The Discovery of France

£18.99

Graham Robb’s “The Discovery of France” is a book of genuine interest, continually redefining what we thought we knew about the history of France, with an assured, analytical, good-humoured and sympathetic understanding of the subject.

It’s easy to reduce France to the sum of its parts: weekend breaks amid the culture of Paris or summer holidays basking in the sunshine of the south; accounts of the Revolution - Madame Defarge knitting beside the guillotine - and Napoleon’s battle at Waterloo ill-remembered from school; a country famous for its intellectuals, artists and philosophers, its fashion, food and wine.

Despite this, however, the notion of ‘the French’ as one nation is relatively recent and, historically speaking, quite misleading; in order to discover the ‘real’ past of France, it is not only necessary to go back in time, but also to go at a slower pace than modern life generally allows.