For European history and a sense of the European community of which France is a member, all of these are excellent reads:
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, John Hale (Atheneum, 1994).
Europe: A History, Norman Davies (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Fifty Years of Europe: An Album, Jan Morris (Villard, 1997).
History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, Timothy Garton Ash (Random House, 2000).
The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (1967; revised 2002), The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (1968; revised 1992), The Penguin Atlas of Modern History: to 1815 (1973; revised 1986), and The Penguin Atlas of Recent History: Europe Since 1815 (1982, revised 2003), all by Colin McEvedy and published by Penguin. The concept for each of these paperbacks is brilliant: a chronological sequence of maps that illustrate political and military developments, which in turn illustrate history via geography. Each volume is remarkably fascinating, and the four volumes as a whole present an enlightening read. Maps appear on the right-hand pages while one page of explanatory text accompanies them on the left-hand page. Essential for history novices and mavens alike. (The Penguin Atlas of Diasporas, published in 1995 by Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Rageau is equally fascinating.)
Travel Guide to Europe, 1492: Ten Itineraries in the Old World, Lorenzo Camusso (Henry Holt, 1992). This unique book, published to coincide with the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Americas, deserves more than short-lived appreciation. Italian historian Camusso presents ten real (or probable) journeys in chronological order, so that readers may imagine the passing of time and events. The first portion of the book gives an overview of Europe in the fifteenth century and includes descriptions of what travel was like by horse, river, and seaworthy boats, as well as of road conditions, inns, money, royal families, artists and artwork, and food and drink. Of the ten itineraries, Paris and cities nearby are featured in three. It’s interesting to note that in a population chart of twenty cities on the itineraries, Paris was then the fifth largest after Istanbul (four hundred thousand) and Florence, Naples, and Venice (each with one hundred thousand).
France lost nearly two million men in World War I, equivalent to two out of every nine, and if today’s younger generations visiting Paris feel a bit removed from this war, all they have to do is visit a smaller French city or town; just about every one has its requisite World War I monument. (And if World War II too feels remote, a visit to the Normandy American Cemetery, with its seemingly endless rows of grave markers, should solidify a very real and present link—and this is only one World War II cemetery of more than 120 in France.) Over the years I have found these monuments quite moving, and I’ve taken numerous photographs of them, probably enough for a book. As renowned military historian John Keegan notes, the list of names on these monuments is “heartrendingly long,” and even more heartrending is that you’ll often notice several names repeated, testifying to more than one death in the same family.
Keegan writes that “the First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict,” and “the Second World War, when it came in 1939, was unquestionably the outcome of the First, and in large measure its continuation.… In 1914, by contrast, war came, out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.” In any compilation of recommended books on the world wars, Keegan’s top the list, and are on my short list, too. Keegan has served as senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy in England and was named by the New York Times Book Review “the best military historian of our day.” His The First World War (Knopf, 1999) was widely acclaimed, and referred to by the Washington Post as “a grand narrative history [and] a pleasure to read.” An Illustrated History of the First World War (Knopf, 2001) includes some text from his previous World War I book and some that is new, as well as photographs, paintings, cartoons, and posters belonging to archives in both Europe and America.
Other world war reads I highly recommend include:
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France, Carmen Callil (Knopf, 2006). I’m fascinated by the opening sentences of books, and the opening line for this one hooked me right away: “There are many things to make one wretched on this earth.” Callil’s childhood was the thing to make her wretched, and when she was twenty-one she tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. The London doctor into whose care she was admitted, Anne Darquier, once told Callil that “there are some things and some people you can never forgive.” In 1970, Callil arrived at Dr. Darquier’s for an appointment, but there was no answer at the door, and later that day she received word that Anne was dead. When she attended Anne’s funeral, she thought it was odd that Anne’s name appeared with the addition of “de Pellepoix,” and it would have remained only an oddity if Callil had not later seen the documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity) by Marcel Ophüls. The English subtitles contained Anne’s full surname, but in reference to a Vichy government official. Callil’s curiosity was piqued, and she began to investigate Anne’s story and that of her father, who had been a leading French anti-Semite before the war and who had added the fictitious “de Pellepoix” to his original name. He later became commissioner for Jewish affairs, and in July 1942 he was put in charge of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ (Vélodrome d’Hiver) roundup in Paris, which led to the deportation of nearly thirteen thousand Jews, almost a third of whom were children. According to Callil, Darquier “worked tirelessly to provide more Jews for deportation. He introduced the yellow star and took life-and-death decisions over the fate of the Jews of France.” She also informs us that after the German occupation of France ended in 1944, the épuration (purge) followed, and it was reported that a man believed to be Darquier was lynched by a mob in either Limoges or Brive. But apparently the mob got the wrong man. Callil’s book is a much bigger story than Anne’s and is a monumental work.
The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, William Shirer (Simon & Schuster, 1969). As you might expect, Shirer (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) has written another work that is thoroughly researched and revealing, and he carefully illustrates, point by point, how the fall of France was an absolute debacle. Until reading this, I hadn’t realized the extent of the utter chaos—the complete lack of communication among government officials as well as with the general public—that followed the news that the Germans were en route to Paris. In the words of the French historian Marc Bloch, “It was the most terrible collapse in all the long story of our national life.”
D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Stephen Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 1994). There is a plethora of books available about the D-Day battles, but none of them is as definitive as this. Ambrose, who passed away in 2002, was a World War II historian and the author of more than a dozen books, including a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower; he also founded the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He was devoted to D-Day scholarship and has been referred to as the premier American narrative and military historian. For this work he drew upon fourteen hundred oral histories from the men who lived through it. This is the story of the enlisted men and junior officers who freed the Normandy coastline, and it is not exaggeration when Operation Overlord is called “the most important day of the twentieth century.”
Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence upon History, J. F. C. Fuller (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London): volume 1, From the Earliest Times to the Battle of Lepanto (1954); volume 2, From the Defeat of the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo (1955); and volume 3, From the American Civil War to the End of the Second World War (1956). Though only the third volume in this trio deals with the two world wars, all three books are worth your most determined efforts to obtain. Fuller wisely notes that it may be disputed whether war is necessary to mankind, “but a fact which cannot be questioned is that, from the earliest records of man to the present age, war has been his dominant preoccupation. There has never been a period in human history altogether free from war, and seldom one of more than a generation which has not witnessed a major conflict: great wars flow and ebb almost as regularly as the tides.”
Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, David Fromkin (Knopf, 2004). I was predisposed to like this as I’m a huge fan of Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace, and I wasn’t disappointed. Fromkin maintains that “the sky out of which Europe fell was not empty; on the contrary, it was alive with processes and powers. The forces that were to devastate it—nationalism, socialism, imperialism, and the like—had been in motion for a long time.” Interestingly, he asked students in one of his classes to pinpoint the first steps toward the war before 1908. Their responses, which included events dating back to the fourth century AD, illustrate “how many roads can be imagined to have led to Sarajevo.”
France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, Philippe Burrin (New Press, 1996). None other than Robert Paxton—an internationally recognized expert on Vichy France who served as an expert witness at the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997—referred to this work as “unsurpassed.” It’s thorough and exhaustively researched. Burrin, a Swiss historian, focuses on three sections of French society that accommodated the Germans: French government, civil society, and a small but significant circle of journalists, politicians, and “ordinary” French people who voiced collaborationist opinions. Burrin seeks to dissect the meaning of the word “collaboration” itself, as it was first used by Marshal Pétain in October 1940 and then passed into German as Kollaboration. No photos but a good map showing where the free and occupied zones began and ended.
The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War, edited by Robert Cowley (Random House, 2003). In his introduction, Cowley writes that a good argument may be made that the Great War was the true turning point of the century just past: “It brought down dynasties and empires—including the Ottoman, one of the roots of our present difficulties. It changed the United States from a provincial nation into a world power. It made World War II inevitable and the Cold War as well. It created the modern world—and that greatest of growth industries, violent death.” Cowley is founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and the thirty essays, articles, and letters featured in this volume originally appeared in MHQ. In addition to writing eight other books, Cowley has traveled the entire length of the western front, from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw (Random House, 1998). Brokaw opens his acknowledgements by saying, “When I first came to fully understand what effect members of the World War II generation had on my life and the world we occupy today, I quickly resolved to tell their stories as a small gesture of personal appreciation.” If, amidst all the hype and publicity this book received, you missed reading it, I encourage you to pick it up—it’s truly wonderful, as are Brokaw’s other books, An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation and The Greatest Generation Speaks: Letters and Reflections, all published by Random House in hardcover and paperback editions.
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman (Macmillan, 1962; Ballantine, 1994). William Shirer, mentioned above, described this as “one of the finest books of our time,” and I completely concur. I love this book, and the paperback Ballantine edition includes a foreword by Robert K. Massie, who explains in his final paragraph that Tuchman’s opening paragraph took her eight hours to complete and was the most famous passage in the book. Massie’s own concludes with “By turning the page, the fortunate person who has not yet encountered this book can begin to read.” Sometimes I wish I were that fortunate person all over again! Tuchman, who passed away in 1989, not only wrote an outstanding book, but her own family’s history is intertwined with the early events of World War I: she was two years old when she and her parents were crossing the Mediterranean en route to Constantinople to visit her grandfather Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who was then ambassador to Turkey (her uncle was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury for over twelve years). They witnessed British cruisers in pursuit of the German battleship Goeben, which successfully eluded the British, reached Constantinople, “and brought Turkey and with it the whole Ottoman Empire of the Middle East into the war, determining the course of the history of that area from that day to this.” Among the many references to France, the ones pertaining to Sedan, where the Prussian army captured Napoléon III on September 1, 1870, are especially memorable. Sedan, Tuchman notes, on the eve of war, was still very much in the French consciousness: “ ‘N’en parlez jamais; pensez-y toujours’ (Never speak of it; think of it always) had counseled [Minister of the Interior Léon] Gambetta. For more than forty years the thought of ‘Again’ was the single most fundamental factor of French policy.”
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, Margaret MacMillan (Random House, 2002). This multiple-award-winning book opens with this sentence: “For six months in 1919, Paris was the capital of the world.” Indeed it was, as the peacemakers—from the Big Four countries (Britain, France, Italy, and the United States) and Japan—met there every day to create the terms of the peace treaty concluding World War I. (Others who came to Paris as peacemakers included Lawrence of Arabia and Ho Chi Minh.) As Richard Holbrooke writes in his foreword, “The road from the Hall of Mirrors to the German invasion of Poland only twenty years later is usually presented as a straight line”; MacMillan, however, refutes this, arguing that the peacemakers have been unfairly blamed for mistakes that were made later. This is a fascinating and ultimately timely book for the twenty-first century, as some of the major problems we face today have their roots in decisions made in Paris in 1919: the Balkan wars between 1991 and 1999; the war in Iraq, whose borders reflect the rivalry between France and Britain; a homeland for the Kurds; tension between Greece and Turkey; and a severe situation between Arabs and Jews “over land that each thought had been promised them.”
The Second World War, Winston Churchill (Houghton Mifflin, 1948). When my husband walked into the room as I was compiling this bibliography, he asked, “Why don’t you just tell everyone to read Churchill’s work and be done with it?” He and I are both enormous fans of Churchill, and his question makes a good point. This six-volume work is Churchill’s masterpiece, and Churchill was honored with the Nobel Prize in 1953. A boxed set of the volumes in paperback was published by Mariner Books in 1986.
