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“... conversion, as well as a banality of evil. ‘Different time lines run through these chapters,’ Jean Franco says of The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. ‘The rapid time of modern communications, the frozen time of military dictatorships, the retrospective time of memory, and the strange temporalities of residues and remnants of the past.’ By ...”

“... the town in a pink Rolls Royce, sometimes accompanied by François Mitterrand’s eldest son, Jean-Christophe, then in charge of Africa at the Elysée. ‘Our interests would be better served if someone more competent, with fewer genetic links to the old regime, were to take over in Gabon,’ a French minister confided last summer. Off the ...”

“... novelist and film-maker Edmundo Desnoes, on First World perceptions of Third World politics; by Jean Franco, who writes about El Salvador and the link between militarisation, mass murder and the destruction of traditional symbolic spaces, like church and home; and by Michel de Certeau on the ‘long march’ of American Indians toward some form of ...”

“... then, ‘all his life long Malraux was an actor playing Malraux.’ A conscious echo, no doubt, of Jean Cocteau’s remark that ‘Victor Hugo was a mad-man who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ But Lottman’s – and others’ – objection to Malraux was less that he was mad than that he was misleading. ‘For all of his life André Malraux let it be ...”

“... By 1995, there were 37 monuments and 113 plaques dedicated to Jean Moulin in France; 978 boulevards, avenues, streets, squares, bridges and stadiums were named after him, as well as more than 365 schools, including one university. There are even more today; only de Gaulle is more honoured. And yet at the time of his death at the hands of Nazi torturers in the first days of July 1943, Moulin was unknown even among the elite circles of the day ...”

“... perhaps the misfortune, of the Enlightenment that its historians frequently write very long books. Franco Venturi’s Settecento Riformatore, which must surely be one of the longest, has now reached its fifth and final volume. As an enterprise it can have few parallels even among dixhuitièmistes. It offers no less than the description of an entire culture ...”

“... must have seemed desirable in 1870, as the Second Empire came crashing down during the Franco-Prussian War. The wedding took place the day after the French defeat at Sedan. Marcel was born ten months later, on 10 July 1871. Robert, the brother famously absent from almost everything Proust wrote, was born when Marcel was not quite two. What is ...”

“... political and financial misdeeds. Pierre Péan is best known for having revealed that the dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic, had given diamonds worth millions of francs to Giscard d’Estaing, and for uncovering the extent of Mitterrand’s work for the Vichy government as a young man. In Le Monde selon K., Péan considers a number ...”

“... Jean-Marie Déguignet was born near Quimper, in Brittany, in 1834, the fifth of ten children born to an illiterate tenant farmer. A succession of bad harvests drove the family off the land into the town and at six, Jean-Marie was sent out to beg. He survived fevers, the potato famine of 1845, and a near-fatal accident which happened when he was ‘no taller than a riding-boot ...”

“... took further issue with each other. One of the figures with whom she’s most concerned, Jean Paulhan, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue française before the Occupation, exchanged letters during this period with his friend and fellow author, Marcel Arland, and this correspondence has now been published. Many of the letters are very short, and merely ...”

“... goods – toing and froing by ferry. But the war of decolonisation – 1954-62 – still dogs the Franco-Algerian partnership and alluding to it in an election campaign, as Macron has, is risky; in this election especially, where sensitivities are heightened by an ongoing state of emergency declared after the jihadist killings in Paris in 2015.‘Une vraie ...”

“... controversy in England. The novel is a more likely reason for the French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner to have turned to the subject than Jerome’s letter. Henner exhibited his Fabiola in the Salon of 1885 (its present whereabouts are unknown). It shows a woman’s head, covered by a red shawl, in profile. Fourteen years earlier, in the ...”

“... La France Libre,’ de Gaulle wrote to Jean Marin, who’d been his companion in London from the summer of 1940 and was now the Director of the Agence France-Presse, ‘that was the finest thing we ever did.’ He believed this. Many of his closest associates believed it too. But as the leader of la France Libre (and la France Combattante), de Gaulle was hardly a free man ...”

“... miners, laundrywomen, farmers, soldiers and servants – lead up to the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second Empire. And then we have the final novel in the series, bringing us once more back to the country, to Plassans, to rural life and a doomed coupling between two relatives, shortly after the empire’s end, with a great ...”

“... in memories of August 1914, when the Germans looked likely to take Paris, and of the strategic Franco-British success on the Marne a month later. On 13 May, after a lull in the censorship and news of the German breakthrough in the Ardennes, a sanguine paterfamilias announced to his family over breakfast: ‘It doesn’t matter. We will win the war at ...”