Colin Jones's history of Paris is subtitled "The Biography of a City," yet the book he provides is virtually the opposite. For rather than providing an intimate portrait of the city through the ages, what he offers is an account of the city within the context of the nation's history. This is underst...
Back in the 1950s, Alfred Cobban wrote the first of what became a three-volume "History of Modern France" for Penguin Press. Together these books provided a primarily political history of France from the death of Louis XIV to the withdrawal from Algeria in 1962 and survived for decades as a standard...
The Abbé Siéyès, when asked what exactly he had done during the Terror, famously replied, J'ai vécu (‘I survived’). Part of me wants to say something similar about getting through this book, which, despite being repeatedly interesting, turned into something of an endurance test for me.The problem is...
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