More than 70 dates, from 600 BC to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, are recounted and commented upon over time, reflecting their own era, the past, and the future. This collective work draws from the history books of French schools and colleges of the Third Republic, idealizing the homeland and heroes.
About fifty modern authors, historians, each take on a topic, a date, a period, revisiting history as it was taught in schools and colleges under this patriotic Third Republic, driven by the desire for revenge against Germany after 1871.
The periods are described and explained to the modern reader, who in a way becomes a schoolchild from the interwar years, a time when people were determined not to relive the slaughter of a conflict from which they were just emerging.
The book explains history from a modern perspective, a view with enough hindsight to better analyze these dates in their causes and consequences. These 70 dates were the minimum knowledge base for schoolchildren in the ‘20s and ‘30s. How many today would be capable of citing and explaining them?
This book highlights the difference between a student of the elementary certificate from this interwar period and today’s middle school student, whose distressing shortcomings would have made them a dunce at a time when history emphasized France’s roots. This is precisely what should not be taught to 21st-century schoolchildren in the context of political correctness. As one author said: “When you refuse to see the past, you condemn yourself to relive it!”
This book precisely shows us the past with its dramas, errors, and failures. The great dates of French history, a book that every French person should read to better understand the present with its many challenges.
Thierry Jan
