Search Results

“... Good Americans go to Paris when they die, but good Americans have always been few in number, so for a long time their impact on France was slight even when they were dead. ‘Who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture ...?’ asked Baudelaire, perhaps echoing Tocqueville, with his premonition that the wonders and vulgarities of democracy in America were what awaited Europe ...”

“... were less sanitary; and Jews, as so often happens, were the first to pay the bill. 26 March 1941: Eugen Ionescu (the playwright Ionesco), ‘desperate, hunted, obsessed’, can’t bear the thought that he may be barred from teaching: ‘not even the name Ionescu, nor an indisputably Romanian father, nor the fact that he was born a Christian . . . can hide ...”

“... After the Second World War was over, 220,000 cards were distributed among French citizens to attest that their bearers had been Voluntary Resistance Fighters. Yet André Malraux, talking to Sanche de Gramont in 1970, asserted that ‘we’ Resistants were 17,000, while ‘they’ – French members of the Waffen SS – were 40,000. That begs a question to which I know no answer, though Malraux’s own story may provide some clues ...”

“... Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is probably the cleverest and certainly the most versatile French historian of our day. Beginning with his thèse on the peasants of Languedoc in Early Modern times, he has ranged back to the everyday life of 14th-century heretics and forward to computers studies of 19th-century conscripts. His secondary thesis dealt with the weather since the year 1000 ...”

“... Eugen Weber is the leading American historian of the French Right in the period 1890 to 1914. He is also the author of a brilliant study of the growth of a national identity among the rural population of France in the second half of the 19th century and up to the outbreak of the First World War. As befits the personal angle to the main title of the present collection, the author opens with a charming account of his own haphazard course from Bucharest and other places in Romania, via Paris in the late Thirties, to a period in an unnamed English public school in the early Forties, service in the infantry of the British Army in the later stages of the Second World War, and then to graduate work at Cambridge where he nearly became a Medievalist ...”

“... It may seem perverse to begin an essay on India by invoking a historian of France: Eugen Weber, who died this year, a colleague of mine and a formidable presence at UCLA. He wrote a book in 1976 on how France became a proper nation by transforming ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. But the Weber I knew, and bantered with during the last years of his life, also had an Indian past of which he felt periodically obliged to speak, though he spoke of it to me with discomfort ...”

“... it seemed so wicked that the family discussed it for days. Where Delaporte sees discourse, Eugene Weber describes material existence. Weber saturates his narrative with all those consumer goods industrial society now concentrated on producing: cycles – uni-, bi- and tri-; footballs, pasteurised milk, omnibuses, lavatory ...”

“... Eugen Weber, who contributes one of the essays to this interesting collection, writes of the way the Revolution became a national obsession in 19th-century France. The reason was, at least in part, that throughout the century the threat – or indeed the reality – of violent political change was never off the agenda ...”

“... mustn’t be confused with a Bordeaux. Much of France’s 19th and 20th-century history was, as Eugen Weber put it, about making ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, about creating national unity around one language, one history, one set of national symbols. French imperial policy worked the same way, stressing the cultural assimilation of the colonies to ...”

“... and his body incinerated, the mob boasted of having ‘roasted a Prussian’. In Périgord, Eugen Weber has written, ‘to kill on such and such a day’ meant a feast would follow: ‘to kill meant to kill a pig.’ Habits of animal slaughter gave shape to the attack, and habits of drink gave it licence. Wary, perhaps, of echoing the prejudices of ...”

“... behind them is remarkably uniform. It is perhaps best illustrated by the circumstances behind Eugen Weber’s book. Invited by the University of Toronto to deliver a special lecture about fins de siècle, he soon discovered that there was not much to say. Centuries were an early modern invention, and it was only the end of the 19th that had attracted ...”

“... languages or dialects in preference to standard French) into a nation. In the famous phrase of Eugen Weber, only after 1871 did the Third Republic, and economic modernisation, turn ‘peasants into Frenchmen’. From this point of view, one would expect the Second Empire’s celebrations of the Saint-Napoléon holiday to have been sad affairs: dreary ...”

“... But of course, ‘we do all like a sparkling error better than a trivial truth.’ He caused Max Weber to storm out of a coffee-house in Vienna in 1919 by saying that he welcomed the revolution in Russia. Weber insisted that it would lead to unparalleled misery and end in catastrophe. ‘Quite likely,’ replied ...”

“... publishing on behalf of Germany’s growing number of anti-semitic authors, including the work of Eugen Dühring, controversial political economist (see Engels’s Anti-Dühring) and self-proclaimed ‘founder’ of anti-semitism. Schmeitzner procrastinated over publications and payments, and in April 1884 Nietzsche wrote to his close friend Franz ...”

“... by privileging performances by Brüggen, Gardiner and Pinnock over Karl Böhm, George Szell and Eugen Jochum, pillars of the Austro-German tradition whose interpretations are now discreetly tucked away as ‘supplementary’ performances, historical oddities. Böhm never gets the notes wrong, but his orchestral plod suffocates Mozart’s supple, pliant ...”