France: An Adventure History

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France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original and endlessly entertaining history of France, from the first century BC to the present day, based on countless new discoveries and thirty years of exploring France on foot, by bicycle and in the library. It was challenging in terms of premise: France and the French are often seen from abroad as a cohesive (Parisian) monolith, and I will never see it that way again. Going through the timeline and looking stuff up on Wikipedia was probably the most entertaining part for me.

There is a lot I learned from these pages that I hadn't ever encountered before, and having read about it through Robb's journeys seemed to make it more relevant.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. He looks for roads that might have been ancient Roman paths or supply routes during the Hundred Years War. Legendarily a giant elm growing at the spot where joined the corners of four counties and under whose shade the noble counts were said to parley, Robb locates the remnants of a not-unlikely candidate in a spot -- now entirely obscure -- that in his telling sat on a once-upon-a-Hundred Years' War highway along the eastern boundary of English-controlled France and very close to the geographical center of the Frexagon.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The land will always predominate: it shrugs at the presence of such pretenders as language (although language is doing a pretty good job of warming the seas these days).For a great read, I would make one critique: I would have liked to have read a bit more about French cultural history. I’m far from being a Francophile, but if a book is written well enough you can be converted to almost anything…at least for the duration of the read. Insítear an scéal trína gcuid litreacha, trí chuntas an teaghlaigh agus le hionchur ó staraithe, iarshaighdiúirí agus síceolaithe. Though possibly the biggest highlight was the chapter on Napoleon and particular his exile on St Helena in the South Atlantic where he met and befriended the young child, Betsy Balcombe.

I want to know more about the scandal of the Murder of Madame Bovary, more theories into The Tree at the Center of France, or simply more recounts of Robb’s own stories of visiting the hidden parts of France. I learned about people, times and places I knew nothing if and a lot more about aspects I thought I was familiar with. Who would have thought that even into the 18th century France was so divided, undeveloped… that you could get lost just trying to walk back to Paris.For that really is the lingering impression of this book: in whatever ephemeral, run-of-the-mill place you happen to be, it may have been at one point either the location of a momentous event buried by the sands of time, or it may have been visited by — or was maybe even the home of — someone who enjoyed a moment of celebrity in some past era. Graham Robb does not offer a standard dry list of facts and dates, but instead a panorama of France, teeming with characters, full of stories, journeys and coincidences, giving readers a thrilling sense of discovery and enlightenment. There is the memoir of the English girl who became an actual friend of Napoleon Bonaparte’s during his final captivity on St. For example, I didn’t know how isolated and independent parts of France were in centuries past, to the point that they had unique languages that were barely connected with French. During the lockdown phase of Covid, my wife and I replaced our usual date nights – dinner and/or drinks out – with foreign language lessons.