Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780330427609
ISBN: 0330427601
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Pages: 474
Publication Date: September 07, 2007
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador

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Rating: - Think you know France? Think again!
"On the eve of the French Revolution, France was three weeks long ... and three weeks wide ... Journey times had barely changed since the days of the Romans."

Think you know France? Think again! Robb's argument is that "France was, in effect, a vast continent that had yet to be fully colonized." By turning his back on "the usual cast list of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history", he seeks out the daily lives of "the faceless millions" and their attitudes to the France in ... Read More

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Rating: - not quite what it seems
I must admit I was seduced by the wonderful cover photo of Mont-Saint-Michel, and the title which suggests a romantic travel book, where the local peculiarities are grounded in the authors knowledge of local history - something like a H.V.Morton's Traveller in Italy for today (and for France).

What you actually get is a social history of the provincial French peasantry from 1780 to 1880. I now find out that the American edition has a sub-title very like this, but not a sign of it on ... Read More

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Rating: - wonderful, written with a passion for france and its people
having bought and loved both "rimbaud" and "homosexual love in the 19th century" i actually didnt realise that this was by the same author until id finished it and got to the authors photograph. Its trully a masterpiece of arcana and lost facts, engagingly written and wonderfully descriptive thoughout- i was very sorry to finish it and have re-read several times (which given my current pile of unread books is hard!)
this isnt a travelogue- its more of a search for the soul of france, and that ... Read More

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Rating: - Discover the real France
Graham Robb is a serious scholar. He has written books on Balzac, Rimbaud, Victor Hugo and Baudelaire. This list also suggests another academic and personal passion - France. He earned a PhD in French literature at Vanderbilt University after his degree in modern languages at Oxford, and has since excelled as a writer. This is a rare fusion of scholarly research and revelatory fact, written in an accessible but highly literate and engaging style.

The book is quite difficult to pigeonhole. ... Read More

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Rating: - Eugen Weber - Peasants into Frenchmen
Anyone who likes this book really ought to check out a remarkable book written by the recently deceased American historian, Eugen Weber, "Peasants into Frenchman" - first published by Stanford University Press in 1976 but still in print. (Published also in French in as "La Fin des Terroirs: La modernisation de la France rurale 1870-1914".) It transformed my understanding of modern day France.

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