Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85286 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Synopsis
Shows how the French imagination, in entertainment, sports, arts, science, and technology, continues today to influence the world.

Customer Reviews

A Splendid Synthesis
When I first picked up this volume, I wondered if it was a coffee-table book of the familiar sort: lots of nice pictures accompanied by a shallow hack-work text. My doubts were strengthened by the first page, where a photograph of Matisse is wrongly identified as Picasso.

Author Brian Moynahan has every right to be vexed by this carelessness on the part of his publisher, for mark well: my initial suspicion that "The French Century" might be a piece of meretricious commercialism was totally mistaken. It is actually an outstanding one-volume history of modern France, informative, wise, entertaining, well-written, and highly enjoyable. With great skill, Moynahan spins political, cultural, and social history into a single continuous thread. There are any number of fascinating details. e.g. France was the most militarized nation in Europe before 1914: 85% of men had received military training. Berets were not widely worn by Frenchmen (apart from the Basque minority) until the 1930s. The first striptease show was in Paris in 1893. Inter-war France (1919-1939) had forty governments in twenty years. The last public use of the guillotine was in 1939. Internal customs duties were not entirely abolished until 1948. One third of French homes still lacked running water in 1954.

I should not give the impression, however, that "The French Century" is merely a factual miscellany. It is a serious and well-judged survey of a nation from 1900 to 2007, with a effective prologue covering 1789-1899. The turbulent decade of 1936-46 justifiably takes up 130 of 450 pages. This book has increased my understanding of France as well as my knowledge of it and puts many an academic textbook in the shade.