A Soldier’s Story, Omar N. Bradley (Modern Library War Series, 1999; originally published in 1951 by Henry Holt). Novelist Caleb Carr is editor of this fine series—other volumes include Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs and Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812—and in his introduction to the series he makes several notable points about military history. He reminds us of the general attitude in the United States during the sixties and early seventies, when admitting to an interest in human conflict was most unpopular. Military history enthusiasts, he points out as well, are often among the most well-read people we’ll ever meet, and they are also usually quite knowledgeable in discussions of political and social history. “The reason for this,” he explains, “is simple: the history of war represents fully half the tale of mankind’s social interactions,” and one cannot understand war without also understanding the political situation, cultural developments, and social issues of the time. Military history, Carr notes, “is neither an obscure nor a peculiar subject, but one critical to any understanding of the development of human civilization. That warfare itself is violent is true and unfortunate; that it has been a central method through which every nation in the world has established and maintained its independence, however, makes it a critical field of study.” Omar Bradley—better known as the “GI General”—is often referred to as the greatest military tactician of our time, and though this classic isn’t limited to World War II in France, the D-Day assault and the liberation of Paris are treated at length.
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, Marc Bloch (Norton, 1968). “Much has been, and will be, written in explanation of the defeat of France in 1940, but it seems unlikely that the truth of the matter will ever be more accurately and more vividly presented than in this statement of evidence,” wrote the New York Times Book Review. Bloch gives a personal, firsthand account of why France fell when faced by the Nazi invasion. This was written in the three months after the fall of France, before Bloch was captured, tortured, and executed by the Nazis.
An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Klaus Barbie Trial, and the City of Lyon, 1940–1945, Ted Morgan (William Morrow, 1990). Morgan is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a young boy in Paris at the time of the armistice, when he and his family left for Spain and then the United States. He returned to France in 1987 to cover the Barbie trial for the New York Times Magazine, and he had access to thousands of pages of secret documents prepared for the trial, including hundreds of depositions that were never made public. Due to these documents, Morgan is able to provide much detail about major events and the everyday lives of residents under occupation. Morgan notes that there were more journalists in Lyon for the Barbie trial than for the Nuremberg trials, and that younger people, mostly students, stood in line every day for hours hoping to get one of the one hundred seats set aside for the public. He wondered why, and he answered, “Because the French had to look into this particular mirror, however distorted. Because there was a generation of young people that was still picking up the tab for World War II.”
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944, Robert O. Paxton (Knopf, 1972). Paxton’s is the single definitive volume on Vichy, and if you’re only going to read one, read this one. Paxton documents the inner workings of the Vichy government, the politics between Philippe Pétain, Pierre Laval, and François Darlan, and the surprisingly slow growth of the Resistance. The revelation that the Vichy government enjoyed such mass support came as somewhat of a shock upon the book’s publication in 1972, though it is accepted knowledge that the French wanted to avoid the destruction of France at all costs. Paris remains a beautiful city in part because of accommodation and collaboration, but the history of this period is far more complicated than that. As Paxton writes, “It is tempting to identify with Resistance and to say, ‘That is what I would have done.’ Alas, we are far more likely to act, in parallel situations, like the Vichy majority.… The deeds of occupier and occupied alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values, one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.”
The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honour: 1940–1942 (Simon & Schuster, 1955); Unity: 1942–1944 (Simon & Schuster, 1959); Salvation: 1944–1946 (Simon & Schuster, 1960). I bought these hardcover volumes at a used-book store about fifteen years ago and I hadn’t even realized that De Gaulle had written them, probably because they do pale in comparison to Churchill’s volumes. I was sure they would be pure puffery, but I was only partially right—no one ever said De Gaulle was modest, after all—and I was quickly swept up in his certaine idée de la France (which included a certain place for him). De Gaulle’s voice was the voice of occupied France, and his memoirs stand alone. Carroll & Graf published a single paperback volume of this work in 1998.
World War II: The Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941–1945, Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen (Random House, 1996). This is a great reference with more than twenty-four hundred entries by two military historians who are also coauthors of a number of other books and articles. The book is definitive, but its uniqueness lies in the fact that it “looks at World War II through American eyes,” which is why it begins in 1941. (Events that happened before December 7, 1941, are covered in a chapter entitled “Prologue to War.”)
There are a staggering number of books available about France and the French, and I own a great many of them. To review them fully would require a separate volume, so I have kept my comments about them brief due to page-count considerations, and from time to time I will remark on them in greater detail on my blog.
Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, edited by Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford (Yale University Press in association with the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1995). The theme for the exhibit this book accompanied was to explore the relationship between culture and power in France, but I see this as nothing less than a history of France as told through its documents, manuscripts, books, orchestra scores, photographs, prints, drawings, maps, medals, and coins. Covering twelve centuries, these treasures are quite extensive, and include such offerings as: the “Letter of Suleyman the Magnificent to Francis I, King of France”; the first edition of The New Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade; the constitution of the “Thirteen United States of America” in French, printed at the behest of Benjamin Franklin; a map of the battle of Austerlitz; the handwritten “J’accuse” letter by Émile Zola in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, before it was printed on the front page of L’Aurore; and five issues of Resistance: Official Bulletin of the National Committee for Public Safety, published from December 1940 to March 1941. A masterpiece.
Atlas Pocket Classics: France
This handsome boxed set is the inaugural edition in a series of travel classics published by Atlas & Company (2008). Novelist Diane Johnson introduces Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, based on a notebook he kept while traveling in the Cévennes; Gleanings in France by James Fenimore Cooper, a rare work based on a collection of his letters home that detailed France in its last days of monarchy; and A Motor-flight Through France by Edith Wharton, who lived in Paris from 1911 until her death in 1937 (this is one of my favorite works).
