A History of France

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We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. The house of Valois ruled France for 250 years, playing a crucial role in its establishment as a major European power. As antisemitism grows in France to unprecedentedly high levels, and Jews leave in droves, I wonder whether Finkielkraut might not have a point.

Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers--that the Revolution was caused by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment.The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Using eighteenth-century France as a case study, David Bell offers an important new argument about the origins of nationalism. The book opens with the author's memory of meeting de Gaulle and closes with his reflections on French culture.

Arguably Debord is the most important French philosophical export of the past 30 years – a fact now recognised in France: Debord and his influence on the outside world are part of the national curriculum. Princeton University's Florent Masse offers us a reading from the point of view of teaching theater. Few people in France take “BHL” seriously: and to the rest of the world he just looks like the archetypal foppish French intellectual. his comic footnotes deserve a review of their own' DAILY TELEGRAPHI can still feel, as if it were yesterday, the excitement of my first Channel crossing (as a child of nearly 7) in September 1936; the regiment of porters, smelling asphyxiatingly of garlic in their blue-green blousons; the raucous sound all around me of spoken French; the immense fields of Normandy strangely devoid of hedges; then the Gare du Nord at twilight, the policemen with their képis and their little snow-white batons; and my first sight of the Eiffel Tower . John Julius Norwich was born in London and served in the Royal Navy before receiving a degree in French and Russian at New College, Oxford.

France's New Deal is an in-depth and important look at the remaking of the French state after World War II, a time when the nation was endowed with brand-new institutions for managing its economy and culture. John Julius Norwich's last book is the book he always wanted to the extremely colourful story of the country he loves best. The Belle Epoque combined a preoccupation with the noblesse of the old regime with the seeds for modernism, says Oxford history professor Ruth Harris, author of an award-winning book on the Dreyfus affair. Here, Professor Richard Vinen of King’s College London recommends five books that will help you understand modern France, all written in a golden age of French historical writing.