Sometimes it feels like it is hard to write engaging history books for any era that predates the 20th century. There is less cultural context for the modern reader: so much has changed that it makes it hard to imagine events, nevermind relate to them. Plus more details have been erased by the sands of time, so often the level of generality goes up. Brown does a good job getting around this. He uses a lot of newspapers and personal letters to give the reader primary sources to relate to: what people were actually writing and reading at the time. He often uses the universal expositions, which happened approximately every decade, to anchor things in time.
Based on the presence of “Dreyfus” in the title, I was expecting this to be more directly about anti-Semitism. The primary theme of the book is Catholic-Royalist versus Republican-Enlightenment, and Continue reading Book Review: For The Soul of France
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