A History of France

Product Information

Stimulating, incisive, insightful, sometimes revisionist, this volume is required reading for historians of comparative colonialism in an age of revolution. This book is a sort of ‘thank-offering to France’ for all the happiness that glorious country has given him over the years. Class and State in Early Modern France explores the economic, social, ideological and political foundations of French Absolutism. The second Viscount Norwich or the late John Julius Cooper if you prefer, wrote and finished his final book, not long before he died.

But that sense of history being written by a wise and understanding coeval is rare, and rarer still without Norwich. Gildea has cogently argued that French politics reflects long-lasting divisions that play out in different mileux.As a child, I was fascinated with astronomy but discouraged from investigating the UFO phenomenon due to religious reasons. The most important example is the fact that the situationist thinker Guy Debord is dismissed as a neo-pessimist, apparently because he killed himself in 1994. They argued vigorously over imperial expansion, constitutional power, personal liberty, and public morality. The picturesque town of Dreux, 60 miles west of Paris, quietly entered history in 1821, when Victor Hugo won the hand of his beloved there. From frowning Roman generals and belligerent Gallic chieftains, to Charlemagne (hated by generations of French children taught that he invented schools) through Marie Antoinette and the storming of the Bastille to Vichy, the Resistance and beyond, FRANCE is packed with heroes and villains, adventures and battles, romance and revolution.

Tocqueville's subtlety of style and profundity of thought offer a challenge to readers as well as to translators. Incorporating the newest interpretations of past events, Sowerwine seamlessly integrates culture, gender, . Covering the centuries between the disintegration of the Carolingian empire and the rise of the French monarchy, this book traces the long period of gestation that ended with the emergence of the kingdom of France as a recognizable entity, both on the map of Europe and in the . Historical fiction offers us emotional insight into impactful historic events and an immersive sense of time and place, says David Lawday, the longtime Economist foreign correspondent and author of a new novel set during the Siege of Paris in 1870. Since Tocqueville's account of the Old Regime, historians have struggled to understand the social, cultural, and political intricacies of this efflorescence of French .Not the first John Julius Norwich book to open with him saying it was probably his last – but alas, this time he was right. It brings together the results of the first part of the first major study from Harvard University's Centre for European . Granted, Duff Cooper, while undoubtedly a significant figure, tends not to rate quite so many mentions in histories not written by his son. This imaginative study recaptures 100 years in the life of Limoges, France's first socialist city, at a time when Limoges rode high on the crest of every wave of social, political, and industrial change.

Fenby takes this head-on, taking the revolution of 1789 as the starting point for a long civil war, or, as he puts it, for “the national narratives that gave France its ideological complexion over two centuries”. Not that the general's pie earns him an easy ride; Norwich is still prepared to admit that, on a larger stage, "The folly and pettiness of de Gaulle pass belief". In addition to the public lives of the various rulers, the author give a peek at their private ones as well. The Nobel Prize in Literature has been won nearly 20 times by French authors, including Albert Camus (1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964, though he refused it) and most recently Patrick Modiano (2014) and Annie Ernaux (2022).The authors, ardent participants in the movement in Paris, documented the unfolding events as they pelted . During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Now in paperback, a major history of one of the seminal years in the postwar world, when rebellion and disaffection broke out on an extraordinary scale. As an American, I learned the French supported us in our Revolution against the British, and went on to have a bloody revolution of their own.

This is the first full-length study in English of the Popular Front, the left-wing coalition which emerged in France during the 1930s in response to the threat of fascism and which went on to win the elections of 1936, giving France her first socialist premier, Léon Blum.There, the young man meets the poet Louise de Vilmorin, “my father’s mistress,” whom, he claims, “my mother loved…almost as much as my father did,” adding that his mother, Lady Diana Cooper, “had no conception of jealousy” about his father’s many lovers. Offers a complete survey of the French May Events of 1968 through narrative, analysis, and documents. This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive study of French history available ranging from the early middle ages to the present. He breezes through the Crusades in a few pages, dusting off two centuries’ worth of battles, from the Fall of Jerusalem to the Fall of Constantinople. There is something of the comfort blanket being wrapped around you, rather than a book that lectures you about the great and good in French history.