The Birth of France: WARRIORS, BISHOPS AND LONG-HAIRED KINGS by Katherine Scherman (Random House: $22.50; 313 pp.)

In the introduction to his famous “Life of Charlemagne” (written around 830), the monk Einhard wrote: “I have determined to be as succinct as possible. My aim has been to omit nothing relevant which has come to my notice and yet to avoid insulting the intelligence of fastidious readers by explaining at great length every fresh item of information. In this way my book may please even those who scorn tales of antiquity as set down by the most competent and eloquent of historians” (translated by Lewis Thorpe).

These words could serve as the motto for many a popular historian, including Katherine Scherman, whose “The Birth of France” covers a period of history from the early encounters between Gauls and Romans in the 4th Century BC, to the death of the Frankish king Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, in AD 768. Unfortunately, as is perhaps to be expected of a history that is promoted by the publisher as “a robust and splendid medieval saga,” its authors desire to get to the meat of the matter in a way that will be comprehensible to the hypothetical modern reader not given to reading medieval annals in bed, results more often in gross simplification and even error, rather than in the production of a bird’s-eye view of the data.

It never becomes clear, for example, whether the entity “France,” whose gestation lasts for nearly 300 pages, is a place, a people, a political union, a culture, or all of these; hence it is even more unclear where, how, or why “it” began. Puzzlingly, the reader is finally dropped off right at the opening of the cosmopolitan era of the Holy Roman Empire with the concluding statement, “Pepin bequeathed to his sons a realm on the verge of realizing itself as a nation”--the French? Surely the invocation of the concept of nation here is of no help; indeed, it is a source of further confusion in a work that starts off with a memorable characterization of the Celts, primarily a linguistic grouping, as “in short . . . a nationality!”

Certainly Scherman has provided a wealth of fascinating detail about the events that were played out over 12 centuries in and around the region known in modern times as France. The gradual absorption of Gaul (as it was known in classical times) into the Roman orbit, the attempts of the Gallo-Roman establishment to survive in the wake of the collapse of the empire, the brilliant maneuverings, cultural as well as diplomatic, of the Germanic tribes and their leaders as they moved into the political vacuum of Western Europe, and the emergence of the Franks as the preeminent rulers of the territory of France--these complex processes form the stuff of Scherman’s story, and they are indeed at times robustly and splendidly told. (For the almost soap-operatic rise to power of the Merovingian dynasty among the Franks, episodes of which form the heart of Scherman’s book, she relies heavily on the 6th-Century “History of the Franks” by Gregory of Tours, which makes for interesting reading in its own right.)

Some attention, most of it condescending, is paid to the extant literary expressions of the people who lived through these remarkably contrasting periods. One of those singled out is the 6th- Century Italian emigre’ Venantius Fortunatus, whose poetic output ranges from the intimate lyric to the public panegyric and the sacred song. In the final chapter, Scherman surveys the range of Frankish art and culture, but the emphasis throughout the rest of the book is on politics, military success or failure, and the dealings of powerful men and women.

Despite Scherman’s attempt to look at history with a modern eye (“The Catholic Church, ever practical, saw to it that its congregation, most of whom led lives of cheerless tedium, should be lifted out of themselves in every area of consciousness”--sounds like California!), the reader in search of a new or subtle reading of the available information will be disappointed. For, although Scherman pays perfunctory homage to the by-now- familiar discovery that the Dark Ages weren’t so dark after all, she enthusiastically portrays the so-called barbarians of the era (those “sanguinary warriors and their unsoftened women”) in tones that evoke Arnold Schwarzenegger more than any of the scholars of recent times who have advanced and deepened our knowledge of the European peoples of the post-classical world and the early Middle Ages.

One hapless group of 6th-Century “pagan Teuton mercenaries” is memorialized in Scherman’s account as “men without conscience, mercy, or loyalty to any.” Meanwhile, the “good guys” of this hackneyed and superficial view of European history are presented as just that. “The Celts,” we are told, “an emotionally receptive people, had embraced the new religion (that is, Christianity) wholeheartedly.” The “Celts” in question are the Irish, and I doubt whether Scherman would recognize as wholeheartedly embraced Christianity what the majority of Irish probably practiced well into the medieval period. The excessive and naive reliance upon dubious sources--or authorial imagination--that pervades “The Birth of France” goes against the relative perspective and the striving for impartiality that should be the hallmarks of our accounts of societies and cultures, particularly those far removed from our own.

I suppose Scherman’s work, despite all these problems, is still good clean fun, especially for those who grew up on Landmark Books or some of the better issues of Classics Comics. But there is something sinister about her facile pegging of cultural or linguistic groups: Celts, we have seen, are “emotionally receptive,” Germanic peoples are warlike and pushy (with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t hereditary aristocracy), and Romans like to keep their empires neat. Wouldn’t we feel uncomfortable talking about our contemporaries in similarly stereotyping terms?