Search Results

“... There is​ a France only thanks to the state,’ Charles de Gaulle declared in 1960, ‘and only by the state can France be maintained.’ He spoke these words during the ‘week of the barricades’ in Algiers, when a pied-noir uprising gained significant support in local units of the French army. De Gaulle appeared on television in full military uniform, and reminded the soldiers that he was their commander-in-chief ...”

“... heads of Europe; as the lover of Josephine. He remained a man of the people despite himself. If Sudhir Hazareesingh hits a wrong note anywhere in his splendid survey of Napoleon’s ‘legend’ in 19th-century France, it is when he compares Napoleon to de Gaulle. There are of course numerous parallels between these two generals turned ‘saviours of ...”

“... life. Removing himself from view the better to be seen was both a tactic and a strategy, as Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in a fascinating study of the De Gaulle myth. He might sweep up his papers and stride from a meeting, refuse to attend a commemoration, or retire for years to his home in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. It was important, De Gaulle had ...”

“... on trial, she was sent to a penal colony in New Caledonia. We​ come across her again in Sudhir Hazareesingh’s sharp-eyed survey, How the French Think, as she returns to France in 1895, after more than one prison term and a spell in exile, to become the Commune’s ‘most potent living symbol’. Several of Sante’s characters turn up in ...”

“... the British officers and men who fell on the day. In France it was a different story, as Sudhir Hazareesingh has recently shown in The Legend of Napoleon.* Napoleon was resurrected as a national hero in 1840, when Louis-Philippe’s regime, weakened by conspiracy and corruption, repatriated the emperor’s corpse from St Helena and had it ...”

“... hero’, although he died, most likely tortured and murdered, at the hands of the French state.Sudhir Hazareesingh’s new biography of Louverture, Black Spartacus, points to the difficulty of describing a figure for whom obscurity was political strategy.He was a very private man who confided in no one and went out of his way to conceal important ...”