The Discovery of France, Graham Robb (Norton, 2007). I wasn’t sure I needed to read another book about the history of France when this one was published, but I couldn’t ignore the praise it received: winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, Slate Best Book of the Year, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and comments like this one from the Mail on Sunday: “Certain books strain the patience of those close to you. How many times can you demand: ‘Look at this! Can you imagine? Did you know that?’ without actually handing over the volume? This is such a book.… It’s not so much a cool linear account as a mosaic, like the patchwork pays of France herself.” When I picked up a copy and learned that it was the result “of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library” and that “this was supposed to be the historical guidebook I wanted to read when setting out to discover France,” I positively knew I needed to read it. It is authoritative and dense (in a good way), but is not for the casual reader. Best of all is that, as Robb notes, the book “shows how much remains to be discovered.”
Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French, Richard Bernstein (Knopf, 1990). To my mind, this is the best overall book about France after Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France (below). Bernstein was the Paris correspondent for the New York Times from 1984 to 1987, and his book explores Paris and such broader topics as la France profonde (“deep France”), French children’s names, the myth of the anti-American, immigrants, politics, and the French struggle with their past. He concludes that France is still a nation greater than the sum of its parts, but that the French people are becoming more like everyone else, losing many qualities that made them different.
France on the Brink: A Great Civilization Faces the New Century, Jonathan Fenby (Arcade, 1999). Journalist Fenby has written for the Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Times of London, and he was named a Chevalier of the French Ordre du Mérite in 1990. He’s been reporting on France for over thirty years, and in this work he presents a full array of the country’s ills and contradictions. Readers who haven’t kept up with the France of today may be alarmed to discover that some classic French icons—berets, baguettes, accordions, cafés, foie gras—are fading.
French Toast: An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French (1997) and French Fried: The Culinary Capers of an American in Paris (2001), both by Harriet Welty Rochefort and published by St. Martin’s, are two excellent books that approach the cultural differences between the French and Americans with wit and wisdom. Welty Rochefort, an American from the Midwest who is married to a Frenchman and holds both an American and a French passport, has lived in Paris for more than three decades. She is a journalist, having written for the International Herald Tribune, Time, and others, and is a journalism professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (known simply as Sciences Po). She also writes a great online column, “Letter from Paris,” for the Paris Pages (paris.org).
Welty Rochefort’s position in a Franco-American couple allows her to be both a participant and an outside observer in French life. “Being neither fish nor fowl,” she writes, “has given me a constant comparative view of both life in the United States and life in France, as well as perceptions about the French that tourists rarely acquire. For example, life with the French has put a whole new meaning on the word complicated. The simplest situation in France suddenly becomes something extremely complex and detailed. The French attention to detail—from the way one cuts cheese to the color of one’s panty hose—has never ceased to fascinate me.” She relates in French Toast how she feels “rather more at home” with the French because of their refreshing lack of Puritanism while, on the other hand, when she visits the States she really appreciates the “civility of people who aren’t afraid to be nice to one another even if their families haven’t known one another for the past two hundred years.”
Also in French Toast she interviews her husband, Philippe, to share his points of view, which are sometimes eye-opening. And though French Fried is dedicated (mostly) to food, since “the most awesome experiences in France revolve around cuisine,” it is an equally revealing read. Harriet and Philippe maintain their own Web site (understand france.org), which I also highly recommend—it’s packed with suggestions for places to stay and eat, sites to see, dozens of tips, and just-like-home places in Paris for homesick Americans.
The French, Theodore Zeldin (Pantheon, 1983). Zeldin is better known for his major work France: 1848–1945, which I’ve not yet seen, but in this book he explains that he puts a lot of stock in humor because “nothing separates people more than their sense of humor.” As a result this book is filled with dozens of caricatures and cartoons, which help illustrate various themes. The final chapter, “What It Means to Be French,” is worth reading on its own. At its conclusion, Zeldin leaves readers who are determined to cling to a more grandiose definition of France with a remark by Pierre Dac, at the time one of France’s most popular comedians: “To the eternal triple question which has always remained unanswered, Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? I reply: As far as I, personally, am concerned, I am me; I come from just down the road; and I am now going home.”
The French: Portrait of a People, Sanche de Gramont (Putnam, 1969). Sanche de Gramont, whose family is a very distinguished one in France, became an American citizen in 1977 and legally changed his name to Ted Morgan, an anagram of de Gramont. In addition to An Uncertain Hour, recommended previously, he is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill (a Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography in 1983) and William Somerset Maugham (a National Book Award finalist in 1982). Whether he’s writing under the name de Gramont or Morgan, his articles and books are engaging and he’s an astute binational observer. Though this book on France is more than forty years old, it’s still meaningful and accurate. “France,” de Gramont writes, “like Adam, had been modeled by the finger of God, and was thus perfectly proportioned and balanced (at equal distance between the equator and the Pole), fertile of soil, and temperate of climate.” By virtue of living there the people were chosen, and l’hexagone had everything the people needed or desired. “This was the European Eden, as the Germans knew when they coined the expression ‘As happy as God in France.’ ”
The Identity of France in two volumes, History and Environment and People and Production, Fernand Braudel (HarperCollins, 1988, 1989) Braudel, who passed away in 1985, has been referred to as the “greatest of Europe’s historians.” He believed strongly in the necessity of world history, and his genius was in his ability to link people and events across all time periods in a single sentence. He once came up with the phrase “economic geography” to describe his approach to history. Braudel is better known for his monumental work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Harper & Row, 1972, 1974), one of my favorite books of all time, but this book on France is equally unprecedented and fascinating.
