A History of France

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If there is any kind of conclusion here it is that, as Fenby puts it, France is a prisoner, trapped under the weight of its history.

After reading the preface, one almost wishes Norwich had written his own memoir and left the history book to French scholars.In the five degrees of British nobility, viscount is less than duke, marquess, or earl, but higher than baron. It seems not, and I can’t imagine a more fascinating or titillating angle to explore the history of France than this wonderful book.

Social Change in Modern France is a concise and lucid account of the profound transformations that have reshaped French society over the past thirty years. 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. Our experts have chosen the best books on France including French literature, French novels and fiction, French history and leading French figures such as Charles de Gaulle , Marie Curie, Emile Zola, Coco Chanel, Simone De Beauvoir, Voltaire and Napoleon. In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth-century Impressionist painters, and much more.The history of Franco-British relations has been, over the past twenty centuries, chequered to say the least; but in those centuries France has made a contribution to European culture greater than that of any other nation – and we have been, among many others, the blessed beneficiaries. Stéphane Hénaut’s wide-ranging career in food includes working in the Harrods fromagerie, cooking for the Lord Mayor of London’s banquets, and selling obscure vegetables in a French fruiterie. Following up on his book Why the French Don't Like Headscarves, John Bowen turns his attention away from the perspectives of French non-Muslims to focus on those of . Knecht concentrates on the high politics, but his book is a valuable linkage of the Middle Ages and the early-modern age, taking readers from the Hundred Years’ War to the French Wars of Religion.

When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. Amongst its central themes are the relationships between state and society, the impact of war, competition for power, and the ways in which power has been used.

Here, Professor Richard Vinen of King’s College London recommends five books that will help you understand modern France, all written in a golden age of French historical writing. This book describes and explains this spectacular growth, and examines some of the problems that have emerged in its wake. He wrote and presented more than 30 television documentaries including Maestro, The Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon's Hundred Days, Cortés and Montezuma, Maximilian of Mexico, The Knights of Malta, The Treasure Houses of Britain, and The Death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu War. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation-a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding-has dealt with les . As Jonathan Fenby points out in his admirably lucid history of modern France, there has always been a tension between republican rule and an angry and disenfranchised population marginalised by French universalism.