France: An Adventure History
France: An Adventure History revisits his historical heartlands in an 18-chapter tour of the 'Hexagone'...It spans a vast terrain, from Brittany to the Alps, Flanders to Languedoc...Meanwhile, Robb traverses two millennia of change from Julius Caesar’s genocidal conquest of the Gauls to the 50,000 protesters, mainly women, who marched against sexual violence in November 2018, dreaming of 'a revolution beyond the settled storyline of History'...If not quite as original as 'The Discovery of France'—his (literally) path-finding account of the forging of a unified nation after the Revolution—this book offers a bulging cyclist’s pannier of insight and revelation...New companions on his rambling journeys could happily start here...They will find, as he writes after a quest to locate a legendary elm tree in the dead center of France, 'history in the raw... unembalmed by heritage committees'...From Joan of Arc to Napoleon, 'Madame Bovary' to Notre-Dame, we meet familiar icons along the way—but always spotted from an unexpected angle...With its quirky, irregular shape and enjoyably offbeat style, France: An Adventure History never pretends to offer a linear trip into the nation’s past...Still, it furnishes a meticulous chronology and 16 thought-provoking maps...Indeed, you could read the book as a bid to redraw the conventional map of France through time to depict the eccentricity of actual experience, rather than 'a simplified wall chart of regional produce'... Enhanced only by the heft of his learning, the keenness of his eye and the muscle of his prose, Mr. Robb’s own collaborations with the land have yielded another champion performance...Long may his wheels turn.
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Beginning with the invasion of Caesar and ending on the eve of the pandemic, Robb ranges freely through time...In the meantime, Robb remains fascinated by the nuances of French language and culture...In this idiosyncratic and deeply personal history of France, Robb proudly distances himself from more conventional historians past and present...Let them assemble their 'unstoppable baggage train of documents labelled with their correct address in time,' if that is what they want to do...He prefers 'the darkening roads that stretch out before and behind us in the here and now.'
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Robb’s France: An Adventure History is a rich and vibrant narrative that ranges from the Gauls to the gilets jaunes...His clear-eyed but imaginative storytelling scrutinises the more idiosyncratic features of France’s historical landscape, beginning with what he calls an 'obscure act of genocide on a summer’s day in the late iron age' — Julius Caesar’s massacre of the Nervii in northern Gaul...The account is based on Caesar’s own writing but infused with Robb’s infectious love of geography and nature...He begins with a detailed description of the saepes, the impenetrable hedges that once offered the Gaulish tribes a 'cloak of invisibility' against the enemy...Embedded in this chapter is the long view that the only history worth writing is that which seeks to read the traces we humans leave on these lands that we pass through so briefly...Thus, Robb’s research only partly took place in libraries; much of it was done criss-crossing the country for more than 30 years on a bicycle...There is, inevitably, a touch of nostalgia attached to most historical writing...Robb’s is for a rural France free of high-speed trains and themed roundabouts...Nostalgia is excusable when the chosen subject is fuelled by affection — and a love of France does radiate from both these books...But when it comes to narrative history, love can no longer be blind...Since the digital revolution, the battle for control of 'national narratives' has become more crucial than ever and as we watch the horrors unfold in Ukraine, any tendency to airbrush or glorify the past feels fraught with hazard.
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