Alistair Horne
Author and historian Sir Alistair Horne, who was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur in 1993 and received a knighthood in Britain in 2003 for his works on French history, has so brilliantly and engagingly written about France that I felt he deserved a space all his own here. His trilogy of books devoted to the three Franco-German conflicts over a seventy-year period are unmatched. The first volume in the series is The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71; the second is The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, which has been continuously in print for nearly fifty years; and the third is To Lose a Battle: France 1940. All were originally published in hardcover in the sixties but are now available in paperback editions by Penguin. A read of just one of these outstanding books is revealing, but all three provide an eye-opening view of how the events were all related.
La Belle France: A Short History (Knopf, 2005; Vintage, 2006) is the book I would recommend on the history of France if forced to name only one. As Horne wisely notes in his introduction, “The pursuit of harmony, though by no means always attainable, is what France is about.” La Belle France is enormously engaging and comprehensive, and happily both the paperback and hardcover editions include color illustrations. Horne acknowledges that ever since he wrote the Price of Glory trilogy, he’s been enticed by the “dangerously ambitious project of attempting a full-scale History of that complex, sometimes exasperating, but always fascinating country—France.” However dangerous the ambition, readers of this short history will be grateful for his effort.
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (Viking, 1978) is equally thorough yet conversational, and Horne again proves his ability to portray the big picture and the major players as well as the everyday lives of ordinary people living through events.
Mission to Civilize: The French Way, Mort Rosenblum (Harcourt, 1986). Rosenblum was a senior foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Paris when he wrote this enlightening book. He now lives on a houseboat on the Seine and has written a number of other very good books on French topics. This work is specifically devoted to the importance of la mission civilisatrice—i.e. the “civilizing mission” of colonization—to the French. Rosenblum explains many aspects of the seemingly contradictory French foreign policy: the difference between a mauvaise foi and mauvais caractère; the Rainbow Warrior bavure (bavure being a hitch or foul-up, notably by officials or police, which was so common that a smooth operation was referred to as sans bavure); beurs and beaufs; Algeria; Vietnam; and le fast-food.
Portraits of France, Robert Daley (Little, Brown, 1991). As a naive étudiante in Paris in 1979, I did not realize why the rue Lauriston, where Hollins Abroad Paris had its school for thirty-plus years, was referred to as sinistre until I read Daley’s chapter “The Gestapo of the Rue Lauriston.” There I learned that 93 rue Lauriston was the site of an infamous den of torture and inquisition during World War II—not by the Nazis but by a gang of French convicts organized by Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont. (Happily, although I have nothing but fond memories of my classes at no. 16, Hollins has since moved its school out of the sixteenth arrondissement altogether.) Daley has put together a miniature tour of French history and culture in this collection of twenty essays. While his portraits take readers to all corners of l’hexagone, even dedicated students of France may find some surprises here, as he preferred to find his stories in places where most readers haven’t looked before.
When in France …
Different from the lengthier tomes featured in this section are the following sources on France and the French. These are more like guidebooks, though the subjects are dealt with in more detail than in a traditional guidebook.
Culture Shock! France: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette, Sally Adamson Taylor (Marshall Cavendish, 2008). Similar to—but not quite as thorough as—Polly Platt’s books below, this guide covers such topics as the French attitude toward pets, the “no” syndrome, dos and don’ts in restaurants, visas and work permits, queuing, office relationships, why businesses close for lunch, etc. Although some of the topics pertain more to people who plan to be in France for an extended stay, this is a really useful book even for short visits. Note that there is also a Culture Shock! Paris guide by Frances Gendlin (Marshall Cavendish, 2007).
France: Instructions for Use, Alison Culliford and Nan McElroy (Illustrata, 2007). Hands down, this is the best book of its kind and is indisputably indispensable. And it measures about 5 × 4 inches, so it’s perfect to bring along and carry around with you every day. It is rather remarkable that a book so small in size has so much packed into it, but there is truly not a practical topic missing. The little book’s subtitle says it all: The Practical, On-site Assistant for the Enthusiastic (Even Experienced) Traveler. Nan McElroy is the founder of the Instructions series (there are also volumes on Italy and Greece that are equally indispensable), each book being the publication she wished she’d had on her first trip. Instructions books have two components: the little handbook and the free “Planning Your Adventure” download (in this case from franceinstructions.com), which is most applicable in preparing for your trip, as opposed to consulting it once you’ve arrived at your destination. I love everything about this book, but I especially like the “Ten Tips for the Traveler Abroad,” which include some Collected Traveler pearls of wisdom: leave home sweet home behind; however much luggage you’re taking, it’s too much; don’t try to see too much in too short a time, whether in one day or ten; plan ahead for those experiences that are really important to you; and it can help to remember the Stones’ famous words “You can’t always get what you want.” Don’t visit Paris, or anywhere in France, without this portable handbook.
French or Foe? Getting the Most Out of Visiting, Living and Working in France (1994, revised 2003) and Savoir Flair!: 211 Tips for Enjoying France and the French (2000), both by Polly Platt and published by Culture Crossings, the company Platt founded in 1986 as a training organization for corporate managers and executives and their spouses. Both of these on-the-mark books are indispensable for anyone planning to live, work, or study in France, but they’re also essential for anyone who wants to really, really understand the ways of the French. No other books are as comprehensive as Platt’s, and in addition to hundreds of explanations, Platt offers her own personal tips, such as the Ten Magic Words (Excusez-moi de vous déranger, monsieur, mais j’ai un problème) and her philosophy of Persistent Personal Operating.
Speak the Culture: France: Be Fluent in French Life and Culture (Thorogood, London, 2008). Speak the Culture (speaktheculture.co.uk) is a new series that’s terrific, and the France edition was the debut title in the series. History, society, and lifestyle; literature and philosophy; art and architecture; cinema, photography, and fashion; music and drama; food and drink; media and sport—these are all covered impressively well, “so that you might get to know the country as one of its own citizens.”
Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past in three volumes, Volume I: Conflicts and Visions (1996), Volume II: Traditions (1997), Volume III: Symbols (1998), Pierre Nora (Columbia University Press). Originally published in France in seven volumes as Les Lieux de mémoire (Places of Memory), this stunning collection is easily at the top of my de rigueur reading list. The series is a singular publishing event, and was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement in London as “a magisterial attempt to define what it is to be French.”
The Road from the Past: Traveling Through History in France, Ina Caro (Nan A. Talese, 1994). What a grand and sensible plan Caro presents in her marvelous book: travel through France in a “time machine” (a car), from Provence to Paris, chronologically, and experience numerous centuries of French history in one trip. I envy her and her husband, Robert Caro (the award-winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson), for making such an unforgettable journey. As we progress chronologically, we visit the sites she has selected, which best represent a particular age and are also the most beautiful examples within each historical period. Seeing each period separately, and then all of them together in Paris, is “an incomparable experience,” as she concludes.
Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow (Sourcebooks, 2003). The husband and wife authors of this excellent book reveal new insights about the French on nearly every page, and I consider this de rigueur reading for every visitor to France. Nadeau and Barlow went to live in Paris for two years as correspondents for the New Hampshire–based Institute of Current World Affairs. They were focusing on globalization, specifically why the French were (seemingly) resisting globalization. But after one year, they realized that asking why the French were resisting globalization “was the wrong question about the right topic. The French were globalizing in their own way. But France needed to be understood in its own terms.” Their first breakthrough in reaching this fact was that it’s impossible to separate the past from the present in France. The French live very modern lives, but simultaneously they hold on to respected traditions, and they have proved that this works. Roquefort cheese is still made in caves according to a tradition that dates back twelve centuries; Napoléon introduced the Civil Code, which is currently used by most European nations; the metric system, high-speed trains, and the Concorde were developed in France; fourteenth-century châteaux and cutting-edge architecture both have a home in France; and when you make a purchase at just about any kind of shop, the staff will carefully and painstakingly wrap it up like a gift, even if it isn’t and even if there is a long line of customers behind you. Plenty more examples abound. Read this book and discover more, as well as a whole lot else about France and the French.
Travel + Leisure’s Unexpected France (Dorling Kindersley, 2007). This is an anthology of articles that have appeared in Travel + Leisure over the years, introduced by editor in chief Nancy Novogrod. (A separate volume on Italy has been published as well.) Novogrod describes the book as presenting “a view of the country’s pleasures that is at once panoramic and highly selective—pastoral, coastal, urban, encompassing both the old and the new.” If you clip articles like I do, you might not feel you need this book, but even though I have all these original articles in my files, I’m still glad I bought this volume—it’s far handier than searching through my massive files and, as I don’t often save an article’s accompanying photographs, it’s nice to see them here. Included in this collection are pieces on Paris, Versailles, the Loire Valley, the Paris Ritz, Normandy, and Coco Chanel.
The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry: From Nerval to Valéry in English Translation, edited by Angel Flores, with an introduction by Patti Smith (Anchor, 2000).
The Blessing, Don’t Tell Alfred, and The Pursuit of Love, all by Nancy Mitford, all recently published in paperback editions by Vintage (2010). As Zoe Heller writes in her foreword to The Pursuit of Love, “It was, of course, Nancy who started it all. Without her, there would be no Mitford industry.” Mitford’s legendary British family is truly the stuff of novels, and she often based the characters in her eight novels on members of her family. She was the eldest of six sisters, one of whom was notoriously smitten with Hitler and who committed suicide shortly after Britain declared war against Germany, so Mitford had no shortage of intimate material. She was born in 1904, and in the 1920s, when she began writing novels, she was friends with Evelyn Waugh and others in his literary circle. Mitford moved to France in 1946 and remained there for the rest of her life, and her novels remind me of those by Barbara Pym, whose books I also love, in that the characters are so eccentric, quirky, and very British; but the reason these novels appear here is because each has a French or Parisian connection. Mitford’s biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Louis XIV are held in high regard (though I’m sorry to say I have yet to read them). More details about her work and her life may be found at Nancymitford.com.
Complete Poems: Blaise Cendrars (University of California Press, 1993). Fans of Cendrars (né Frédéric Louis Sauser) will be pleased to know about a unique and wonderful book published by Yale University Press in 2009: a facsimile of La Prose du Transsibérien, a poem originally published in 1913 with accompanying artwork by a favorite painter of mine, Sonia Delaunay. This facsimile comes in a little package with a booklet of the English translation and a foldout of the poem (in French), and is modeled after an original copy of the work held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The original edition unfolds to over six feet in length, and as translator Timothy Young notes, “If 150 copies were laid end to end they would be as tall as the Eiffel Tower.” Young explains this work “is noted today as much for its lyric beauty as for its unmatched composition of colors by Sonia Delaunay (née Terk),” and the intensity of the pigments survive in the Beinecke copy “with an astonishing vibrancy.”
The Château, William Maxwell (Knopf, 1961).
French Folktales, Henri Pourrat, selected by C. G. Bjurström, translated and with an introduction by Royall Tyler (Pantheon, 1989). One hundred and five legends culled from the rural provinces of France, which are, as Tyler writes in the introduction, “stories to eat with your pocketknife, among friends. They are delicious, and the days they taste of will never come again.”
France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
Whereabouts Press, based in Berkeley, California, has recently introduced a series I’m crazy about called the Traveler’s Literary Companions. As travel writer Jan Morris asks, “What could be more instructive for the traveler—and more fun!—than to see a country through the eyes of its own most imaginative writers?” And the neat people at Whereabouts (I just know they’re neat) remind us that “good stories reveal as much, or more, about a locale as any map or guidebook.” (Incidentally, the name of the press also reminds me of a book called Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner by Alastair Reid [White Pine Press, 1995]. Reid, who lived for many years in Spain, wrote that “coming newly into Spanish, I lacked two essentials—a childhood in the language, which I could never acquire, and a sense of its literature, which I could.”)
