
The French Mind
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We are endlessly fascinated by the French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity, sophistication and self-assurance, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But how did France become the country it is today, and what really sets it apart?
Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these questions in The French Mind, a dazzling history of France that takes us from the seventeenth century to the present day through the nation's most influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance salons that were a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and scientists, and tells the forgotten stories of the extraordinary succession of women who ran these institutions, fostering a culture of stylish intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the world.
It's a story that takes us into Bohemian cafes and cabarets, into chic Parisian high culture via French philosophies of food, fashion and sex, while growing unrest hastens the bloody birth of a republic. From the 1789 revolution to the country's occupation by Nazi Germany, Watson argues that a unique series of devastating military defeats helped shape the resilient, proud, innovative character of the French.
This is a history of breathtaking ambition, propelled by the characters Watson brings to vivid life: the writers, revolutionaries and painters who loved, inspired and rivalled one another over four hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global influence, in art, culture and politics, cannot be overstated.
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'An encyclopaedic celebration of French intellectuals refusing to give up on universal principles, rooted in the Enlightenment and French Revolution, while remaining slim, bringing up well-behaved children and falling in love at every opportunity' The Times
'An engaging movement through time towards France's recent reckonings with extremism, exceptionalism and empire' TLS
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Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction: The Fascination with France, the French and the French Way of Life
- Prologue: The Intoxication of Simon Arnauld
- Part One: The Birth of the Salon and the 'New Constellation' of Women
- Chapter 1: Catherine de Vivonne, the Blue Room and the Académie française
- Chapter 2: A Woman's War: Élisabeth du Plessis-Guénégaud and Blaise Pascal
- Chapter 3: Marie de Sévigné, Molière and the Gradations of Love
- Chapter 4: Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld and La Fontaine: Three Literary Revolutions
- Chapter 5: Magdeleine de Sablé and the Journal des savants, Madeleine de Scudéry and the Tender Game of Love
- Part Two: The Lineaments of Frenchness I
- Chapter 6: The Philosophical Eroticism of Ninon de Lenclos
- Chapter 7: The Formal French: Colbert and the Academies
- Chapter 8: Haute Cuisine, Haute Couture, Haute Coiffure: The French Taste for Grandeur
- Chapter 9: Salons as 'Schools of Civilisation': Intellect in Fashion, Intellect as Fashion
- Chapter 10: The Orléans Alternative
- Part Three: Enlightenment: 'The Victory of Intelligence over Respectability'
- Chapter 11: 'Esteem Is the Soul of Society'
- Chapter 12: Sceaux: 'The Best of All Possible Worlds'
- Chapter 13: She Who Made Voltaire Tremble
- Chapter 14: 'All the Loose Knowledge of the World'
- Chapter 15: The Multiple Ménages of Julie de Lespinasse
- Part Four: Savoir Vivre: The Lineaments of Frenchness II
- Chapter 16: An Elevated Level of Living: France as the New Greece
- Chapter 17: The Fixation with Fashion
- Chapter 18: The Philosophy of Food, the Cult of Coffee and the Rise of the Restaurant
- Chapter 19: The Serious Game of Love
- Part Five: Revolution, Robespierre, Regicide, Recovery, Restoration
- Chapter 20: The Discovery of the Bourgeois: Unpoetic, Unheroic, Unerotic
- Chapter 21: 'Literification'
- Chapter 22: Debt, Madame Deficit and an Undimmed Versailles
- Chapter 23: The Maître d'Hôtel de la Philosophie
- Chapter 24: Félicité de Genlis and Égalité in the Palais-Royal
- Chapter 25: The Most Eloquent Love-Hate Affair in History
- Chapter 26: Napoleon Spurned
- Chapter 27: 'The Return of Conversation'
- Chapter 28: Delphine de Girardin and her 'Collection of Superiorities'
- Chapter 29: 'A Life Based on More than Motherhood'
- Chapter 30: 'Notre-Dame des Arts'
- Chapter 31: La Grande Française
- Part Six: Parisine: The Lineaments of Frenchness III
- Chapter 32: The Flâneur, the Boulevardier and the Dandy
- Chapter 33: The Splendours and Spleen of No-Man's-Land
- Chapter 34: Fumisterie and the Poetics of the Café
- Chapter 35: Chic: The Parisienne as a Work of Art
- Part Seven: Defeat, Decadence, Dazzle
- Chapter 36: 'All Progress Depends on France Remaining Intact'
- Chapter 37: 'Vegetations of the Sick Mind'
- Chapter 38: 'The Old Brilliance Revives'
- Chapter 39: Proust's Prototypes
- Chapter 40: The Crossroads of French Musical Life
- Part Eight: 'Life Is What We Win'
- Chapter 41: Miracle, Mutiny, Mourning, Mondains
- Chapter 42: A Revolution in Kissing: The Landscape of Sex in Paris
- Chapter 43: Shell Shock, Surrealism and the Seventh Art
- Chapter 44: Solitude, Négritude and Other Half-Way Houses
- Chapter 45: The Collaboration of Culture and the Culture of Collaboration
- Part Nine: Post-Vichy France and the Anglosphere
- Chapter 46: Anti-Americanism and la Famille Sartre
- Chapter 47: La Longue Durée: Civilisation, Capitalism, Colonialism
- Chapter 48: 'French Theory' and the Late Focus on Freud in France
- Chapter 49: The End of the 'Theatre of the Exceptional'
- Chapter 50: The Literary Pre-eminence of Paris in an Age of English
- Chapter 51: 'An Immense Vanity for France': De Gaulle, the French and the Anglo-Saxons
- Chapter 52: France's Other 'Other'
- Envoi: 'Je Suis Notre-Dame'
- Conclusion: 'The Uncanny Power of Literature': How and Why the French Became French
- Photographs
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
- Copyright
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