A capable history sure to appeal to all lovers of France.
Fenby (Will China Dominate the 21st Century?, 2014, etc.) investigates France’s attempts to live up to her revolutionary ideals and how she has become a prisoner of her history and its narratives.
The author, well-versed in all matters French, examines politics and governments through all of the conflicts of the past 200 years, and he provides occasional sidebars that offer quick, insightful biographies of the primary players through France’s history. Even though by 1830 there had been multiple regime changes, that period was almost stable compared to what would come after Louis Napoleon. The nephew of the emperor was elected president in 1848, but the disarray of the National Assembly gave him the impetus to stage his own coup. He became Napoleon III in 1852 and ushered in the Second Empire, and he lasted until the war of 1870. The Third Republic’s first president, Adolphe Thiers, declared that a “republic was the form of government that divides us least.” Only one president from that government completed his full term, and France endured through countless different forms of government between the world wars. The Third Republic fell because it failed to resolve 150 years of conflicts and live up to France’s view of itself. The numerous parties and the electorate’s tendency to swing with the economy prove the old saying, “the French wear their hearts on the left, their wallets on the right.” The Fourth Republic featured Philippe Petain’s collaborationist Vichy administration during World War II, and today we have the Fifth Republic, which came to be under the Machiavellian Charles de Gaulle. The nation currently suffers under the inflexible regulations of her labor code and living beyond their means for 40 years thanks to their generous social system. For all the confusion, twisting and turning of politics, student revolts, and peasant uprisings, France has survived, and Fenby dutifully guides us through.
A capable history sure to appeal to all lovers of France.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09683-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.
A fresh, urbane history of the dramatic and melodramatic belle epoque.
When Barnes (The Only Story, 2018, etc.), winner of the Man Booker Prize and many other literary awards, first saw John Singer Sargent’s striking portrait of Dr. Samuel Pozzi—handsome, “virile, yet slender,” dressed in a sumptuous scarlet coat—he was intrigued by a figure he had not yet encountered in his readings about 19th-century France. The wall label revealed that Pozzi was a gynecologist; a magazine article called him “not only the father of French gynecology, but also a confirmed sex addict who routinely attempted to seduce his female patients.” The paradox of healer and exploiter posed an alluring mystery that Barnes was eager to investigate. Pozzi, he discovered, succeeded in his amorous affairs as much as in his acclaimed career. “I have never met a man as seductive as Pozzi,” the arrogant Count Robert de Montesquiou recalled; Pozzi was a “man of rare good sense and rare good taste,” “filled with knowledge and purpose” as well as “grace and charm.” The author’s portrait, as admiring as Sargent’s, depicts a “hospitable, generous” man, “rich by marriage, clubbable, inquisitive, cultured and well travelled,” and brilliant. The cosmopolitan Pozzi, his supercilious friend Montesquiou, and “gentle, whimsical” Edmond de Polignac are central characters in Barnes’ irreverent, gossipy, sparkling history of the belle epoque, “a time of vast wealth for the wealthy, of social power for the aristocracy, of uncontrolled and intricate snobbery, of headlong colonial ambition, of artistic patronage, and of duels whose scale of violence often reflected personal irascibility more than offended honor.” Dueling, writes the author, “was not just the highest form of sport, it also required the highest form of manliness.” Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt (who adored Pozzi), Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more.
Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-65877-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
It took 14 years to build and it cost 15 million dollars and the lives of 20 workmen. Like the Atlantic cable and the Suez Canal it was a gigantic embodiment in steel and concrete of the Age of Enterprise. McCullough's outsized biography of the bridge attempts to capture in one majestic sweep the full glory of the achievement but the story sags mightily in the middle. True, the Roeblings, father and son who served successively as Chief Engineer, are cast in a heroic mold. True, too, the vital statistics of the bridge are formidable. But despite diligent efforts by the author the details of the construction work — from sinking the caissons, to underground blasting, stringing of cables and pouring of cement — will crush the determination of all but the most indomitable reader. To make matters worse, McCullough dutifully struggles through the administrative history of the Brooklyn Bridge Company which financed and contracted for the project with the help of the Tweed Machine and various Brooklyn bosses who profited handsomely amid continuous allegations of kickbacks and mismanagement of funds. He succeeds in evoking the venality and crass materialism of the epoch but once again the details — like the 3,515 miles of steel wire in each cable — are tiresome and ultimately entangling. Workmanlike and thorough though it is, McCullough's history of the bridge has more bulk than stature.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1972
ISBN: 0743217373
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972
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