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France will always have a love-hate relationship with its heroes

23 May 2020

9:00 AM

23 May 2020

9:00 AM

Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History Patrice Gueniffey, translated from the French by Steven Rendell

Harvard, pp.416, 28.95

The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated the age of the people: ‘France cured of individuals,’ he wrote in the preface to his history. But that same Revolution created a pantheon for its grands hommes.

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