What I especially enjoy about this series is that the writers whose fiction is featured are mostly all contemporary, so we are introduced to writers we might not find otherwise. The France volume (published in 2008) is edited by William Rodarmor and Anna Livia, and they include a most diverse group of writers in this edition, among them Christian Lehmann, Samuel Benchetrit, Frédéric Fajardie, Jacques Réda, Colette, Annie Saumont, Eric Holder, and Andrée Chedid. Rodarmor concludes that “these pieces are neither bonbons nor full-course meals. They’re more like hearty appetizers. You’re at a bountiful buffet, and you should feel free to come back for more.”
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert (various editions).
One Hundred Great French Books: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Lance Donaldson-Evans (BlueBridge, 2010). French literature, the author notes in the introduction, has been an inspiration to readers around the world for the simple reason that it is “one of the great literatures on the planet and would surely be offered World Heritage status if such a category existed in the literary sphere.” Donaldson-Evans, professor of Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a unique and worthy book, and I wish there were hundreds more just like this one for other countries in the world. This book is not necessarily an introduction to the best one hundred French books, but rather the emphasis is on the word “great.” The book is also not for specialists of French literature, but rather for the general reader who would like to learn about, or renew acquaintance with, some noteworthy books published in French. Additionally, the books selected had to be available in English translation, and lastly Donaldson-Evans admits to having a hidden agenda: to “whet your appetite to read or reread some or all of the works presented.” A number of the writers represented were born outside metropolitan France but have French as their primary language, such as authors from the Caribbean, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, and African nations. And what a selection this is—everything from The Song of Roland, The Romance of the Rose, The Letters of Madame de Sévigné, and The Count of Monte Cristo to The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, The Flowers of Evil, Astérix, So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Monsieur Ibrahim and The Flowers of the Koran by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt. (Plus, there are fifty other great titles recommended at the back of the book.) I, for one, discovered at least a dozen books I want to track down, but I like this book also for providing me with good outlines of titles I’d known of but haven’t read, which is sometimes enough, though not nearly as satisfying as what Roland Barthes calls “le plaisir du texte, the pleasure that comes from reading a great book and being stirred to the core by it.”
Reckless Appetites: A Culinary Romance, Jacqueline Deval (Ecco, 1993). One of my favorite quirky books, blending the fictional story of Pomme and Jeremy with literary history and almost one hundred recipes.
Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution, Rafael Sabatini (originally published in 1921; various editions available). The opening line of this truly swashbuckling book is among the great opening lines of all time: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
Literary Traveler
A unique and dangerously interesting Web site—it’s easy to start browsing and completely lose track of time—that I love is Literary Traveler (literarytraveler.com). Founders Linda and Francis McGovern say their mission is “to inspire readers and travelers to explore their literary imagination. We uncover the connections between great literature and great places, to inspire our readers to pursue their passions and help them become part of what they have read.” It’s a wonderful concept, and the site has been referred to as a “bookworm’s delight” by the Wall Street Journal.
Since 1998, Literary Traveler has been featuring great travel writing, and the online archive is quite large. I’ve found some really wonderful pieces on Paris and other parts of France and beyond. A basic subscription is free, although access to some content is limited; there is a monthly fee for a premium subscription, which offers full access to the site’s content. The Web site is very well done and was named to Forbes’s Best of the Web. Literary Traveler also offers tours, such as a Lost Generation literary tour in Paris and a French Resistance tour in Lyon.
Somewhere in France, John Rolfe Gardiner (Knopf, 1999).
Suite Française (2006) and Fire in the Blood (2007), both by Irène Némirovsky and published by Knopf. If Némirovsky’s fiction inspires you to want to know more about her real life, you may also like The Life of Irène Némirovsky, 1903–1942 by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt (Knopf, 2010), as well as Shadows of a Childhood by Elisabeth Gille (New Press, 1998). Gille, Némirovsky’s daughter, was five years old when her mother was deported to Auschwitz, and she and her sister were hidden in the French countryside until the war was over. This novel—her third, and the first to appear in English—won the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in 1997. Gille died in Paris in 1996.
That Mad Ache, Françoise Sagan (Basic Books, 2009). This unique edition also includes a tandem work, Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation by Douglas Hofstadter, the translator of the Sagan work. Printed in the reverse from the novel (starting at the last page), Hofstadter reveals some of his own thoughts about translations in general as well as revelations he had while translating Sagan’s novel, which was originally published in 1965 under the title La Chamade.
A trip anywhere in the world can be transforming, but there’s no doubt that Paris (or anywhere in France, for that matter) is a particularly inspiring destination. France is seductive, and many people—myself included—have a great desire to incorporate many French lifestyle details into their lives. Happily, there are some great resources to help us Francophiles re-create a French spirit in our homes.
Bringing France Home: Creating the Feeling of France in Your Home Room by Room, Cheryl MacLachlan with photographs by Ivan Terestchenko (Clarkson Potter, 1995). MacLachlan worked for Esquire a few decades ago and traveled to Paris on business four to five times a year. Each time she returned to New York, she felt that she was missing something, though it wasn’t a case of wanting to move to France—she loved her job and her life. “The answer,” she decided, “perhaps was to try to make France a part of my day-to-day life back home.” So she did, but then she took this answer one step further, and examined the French lifestyle and explored just what it was that made France France. Discovering that “French life was in the details,” MacLachlan found it possible to bring France home to America. She takes readers on a tour of every room in a French house and offers tips galore; there are also chapters on the pleasures of the table and on resources.
