A History of France

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only master was Vico. His principle of the living force, of a humanity that creates itself, made both my book and my teaching.

possessed annals, but no history at all. Eminent men had studied her, especially from the political point of view. None of them entered into the infinite details of the diverse products of her activity (religious, economic, artistic, etc.). None of them had yet embraced the living unity of the innate and geographic elements which formed her. I was the first to perceive her as a soul and as a person. Part of the book’s themes is the relationship between state and society, the impact of war and the use of political power.had a fine disease which clouded my youth, but which was well suited to an historian. I loved death. I had lived for nine years at the gates of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, which was at that time the only place where I could take a walk. Then I lived near the Bièvre district of Paris, amidst large gardens adjoining convents, another kind of sepulcher. I led a life which the world could have described as a buried one, having no company other than the past, and for friends, entombed peoples. By recreating their legends, I awakened in them a multitude of vanished things. Certain nurses’ songs of which I held the secret had a sure effect. By my tone of voice they believed I was one of them. I was given the gift that Saint Louis requests and does not obtain: “The gift of tears.” odd thing is that the only person with enough love to recreate, to remake the Church’s inner world, is the one whom she did not raise at all, who never entered into communion with her, who had no faith other than in humanity itself, no imposed creed, nothing but a free mind. incredible energy, that little book [ Introduction to World History] was carried forward in rapid flight on two wings at once (as always with me): Nature and Spirit, two interpretations of the vast general movement. My method was already in it. I said there in 1830 what I said (in The Witch [1862]) about Satan, the weird name of still youthful freedom, combative at first, and negative, but later creative and increasingly fruitful. the midst of so many gloomy things, we fall upon a great light—death enthroned in the Louvre—in a deserted Paris, the real death of France in the shape of the Englishman, of Lancaster. Henry, the king of priests, the damned Pharisee, tells us: “that we have perished only for our sins.” Much of the book is located in Provence and The Horseman on the Roofhas since been transformed into a movie starring Juliette Binoche. The original book was published in the 1950s and follows the story of a young Italian nobleman who is residing in France and is trying to raise money for the Italian revolution against Austria in the mid-1800s. The Three Musketeers– by Alexandre Dumas

Dorinda studied the period as a global phenomenon that touched on how historical interpretations of the Enlightenment continue to transform in response to contemporary socio-economic trends. This book gives a clear and up-to-date guide to French history. It starts from the early middle ages to the present (when the book was published). sum up, history, as I saw it represented by those eminent (in several cases admirable) men, still seemed unsubstantial in its two approaches:

STUDIES IN POETRY AND PROSE.

Murder, intrigue and mystery, this gripping novel is known in English as ‘The Beast Within’ or ‘The Beast in Man’. Written by Zola in 1890, the storyline follows the story of a killer and is an intense look on human nature, and what it means to be human. Many claim that this is one of Zola’s all-time best works. The Count of Monte Cristo– By Alexandre Dumas the lonely galleries of the Archives where I wandered for twenty years, in that deep silence, murmurs nevertheless would reach my ears. The distant sufferings of so many souls, stifled in those ancient times, would moan softly. Stern reality protested against art, and occasionally had bitter words for it: “What are you fooling around with? Are you another Walter Scott, recounting picturesque details at great length, the sumptuous meals of Philip the Good, the empty Oath of the Pheasant? Do you know that our martyrs have been expecting you for four hundred years? Do you know that the valiant men of Courtray, of Rosebecque, do not have the monument which history owed them? The salaried chroniclers, Froissart the chaplain, Monstrelet the chatterbox, do not suffice. It was with firm faith, with the hope of justice that they gave their lives. They would have the right to say, ‘History! Settle with us! Your creditors are summoning you! We accepted death for one line from you!’” This book is intended only for the general reader, to whom the French rather charmingly refer as l’homme moyen sensual, and is written in the belief that the average English-speaking man or woman has remarkably little knowledge of French history. We may know a bit about Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Louis XIV, but for most of us that’s about it. In my own three schools we were taught only about the battles we won: Crécy and Poitiers, Agincourt and Waterloo. France is located at the centre of Western Europe and has an interesting history that shaped it into what it is now. This country has had several conquests conflicts and the French Revolution that began in 1789 and ended in 1799. a master with whom I shared, not genius no doubt, but a violent will, upon entering the Louvre (the Louvre of that time, where all Europe’s art was collected), did not seem troubled. He said: “Fine! I’ll do it all over again.” In rapid sketches which he never signed, he went about seizing and appropriating everything. And, were it not for 1815, he would have kept his word. Such are the passions, the madness of youth.

