Reviews for L'école de la France

The average rating for L'école de la France based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-15 00:00:00 harry cross This short book is an excellent introduction to French and British politics in the 1790s, as well as an accurate and readable portrait of a key subset of French political figures. It focuses on the small group of aristocratic leaders known as the constitutionalists, who earned the loathing of both the royalist and the Jacobin factions during the French Revolution for their advocacy of a middle way. The constitutionalists tried to promote a limited monarchy with the protections of a constitution for the people of France, while the royalists wanted a return to the ancien régime and the Jacobins were thirsty for blood. You would have imagined that this position, basically an endorsement of the British system of government, would earn them the support of British officialdom; but it did not. The constitutionalists—Narbonne, Talleyrand, Jaucourt, Lally Tollendal, and a few others, plus their female counterparts including the Princesse de Hénin, Mme. de Staël, Mme. de la Châtre, and so on—were suffered to enter Britain but watched and suspected and, several of them, ultimately ejected from the country. British political discourse in the 1790s painted the French with a broad condemnatory brush, erasing the deep political divisions among factions, and all were suspect. In this tenuous environment, the idealistic constitutionalists for a brief while were able to create a Camelot for themselves in the county of Surrey. They let a house—the Juniper Hall of the title—near Dorking and lived there in elegant poverty for about a year before the tides of history shifted and they scattered, some to America, others to Switzerland, a few to return to France. They were sophisticated, charming, and erudite, and a handful of their neighbors gave them welcome and offered them the respite of good society. One, novelist Fanny Burney, even fell in love with and married one of the French refugees. Linda Kelly paints a vivid portrait of this group, rich in detail and impeccably researched. She doesn’t overwhelm the casual reader with documentation (there are no footnotes), instead offering a narrative that reads almost like a novel. If you are interested in the period of the wars with France (Napoleon had not yet ascended to power), this book is fascinating to read. Popular history doesn’t get any better than this.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-06 00:00:00 Zachary Larson The most biased political biography since Anton Pellugocci’s Why Mussolini is never Wrong and Also an underrated Short Order Chef (1931) (don’t google it, I made it up). Here we have, I’m reliably informed in this books preface, the only biography of Marat in English outside of Gottschalk fifty years earlier. If a biography of Marat can be said to be well overdue, this isn’t it. Conner tries to revaluate his subject in a more positive light than what is found outside of Marxist histories. He’s far too rambunctious in his task, not conceding a single inch at any stage, often committing cavalier fallacies and even ignoring historical evidence in the process. The result of this entirely chinkless armour is not so much impenetrability as unbelievability. It just doesn’t make for good history. There’s information to be gleamed here but proceed with caution, this isn’t a case of ‘one side of the story’, it’s a case of historical fantasy. Still, I don’t blame people for their rigid political bias, but I do ask that they justify them. Clearly written however, and the Tom Clancy style political thriller style makes for some genuine page quickened page turning. In his (admittedly also heavily biased) biography Gottschalk talks about ‘even the most blinkered Marat apologist’ turns out he wasn’t speaking hypothetically.