“... was the prototype: blonde, blue-eyed, with porcelain skin. Until Marie-Antoinette, the queens of France had been of interest only as breeders. With her appetite for dresses, jewels, parties and public entertainments, she was more like a favourite than a queen: more like Du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, the frequent target of lampoonists. She imposed her ...”

“... reporting back to a Jim Crow country that had prohibited the black American soldiers who fought in France from marching (along with their white American and black French and British counterparts) in the 1919 Bastille Day victory parade. Many returning black veterans were targets of the 1919 race riots in Chicago, Tulsa and other cities, but those who stayed in ...”

“... its world-historical debut in August 1791 when ten thousand slaves in the north of Saint-Domingue rose up and laid waste to sugar plantations. Within three months, the numbers involved in the insurrection had grown eightfold. Sugar production almost ceased. Fortunes burned. Planters fled, and some were killed. By 1794, the rebels had compelled ...”

“... prestige of the Spanish monarchy declined (despite his efforts, or even because of them), while France rose. The ‘planet king’, Philip IV, was eclipsed by the sun of Louis XIV. History, or the historian at any rate, has little patience with failure. The second reason for the neglect of Olivares is the loss of most of his papers, those notorious ...”

“... was greatly outnumbered (as it was to be for centuries) by some of its neighbours: in the case of France by around four times, in the case of Germany by nearly as much. But population size did not necessarily correlate with political and economic power. Germany and Italy were weakened by their political fragmentation, ...”

“... disrepute, so the ripples of self-questioning spread outwards, to other Masonic brotherhoods. In France, there is now open discussion about Masonry’s close ties to the Socialists and speculation as to the part influential Masons played in the 1981 Elections. (The current French Grand Master is Air Force General Jacques Mitterrand, the President’s ...”

“... meanwhile, collapsed. The Parti Socialiste, more divided than ever, came fifth in 2017, and La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken ...”

“... North Africa and Italy. Defeat came when there was nowhere left to retreat to. The retreat through France after the Allied break-out following the Normandy invasion threatened to break that pattern. In Rückzug, Joachim Ludewig, an official in the German defence ministry, who first published this newly translated study more than twenty years ago, describes the ...”

“... being fat. These memoirs leave no doubt that Thatcher savoured her public dinners, especially in France, with predictable results. References to corsets crop up in many of her speeches quoted here. So, more self-consciously, does the explanation of why she likes tailored suits: ‘They also have the advantage of gently passing by the ...”

“... fresh ear’, he identifies the ‘alchemy’ of a violent event which, in the history of modern France, represents the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder’. The Village of Cannibals, like Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, confirms the degree to which social historians, building on the Annales tradition, have embraced cultural ...”

“... suddenly trained on Tahiti at the beginning of last month after the nuclear-bomb test that ended France’s three-year moratorium. Pictures of violence at Tahiti’s international airport at Faa’a and in downtown Papeete were broadcast all over the world. What was missing were interviews with Polynesian Tahitians – or Maohi, to call them by the name they ...”

“... the middle of the pandemic and was worried about finding work. I had another reason for applying: France seemed to be at war with itself, and schools were the battleground. The papers talked about violent classrooms and complacent teachers. One word in vogue was islamo-gauchisme, or ‘Islamo-leftism’, a dangerous brand of thinking that supposedly combined ...”

“... by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which had called for an armistice after the comprehensive defeat of France’s armed forces at the hands of the Wehrmacht. ‘Nothing is lost for France,’ he declared. ‘The war is not over as a result of the Battle of France. This war is a world ...”

“... proposition that is neither testable nor plausible’. Hobsbawm understands revisionism, in France at least, as a phenomenon which is both personal and ideological. At one level, it is a rebellion against the almost impregnable left-wing orthodoxy represented by the Chair in the History of the Revolution at the Sorbonne, and its ‘apostolic ...”

“... never rise to the surface.’ With its regulated banking system and extensive welfare provision, France was at first considered to have weathered the economic downturn better than most. Sarkozy delighted in telling the country that it had entered recession later, exited sooner and generally fared better than its European neighbours, ignoring the fact that ...”