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“... a people that produces 246 different cheeses? General De Gaulle’s remark may be apocryphal – France has far more than 246 cheeses – but it captures a central dilemma in French history. How could such a diverse collection of peoples be forged into a single nation? The question remains pertinent. Despite an apparent unity, regional differences and ...”

“... the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform France’s perennially disastrous finances. Law quickly became the second most important man in the country, and cobbled together a reform scheme that had all the solidity and common sense of an Icelandic hedge fund prospectus; it ambitiously tethered government ...”

“... and from there embarked on the unbelievably accelerated career which would make him master of France in six years, and all Europe seven years later. Yet even in the midst of rebuilding French institutions and society, marching his armies across most of the continent and earning a widespread reputation as the devil incarnate, he still cultivated his love ...”

“... for the predatory Girard, and cast the story as an example of the way the Jesuits sought to keep France in thrall to superstition. More recently, the case has attracted attention from historians of illicit literature such as Robert Darnton, interested in explaining the success of Thérèse philosophe, and from historians of medicine fascinated by ...”

“... 29 December 1990: Caught Red Funnel Ferryboat 10 a.m. Taxi Southampton Dock to Eastleigh – Air France plane departed 12.45. Met at Roissy (3 p.m. approx. Continental time) by Jean-Claude Masson and Annick, who drove us in their car to the Grand Hotel Français, boulevard Voltaire, XIIème – a quarter little known to me. Windy, showery, as at ...”

“... Government, Sir Alec Cairncross shows that our industrial production was larger than that of France and Germany combined. It was 50 per cent above the 1938 figure, compared with 20 per cent in France and 10 per cent in Germany. France and Germany together exported less than we ...”

“... of secular educators. Brittany was the most Catholic, feudal and superstitious province of France. Many had actually seen the devil and they blamed him for every calamity, from pestilence and bad harvests to curdled milk. But by his early teens, Déguignet knew that the real devil wore a cassock. He came to believe that most Breton legends were the ...”

“... criminality could flourish. The circumstances were certainly right in mid-18th-century France, when the most famous criminal in the country’s history, Louis Mandrin, established his reputation. As Michael Kwass explains in his excellent book, flourishing global trade and domestic economic expansion had combined to create a vast new consumer ...”

“... the glass. In Tennessee, he noted that the people had elected to Congress ‘an individual called David Crockett, who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent … his whole life in the woods’. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville also found America ‘a most interesting and instructive country to ...”

“... Alan Bullock, are dead, and their project remains incomplete. Individual volumes cover Germany, France from 1848 to 1945, Spain, the Low Countries, Romania and the European Jews. As yet they include only tsarist (not Soviet) Russia, and there is nothing on Austria or Italy. Even so, the formula has generated a number of classics, which have remained in ...”

“... comfortable and dull Provençal city (which remained a Papal enclave until its annexation by France during the Revolution). A confirmed bachelor, he kept regular hours, eschewed games and exercise, and read virtually no contemporary literature. Brockliss calls Calvet a ‘prig’, an ‘intellectual and moral snob’ and a ‘social climber’. At first ...”

“... was the reverse of the unmilitary monarch of popular legend, who was keen to promote peace with France. Instead, between 1382 and 1386, he pursued with ‘uncompromising vigour’ plans for expeditions to the Continent during which he might win his manhood. In 1385, thwarted by poverty and circumstance, he instead led an army to Scotland, ‘an important ...”

“... is not the French, but the Haitian, in which enslaved people not only freed themselves but forced France to abolish slavery everywhere in its empire (until Napoleon brutally reimposed it in 1802).As the French Revolution’s lustre has faded, the task of explaining why it occurred has come to seem less urgent. A few decades ago, fierce battles raged between ...”

“... exhibited such phases. Here the width of Professor Charlton’s canvas proves its worth. France, he finds, lagged well behind England in the preliminary phase of awakening to natural scenery. The English were alive to pastoral attractions as early as the 1720s and markedly so by the 1740s, but it was not till the 1760s that the French showed a ...”

“... France, it has often been said, is a democracy with the manners of an absolute monarchy. Think of the ceremonial splendour with which French presidents surround themselves, the haughty, distant style they tend to adopt, or the way relationships within their entourages tend to mimic, with delicious self-consciousness, patterns of favouritism and intrigue developed long ago at the court of Versailles ...”