A fascinating quadruple biography of four of the greatest monarchs of the Renaissance by this true master of narrative history.” ―Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem: The BiographyThe big question in the book is whether the Enlightenment period meant the same for different genders, social classes and Europeans vs non-Europeans. example, the one I suggested above, will suffice to make me understood. In the pleasant history in which Monsieur de Barante follows our story-tellers, Froissart, etc., so faithfully, step by step, it would seem that he cannot go too far wrong in clinging to these contemporaries. But then in examining the records, the various documents, so dispersed at the time though collected today, we recognize that the chronicler failed to appreciate, was unmindful of the broad features of the age. This is already a financial and juridical century in feudal form. It is often Pathelin masked as Arthur. The advent of gold, of the Jew, the weaving industry of Flanders, the dominant wool trade in England and Flanders—this is what allowed the English to prevail with regular troops, some of whom were hired and paid mercenaries. The economic revolution alone made the military revolution possible, which, through the punitive defeat of feudal knighthood, prepared, then brought about the political revolution. The tournaments of Froissart, Monstrelet, and the Golden Fleece have little influence in all this. They are completely incidental. Francis, a child who does not know what he says, and who speaks the better for it, tells those who ask who wrote The Imitation of Christ: “The author is the Holy Spirit.” is the spirit of union, of love, finally emerging from the suffocation of legend. The free associations of fraternities and free towns were for the most part moved by this spirit. Such was, in 1200, in the time of the Albigensians, the religion both of the free towns and of the knights of southern France, a religion in a new spirit that the Church drowned in torrents of blood. And so the Spirit, frail dove, seems to perish, to disappear. From that moment on it becomes airborne, and will be breathed in everywhere.

During that period, leading French intellectuals and political figures prioritized perfect national unity and looked for ways to bequeath all French people with the same language, laws, customs, and values. part of the generation that reached maturity during the Restoration, Michelet was nourished by his sympathy for the medieval Church. The six volumes of his History of the Middle Ages pulse with admiration for the artistic and intellectual triumphs of the Christian spirit. Because of the fervor expressed in these volumes, and because of the exhaustive documentation upon which they are based, most historians agree that they are Michelet’s most lasting historical masterpiece. Does their literary quality suffice to explain why the author of the 1869 Preface, despite his long-standing hostility toward the Church, persisted in recalling his youthful love? When Louis XVI was woken with news of the storming of the Bastille he sleepily asked: "Is it a Rebellion?" "No," replied Duc de la Rochefoucauld, "it's a Revolution." would have become of me, in studying the fourteenth century, if, clinging to the methods of my most illustrious predecessors, I had made myself the docile interpreter, the servile translator of the narratives of the time? Entering centuries rich in records and genuine documents, history came of age, acquired of the chronicles which it controlled, purified and judged. Armed with unassailable documents unknown to these chronicles, history, as it were, held them on its kness like a little child to whose prattle it listens willingly, but whom it must often admonish and contradict. to those who pursue this racial element and exaggerate its influence in modern times, I drew from history itself an enormous, and too little noticed, moral fact. It is the powerful labor of oneself on oneself, whereby France, by her own progress, transforms all her raw elements. From the Roman municipal element, from the Germanic tribes, from the Celtic clan—which have been annulled and have disappeared—we have produced in the course of time completely different results, results even contrary, to a great extent, to everything that preceded them.divine a spectacle when, on the scaffold, the girl, abandoned and alone, upholds her interior Church against the priest-king, against the murderous Church, in the midst of the flames, and takes flight saying: “My voices!” of the past was an essentially prophetic task, a vision of universal justice. The dead would receive their reward of eternity by surviving in the consciousness of the present. The historian’s sacred duty was to restore the glories of the past to inspire readers to construct the image of an ideal future. kept my distance from the majestic, sterile Doctrinaires, and from the great Romantic flood of “art for art’s sake.” I had my world within myself. I held my life within myself, as well as my renewals and my fecundity; but also my dangers. Which? My heart, my youth, my very method, and the new demand made of history: no longer just to recount or judge, but to summon, remake, revive the ages. To have enough passionate flame to reheat ashes long cold–that was the first point, and it was not without peril. But the second point, still more perilous perhaps, was to enter into an intimate relationship with the revived dead, and who knows? finally become one of them.