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The Discovery of France by: Graham Robb List Price: £18.99 Price: £6.95 You Save: £12.04 (63%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780330427609 ISBN: 0330427601 Label: Picador Manufacturer: Picador Number Of Pages: 474 Publication Date: September 07, 2007 Publisher: Picador Studio: Picador Sales Rank: 34878 Related Items:
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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 which they supposedly lived. This is not a history of the French regions. Rather it is a history of how those regions culturally coalesced into the centralist state that is the France of today, "the celebration of home-grown diversity and the supreme ... Read More: Rating:  - not quite what it seemsI 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 my copy, or on Amazon-UK. However, it is well written and so not as dull as that sounds, in fact it is good to read, and interesting in a rather vague way - paints pictures rather then pushing a thesis. The only way it is 'heavy' is the ... Read More: Rating:  - wonderful, written with a passion for france and its peoplehaving 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 is a VERY hard thing to pull off successfully- fantastique Msr Robb! Rating: - Discover the real FranceGraham 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. It is at times a travel book, based on Robb's own personal experience of cycling around France and getting a feel for the immensity of what the pre-industrial nation would have been. It is also an anthropological study of the French, and the development ... Read More: Rating: - Eugen Weber - Peasants into FrenchmenAnyone 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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