John Julius Norwich's history of France was his final tribute to a country that he loved throughout his long life, ‘living in everything from the grandeur of the British Embassy to a humble Strasbourg bedsitter'.
As the title indicates, the reader is taken for a cheerful gallop, Norwich covering everything from Vercingetorix, Caesar's heroic, doomed opponent, to the end of the Second World War. He brings to life Clovis, King of the Franks, the Emperor Charlemagne, Count Robert of Paris, St Louis and the disastrous Crusades, the end of the Templars whose last Grand Master was burned at the stake and their baleful destroyer Philip IV, the Hundred Years War and Jeanne d'Arc, the sinister spider king Louis XI and the glittering Francis I – the rival whom Henry VIII so much admired. The miseries of the appalling Wars of Religion, the charm and gallantry of Henri IV and the magnificent follies of Louis XIV all receive attention. There is a sympathetic and perceptive portrait of Mme de Pompadour and of the weaknesses of the ancien régime that led to the horrors of Revolution.
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