Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [25]
Creating French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, edited by Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford (Yale University Press in association with the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1995). The theme for the exhibit this book accompanied was to explore the relationship between culture and power in France, but I see this as nothing less than a history of France as told through its documents, manuscripts, books, orchestra scores, photographs, prints, drawings, maps, medals, and coins. Covering twelve centuries, these treasures are quite extensive, and include such offerings as: the “Letter of Suleyman the Magnificent to Francis I, King of France”; the first edition of The New Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue by the Marquis de Sade; the constitution of the “Thirteen United States of America” in French, printed at the behest of Benjamin Franklin; a map of the battle of Austerlitz; the handwritten “J’accuse” letter by Émile Zola in defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, before it was printed on the front page of L’Aurore; and five issues of Resistance: Official Bulletin of the National Committee for Public Safety, published from December 1940 to March 1941. A masterpiece.
Atlas Pocket Classics: France
This handsome boxed set is the inaugural edition in a series of travel classics published by Atlas & Company (2008). Novelist Diane Johnson introduces Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, based on a notebook he kept while traveling in the Cévennes; Gleanings in France by James Fenimore Cooper, a rare work based on a collection of his letters home that detailed France in its last days of monarchy; and A Motor-flight Through France by Edith Wharton, who lived in Paris from 1911 until her death in 1937 (this is one of my favorite works).
The Discovery of France, Graham Robb (Norton, 2007). I wasn’t sure I needed to read another book about the history of France when this one was published, but I couldn’t ignore the praise it received: winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, Slate Best Book of the Year, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and comments like this one from the Mail on Sunday: “Certain books strain the patience of those close to you. How many times can you demand: ‘Look at this! Can you imagine? Did you know that?’ without actually handing over the volume? This is such a book.… It’s not so much a cool linear account as a mosaic, like the patchwork pays of France herself.” When I picked up a copy and learned that it was the result “of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library” and that “this was supposed to be the historical guidebook I wanted to read when setting out to discover France,” I positively knew I needed to read it. It is authoritative and dense (in a good way), but is not for the casual reader. Best of all is that, as Robb notes, the book “shows how much remains to be discovered.”
Fragile Glory: A Portrait of France and the French, Richard Bernstein (Knopf, 1990). To my mind, this is the best overall book about France after Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France (below). Bernstein was the Paris correspondent for the New York Times from 1984 to 1987, and his book explores Paris and such broader topics as la France profonde (“deep France”), French children’s names, the myth of the anti-American, immigrants, politics, and the French struggle with their past. He concludes that France is still a nation greater than the sum of its parts, but that the French people are becoming more like everyone else, losing many qualities that made them different.
France on the Brink: A Great Civilization Faces the New Century, Jonathan Fenby (Arcade, 1999). Journalist Fenby has written for