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“... in the country’s political elites. The only true populist in contemporary French politics is Jean-Marie Le Pen. This aspect of French culture helps explain why France remains so conflicted by the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, for he was an absolute monarch with the manners of a democrat. Of course, he tried to deny it. He founded an empire, and an ...”

“... who recruits his short-lived mistresses from the ranks of pallid bourgeois consumptives (Jean Lorrain), or the male hysteric who insists that his utterly docile mistress has been unfaithful (Emmanuel Bove). Maupassant’s ‘La Horla’ is a degenerationist ghost story about a higher life-force waiting politely in the wings, which signals its ...”

“... that the pressure of public opinion would be sufficient. But the intoxicating nationalisms of the Franco-Prussian War showed the limits of any ‘purely moral force’ such as the Geneva Conventions or the Red Cross. On both sides, public opinion supported – and arguably encouraged – atrocities. By January 1872, Moynier had changed his mind, and presented ...”

“... America to Europe itself has been a product of a now vast academic industry: some five hundred Jean Monnet chairs are currently planted across the Union. In the midst of a sea of conformity, a cluster of thinkers has emerged whose writing represents a qualitative advance in critical understanding of the Union. In independence of spirit closer in type to ...”

“... Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both painted here. There were examples of cross-Channel quasi-pupillage, the most famous being Sickert’s to Degas. On the whole, the British were more drawn to new French ways than vice versa: one ...”

“... of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was still palpable; the Dreyfus Affair, which would shame the army in his family’s view, was about to unfold. De Gaulle was raised in this twilight ambience to think grand thoughts about the nation, and growing older, was sure that French ...”

“... eight o’clock on 21 April, a mortified France and a stupefied world registered the cataclysm: Jean-Marie Le Pen had overtaken Lionel Jospin.’ Everywhere hands were wrung in shame. The media were flooded with editorials, articles, broadcasts, appeals explaining to the French that they faced the brown peril and must now rally as one to Chirac, if the ...”

“... Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon.The king and his advisers took the view that Morocco must forge its own post-independence path. Why should left-leaning states in the Third World and ex-colonial powers, harping on the rights they had denied in the past, tell ...”

“... between Adenauer and Mollet.A long second phase, lasting from 1958 to 1989, began with the Franco-German deal exchanging the agricultural subsidies Paris wanted for the competition policies patronised by Bonn; after repeated setbacks, it saw eventual British entry into the Community, once France realised that the UK could be a counterweight to the ...”

“... General Alberto Bayo, a Spanish career officer who had fought against the Moroccans and against Franco during the Thirties. Exiled to Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War, he had begun a new life, training youthful Caribbean revolutionaries. When Fidel (whose own father came to Cuba during an earlier Spanish emigration) was casting around for a ...”

“... support Brexit, which is going to hit British universities badly. I am the father of a 13-year-old Franco-Portuguese daughter who was born in London and is quintessentially ‘European’. Despite all this, I was not enthused by the Remain message. I am of the view that the EU has shown no interest in fostering solidarity and greater equality. It may be good ...”