 

Montaigne provides 20 answers, all of which are summed up in an overarching aphorism, “Life is an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself.”

Lady Marchmain, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, archly informs Charles Ryder, “The only life that really matters is the life hereafter.” Not so, say the French resistance fighters and Montaigne. 

Whether on the battlefields of 20th century France, in the world of a 17th century French philosopher, or the 21st century landscape of New Zealand, every day life with its commonplace routines, its complexities, difficulties, life changing decisions and volatile moral choices is where we decide how to live. 

The Easter story of Jesus living a fully human life is a graphic illustration of that.

“The 21st century,” says Bakewell. “is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour’s trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages and pods brings up thousands of individuals, fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go an about themselves; they diarise and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. They look inward as never before.”

The French men and women in these books remind us that more important than winning the World Cup is winning life here and now. 

That doesn’t come through looking after number one but by exercising “the last of the great human freedoms,” and making deeply human decisions, often routine, sometimes terrifying and demanding, but always in the manner of the human Jesus. 

– Tom Cadman looks at life and faith through the lens of literature