Bringing Paris Home, Penny Drue Baird (Monacelli Press, 2008). “Step outside the door, glance around, and you know you are in Paris,” writes Baird, founder of the design firm Dessins and one of Architectural Digest’s top one hundred designers. “What is it about just being there that creates a stir within us? All at once, we are surrounded by physical beauty and by ethereal stimuli—the smell of the streets, the sky, the street signs, the light. Can the air really be that different? … This heightened sensual experience stays with us throughout our visit. Can we bring it home?” In chapters detailing architecture, fireplaces, furniture, paint and wall treatments, lighting, cafés and tabletops, flea markets, and collecting, Baird answers this question with a resounding yes. She spent every summer for many years in a region of France, but one year she and her family decided to stay in Paris for an entire year. They found an apartment in the seventh near her favorite Paris café, Bar de la Croix Rouge, which she refers to as “completely typical by French standards and outrageous by American” (it has fourteen-foot ceilings and eight fireplaces). She decorated her Paris apartment the way the French do: if you see something you really like, you buy it first and figure out where to put it later. The chapter on flea markets is particularly useful for anyone interested in buying items that require shipping—the transiteur (shipper), she notes, is as essential to the flea market as the vendors, and he or she will pick up your merchandise, pack, ship, insure, clear customs, and deliver. Baird wisely warns that bringing Paris home “is not as simple as adding lace curtains or provincial pottery to your décor. It is something much more subtle and much more personal. It has to do with the philosophy of European living and many characteristics.” By turning these pages readers embark on a stroll through Paris identifying both the tangible and intangible gems that may be brought home.
And a duo of titles published by Clarkson Potter from French style specialist Linda Dannenberg:
French Country Kitchens: Authentic French Kitchen Design from Simple to Spectacular, with photographs by Guy Bouchet (2008). When she thinks back on all the hundreds of homes she’s visited in France over the last twenty-five years, Dannenberg says, it’s almost always the kitchens she remembers most clearly and with the most affection. In these pages readers glimpse several kitchens in Paris and its surrounding regions as well as in other parts of France. These include Patricia Wells’s kitchen in her Provençal home, Chanteduc, and the kitchen of Michel Biehn, owner of La Maison Biehn, a renowned shop specializing in Provençal quilts, antiques, and tabletop items in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Among the most distinctive characteristics of the French country kitchens Dannenberg visits “is the acknowledgment of the past in some way, either as inspiration or to respect the kitchen’s ‘old bones’—the walls, the beams, the floors, the volumes—or to use old vintage elements, cooking tools, or art, even in a very contemporary kitchen design.” For nearly every kitchen featured there is an accompanying recipe that is representative of the region and was prepared in the kitchen. “It may be one humble, functional room,” notes Dannenberg, “but the French country kitchen reveals all you need to know about the art and joy of living in France.”
Pierre Deux’s Paris Country: A Style and Source Book of the Île-de-France, with Pierre Levec and Pierre Moulin, and photographs by Guy Bouchet (1991). This book appeared a few years after the groundbreaking and hugely successful Pierre Deux’s French Country, and it is as essential to Paris and the Île-de-France as its sister volume is to Provence. In addition to the design and decorating tips there is useful information for visitors. (Though some of the restaurant and hotel information may be outdated, these details may be researched online, as is the case for the shops, antique fairs, museums, and festivals.)
Readers who may be traveling on to Provence will want to read New French Country: A Style and Source Book (2004), in which Dannenberg picks up where she left off with Pierre Deux’s French Country more than twenty years ago, with homes, gardens, fabrics, furniture, pottery, architectural elements, decorative accents, and an excellent directory of French country sources in Provence.
The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—And the Modern Home Began, Joan DeJean (Bloomsbury, 2009). Though not the same kind of book as the others here, this is de rigueur reading about the fundamental ideas about homes and homelife in what the author calls the “Age of Comfort,” 1670 to 1765. DeJean notes that the architects, craftsmen, and inhabitants of Paris during this century “can be said to have created a blueprint for today’s home and the way we live in it.” The English words “comfort” and “comfortable” derive from the French word réconfort, help or assistance, and they only took on their modern meaning in the late eighteenth century (before this time they signified help or consolation, as in today’s “comforting”). Thomas Jefferson, DeJean tells us, longtime resident of Paris and great admirer of the eighteenth-century French way of life, was among the first to use “comfortable” in the new way.
DeJean relates a truly fascinating history of the first sofas, private bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms that could not have been accepted and embraced without visionary architects and interior designers, as well as the influence of two women, the Marquise de Maintenon (Louis XIV’s mistress) and the Marquise de Pompadour (Louis XV’s mistress). Interestingly, she relates that although the French have been recognized as style leaders for centuries, the phrase art de vivre “is no longer much in use.” DeJean is the author of nine other books on French literature, history, and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all of which have somehow escaped my reading list. Among the titles is The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (Free Press, 2005), about which I will report on my blog.
This is the France the French know best and love best, their private France, the one they grow up with and have pictures of and instantly turn the clock to when no one’s looking, the France they’d like nothing better than to hand over to their children in the twenty-first century, the way it was just barely handed over to them after two world wars from those who inherited it from the nineteenth century—a France that, for all its turmoil at home and elsewhere, and for all the changes brought on by the Information Age and the Age of Anxiety, has managed to safeguard the daily rhythm and precious rituals of its day-to-day life, a France that always seems to trust it will be there tomorrow, a France that is always open for business and infallibly closes at very set hours. It is a France that, all told, is never bigger than a city block but that, within its narrow purview, easily explains why so many Parisians have never ventured beyond their own arrondissement or why so few have ever bothered to learn another language. They know every conceivable shade of the French subjunctive and know every meandering anonymous lane near home—and that’s good enough. Walk the block from the fromagerie to the boulangerie, to the boucherie, to the traiteur, to the marchand de tabacs, to the fruitier, crémerie, and charcuterie, and, come to think of it, you have walked the world.
—André Aciman, Entrez: Signs of France
