Sunday, March 28, 2021

Fenby, France: A Modern History . . . (2016)

Jonathan Fenby.
France: A Modern History from the Revolution to the War with Terror.
New York: St. Martin's Press (Macmillan Publishers), 2016.

Book Information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.

Originally published as:
The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror.
London: Simon & Schuster UK, Ltd., 2015.
[Publisher UK; Google Books; Amazon.co.uk.]

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I read this book once before. My post for that is: At that time I had recently read some books on the U.S. war in Vietnam and I wanted to understand more about French colonialism during the Nineteenth Century. Unfortunately, Fenby's book has almost nothing to say on that topic and the most attention French Indochina gets is a sketchy one page on the siege at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Logevall's Embers of War (2012) is pretty good on French Indochina during the Twentieth Century. I started reading Brocheux & Hémery, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954 (2011) but haven't finished it. It's definitely the kind of book I was looking for, but Brocheux & Hémery requires a greater familiarity with French history than what's provided by Fenby's very introductory book.

More recently I read a couple novels by Zola and thought I should know more about Nineteenth Century France (The Fortune of the Rougons is a very political novel). So I read Fenby's book again. He covers all the basic topics: Bourbon Restoration (Louis XVIII and Charles X), July Monarchy (Louis Philippe), Second Republic, Second Empire (Louis-Napoléon), Third Republic; but it's all very introductory. Now I'm looking forward to reading some books that focus on Nineteenth Century France:
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