It's called the passe hstorique, but it's not really a
past tense at all.
Of course it is, Nick.
As you see from my example, it is used for written past narratives in literary texts, even in fairytales and newspapers (see alans's post above).
It is very very rarely used for narrative - not "even" in fairy tales, but "specially" in fairy tales - or, perhaps more accurately, by those stories intended to lend the mythic aura to the Royal family, or the pre-historical legitimacy of the aristocracy. This
ye olde flavour to such texts is quite evident to a French speaker. When it's an official text - or a news quote of one - the aura conveyed is intentionally authoritative.
It's an almost verbatim analysis given to me by one of France's leading historians, a long-standing member of the Academy, who'd been a professor in one of its most prestigious universities, Toulouse, and then the institut Catholique. You can nit-pick it to death no doubt, but it's broadly accurate.
Nearly always. I can think of at least a dozen modern female novelists who use it - I can't recall a single man. Before you go on one of your google searches, I'm sure there must be some, here and there feeding the pulp mills.
Remarkable - now I never knew Caesar wrote in English, thanks.
It's not meant to give
immediacy - it's
meant to give a God's Eye authority.
As for why female novelists like to use the present tense, even in a narrative where it's clearly limiting and inappropriate - I don;t think the intent is to achieve immediacy. If it is, it fails, of course. I suspect rather it's merely down to a lack of confidence. They
want to be so limited.
Stop being so dense - I'd say deliberately so, but it's impossible to know with you two just how obtuse you genuinely are. They were
speaking quite normally, of course. The issue they were addressing was how and why such important facts of French history had not been, and were still not, at that point, debated in a proper manner by the academy.
I don't need to look it up, as you quite clearly did, because I learned it, to read such a text with the proper diligence worthy of my neighbour's efforts, and so I could discuss it with him without making disrespectful mistakes. So, now you've done a bit of research, I'm glad you agree with me now that there are indeed peculiar complexities with this tense.
The point was that it didn't
let them, but that the imprimatur of authority that this academese carries, together with its structural clumsiness, makes questioning the official account - of anything, not just history - quite unfamiliar. In particular, the fairly standard Anglo-American practice of asking, what would have happened had this
not happened, or if something
else had happened instead, is simply not in Ordnung, richtig.
Also - the national trauma in the 80s and 90s was not the revelation of "what the Vichy regime did on their behalf." That had always been "known", conveniently. It was of what quite ordinary French people did, of their own volition, not to say eagerness, in Vichy and all over France, even in those areas where the Germans hardly had a presence.
No - it's merely an unfamiliar act of thinking because, from top-down, it's not how "history" is done.
Your semi-divine abilities really are quite astonishing. Yes, he gave a rational answer - but he didn't understand, so it was a mistaken rational answer. I eventually got through to him, of course. It was simply a way of thinking about the past that was very strange to him.
I probably did - you're not getting it. We were conversing in French, quite ordinary conversational French. You keep forgetting you've already admitted this "narrative" tense is not used in speech. It is not that he did not understand linguistically - his mind was just not used to thinking in that way. This was the point made on
Apostrophes.
No idea what you're talking about. Talking with you always ends up in a mess, to be sure, but it's always of your own making. You're thinking about the umpteenth example I gave you to explain an obsure point of English grammar - the JFK assassination example? You just couldn't understand, that's all - another example of unfamiliarity of thinking. And the usual wilful obtusity, in your case.