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“... Clemenceau was an archetype; he even looked like the Third Republic. He wore, in Keynes’s words of 1919, ‘a square-tailed coat of very good, thick broadcloth, and on his hands, which were never uncovered, grey suede gloves’. For Churchill, who much admired his French counterpart, Clemenceau was ‘as much as a single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be, a nation; he was France ...”

“... Robert Gildea’s subject is less French history than French ‘political culture’. His method eschews ‘the theorising pretensions of the Marxist and the Annales schools’ without ‘reducing history to one senseless deed of violence after another’, as he presumes (wrongly) Simon Schama to have done. Also to be avoided is Theodore Zeldin’s pointilliste description of isolated individuals, moving through time and space like ‘rogue electrons ...”

“... Sloth, by bringing on Disease, absolutely shortens Life.’ ‘The cat in gloves catches no mice.’ ‘A watched pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers over the entire tradition of American ‘Babbittry ...”

“... Did France need François Mitterrand? I hope not: the man was so vain, so shallow, so duplicitous, so amoral. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t believe anything he said: you couldn’t even consistently believe its opposite. In fact, you couldn’t listen to him without feeling you had somehow been deceived. When this deeply cynical politician placed his hand on his heart, spoke about the poor, reminded you that he had never been interested in money, even as a child, and smiled through his bloodless lips, then you could be pretty sure he was lying ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... error” the mould of the species is permanent. That is the earth’s burden.’ Edmund Morgan and Patrice Higonnet are less pessimistic. They see the great ideological transformations of the 18th century as a continuing challenge. To be sure, those who dreamed of creating a genuine liberal democracy may have failed to achieve their immediate goals, but ...”

“... world of its participants, but this is not enough to explain why things turned out as they did. Patrice Higonnet’s subject is not the nobles and what happened to them, but the way the evolution of other people’s attitudes towards them illuminates the objectives and assumptions of the revolutionaries. His starting-point is the assertion that changes ...”

“... individualistic and communitarian, and it inherited the hard-nosed intolerances of absolutism. Patrice Higonnet put it best in Goodness beyond Virtue (1998): ‘Jacobinism could not stand still … [it] would either fall back or move forward. It required commitment. It could not pause. Time and time again, Jacobin politics excluded those ...”

“... the violent aspects of the Revolution; and only recently another Harvard historian of France, Patrice Higonnet, wrote an anguished essay linking the Terror of the 1790s with the Holocaust of the 1940s. Stanley Hoffman’s reply to this latter piece in the journal French Politics and Society seems to me to be important: ‘Today, those who ask the ...”

“... is an active force that puts the public good before private interest. Its meaning is explored in Patrice Higonnet’s Goodness beyond Virtue (1998), which is an extraordinary manual of practical Jacobinism. Higonnet has not much time for Robespierre, who, he says, ‘probably died a virgin’ (not that historians ever ...”