This book explains the history of France from within the events themselves. We uncover the ins and outs from the Roman conquest in 58 BC to 2007 and the election of Nicolas Sarkozy.
It is primarily a political history, with the underhanded maneuvers, the calculations of ministers, kings, nobles, princes, and from the 19th century onwards, politicians more concerned with maintaining their power than with the country’s interests. The republican regimes emphasize, after the foolish attitude of the legitimist pretender who politically committed suicide along with the monarchical restoration, this little game of scheming.
France has been divided between left and right since 1871. The author Alain Minc highlights these shopkeeper maneuvers where three constitutions set the rules of the game between the executive and legislative powers. A history of France, an ideal book to better understand, grasp, and intellectualize it. Two thousand years of our lived experience, with its greatness, its great geniuses, its moments of glory, its baseness, betrayals, miraculous recoveries, all exposed in 450 pages, this is the entire merit of this book: conveying the essential without forgetting the incidental.
Alain Minc has managed to be a historian without drowning us in dates, a novelist without getting lost in details, and a chronicler by showing us the facts.
Thierry Jan
