Spanning the Middle Ages to the present,How the French Invented Loveexplores a love-obsessed culture through its great works of literature, interlacing the authors charming personal anecdotes. This fascinating history will particularly delight fans of Alain de Botton, Adam Gopnik, and Simon Schama.
Love occupies an honored place in the French sense of identity, on a par with fashion, food, wine, and the rights of man. A Frenchman or woman without amorous desire is considered defective, like someone missing the sense of smell or taste. For hundreds of years, the French have championed themselves as guides to the art of love through their literature, paintings, songs, and cinema, yet no English book has seriously addressed the subject of French ideas about love. No one has followed the roadmap of French literary landmarks, which explore every nuance of love as it evolved over the centuriesuntil now.
InHow the French Invented Love, acclaimed scholar Marilyn Yalom distills her readings of French literary works and the memories of her experiences in France to discover the central tenets of that cultures gospel of love. In the process, she examines almost a thousand years of divine culture in search of the intimate moments that reveal how the particularly French concept oflamourhas endured and evolved.
This famous treatise began as a letter to a young French friend who asked Edmund Burkes opinion on whether Frances new ruling class would succeed in creating a better order. Doubtless the friend expected a favorable reply, but Burke was suspicious o...
From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against ...
Narrator: Frederick Davidson Published: 01/01/1990
New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba explores a devastating period in Paris's history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn’t—during the Nazi occupation.Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggressio...
The spellbinding and revealing chronicle of Nazi-occupied Paris On June 14, 1940, German tanks entered a silent and nearly deserted Paris. Eight days later, France accepted a humiliating defeat and foreign occupation. Subsequently, an eerie sense ...
Many are familiar with the story of the much-married King Henry VIII of England and the celebrated reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I. But it is often forgotten that the life of the first Tudor queen, Elizabeth of York, Henry' s mother and Elizabeth...
Duc de Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon (1675-1755) was a French soldier, diplomat and noted diarist. A French courtier during the 18th century, today he's best known for the comprehensive multi-volume memoirs, which depict life in France at the time. H...
This is the Paris you never knew. From the Revolution to the present, Graham Robb has distilled a series of astonishing true narratives, all stranger than fiction.
A young artillery lieutenant, strolling through the Palais-Royal, observes disapprov...
A riveting true story of murder and detection in 15th-century Paris, by one of the most brilliant medievalists of his generation. On a chilly November night in 1407, Louis of Orleans was murdered by a band of masked men. The crime stunned and paral...
The bestselling author of Catherine de Medici returns to sixteenth-century Europe in this evocative and entertaining biography that recreates a remarkable era of French history and brings to life a great monarch—Francis I—who turned Fra...
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