A History of France

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The origins of the most legendary French foods and wines—from Roquefort and cognac to croissants and Calvados, from absinthe and oysters to Camembert and champagne—also reveal the social and political trends that propelled France’s rise upon the world stage. It is more than just a topic of intellectual interest: it has become part of a moral and political heritage.

Norwich, though, never pretends to objectivity, never tries to use sleight of hand to get us going his way - he offers the facts, with commentary and conclusion. A History of France is] a delightful book—engaging, enthusiastic, sympathetic, funny and sometimes, one has to add, quirky. From the wars against the English, all the way to the Revolution and Napoleon and ending, timely enough, with the end of the Second World War- this is a superb introduction to French history written in an engaging fashion that will appeal to history lovers or even the casual reader who wishes to know a little bit more about France. Norwich’s long career as a historian has given him a definite assurance of style, which allows him to present historical detail in a thoroughly engaging manner without sacrificing clarity. From the introduction of wine to Gaul by the Romans to Napoleon’s pancake predictions before entering Russia, the strange dialectics of war and peas offer a fascinating means of exploring the origins of French culinary traditions.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. Family welfare embraced an industrial model in which class distinctions and employer control predominated. In 1789 the French colony of Saint Domingue was the wealthiest and most flourishing of the Caribbean slave colonies, its economy based on the forced labor of more than half a million black slaves raided from their African homelands. The prospect of a Black Republic is equally disturbing to the Spanish, the English and the Americans. Although I am a longtime resident of Paris, this was the first time I began to understand the full meaning of the slogan “ Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.

Few people in France take “BHL” seriously: and to the rest of the world he just looks like the archetypal foppish French intellectual. In this groundbreaking new study, Darrin McMahon demonstrates that, on the contrary, contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the . Both the Church and secularists championed the "miracle" town as crucial in shaping how society should think about the mind, body, and spirit. Other classics of French literature include Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.As told by a Franco-American couple (Stéphane is a cheesemonger, Jeni is an academic) this is an “impressive book that intertwines stories of gastronomy, culture, war, and revolution. Another century and a half would pass before the town made history again, but this time there was nothing quiet about it.