Jonathan Fenby > Quotes

“I respect only those who stand up to me, but I find such people intolerable.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“In 1945, Yvonne established an Anne de Gaulle Foundation for Down’s syndrome children in a château bought for the purpose outside Paris, and, after his daughter’s death in 1948, de Gaulle kept her framed photograph with him.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“They assure love from the beginning of life to its conclusion and, in the end, they govern our existence.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“The Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking - a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy' of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of the nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was `Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“You people sit in your yamen [headquarters], and your horizon is your window sill,' he went on. `You are ignorant because no one dares to correct you. You might lose face and, what's more, some one might lose his head. You've retreated into your intellectual rat holes, having exposed only a posterior of vanity. Goddamn it, sir, you've all become insufferably stupid!”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“This is not war but merely an incident." All treaties and structures to outlaw war and to regularise the conduct of war appear to have crumbled, and we have a reversion to the day of savages.' Was Western silence `a sign of the triumph of civilisation', she wondered, or `the death-knell of the supposed moral superiority of the Occident'?18”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“If present reality contradicts such a vision, if they prefer to reject economic modernisation in favour of defence of tradition, if their nation has fallen behind its neighbour across the Rhine, if polls in the summer of 2014 showed that 90 per cent of respondents did not believe their elected president could handle the problems facing them, this leaves them feeling deprived of what they believe should be theirs by historic right and opens them to the temptation of extremist illusions.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror

“There were flurries of concern in the West when shells landed on foreign concessions or threatened ships. But, as in Manchuria, nobody would take practical steps to hold back Japan even when its army landed at the end of February and marched in to bolster the lacklustre marines.”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“the US continued to recognise Vichy and the Free French were reduced to operating in the US out of the office of the representative of the Patou perfume firm.143”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“French police and the SS worked together on round-ups in Marseille, classified as ‘moral cleansing’. In all, some 75,000 Jews would be deported from France in terrible conditions to concentration camps in eastern Europe. Only 3 per cent returned alive.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“since the Revolution, the French have become prisoners of the heritage of their past. The idea of the Hexagon as a model for the world is not one which many people could objectively defend in the twenty-first century, but it remains a potent reason to repel change or foreign influences. The French want to see their country as the bearer of a special mission bequeathed by their history, the Gallic cockerel crowing proudly to the world as they proclaim the historic virtues of the republican civil religion, on the basis of institutions dating back two centuries.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror

“Feeling they were being treated as inferiors by the West, and suffering from American and European racism, the Japanese concluded that they had to make their own place in the world, using force to pursue the manifest destiny of the `imperial way'.”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“Though the issue of collaboration, whether active or passive, remains a highly emotive matter in France, the fact was that, in the summer of 1940, most people in the unoccupied zone accepted the armistice.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“To get round limits placed on the number of dishes that should be ordered, restaurants served several at the same time on large plates, with alcohol brought to the table in teapots.51”
― Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost

“The Romantic Gérard de Nerval led his pet lobster round the the Palais-Royal because ‘it does not bark and knows the secret of the sea”
― Jonathan Fenby, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the Present Day

“since the Revolution, the French have become prisoners of the heritage of their past. The idea of the Hexagon as a model for the world is not one which many people could objectively defend in the twenty-first century, but it remains a potent reason to repel change or foreign influences. The French want to see their country as the bearer of a special mission bequeathed by their history, the Gallic cockerel crowing proudly to the world as they proclaim the historic virtues of the republican civil religion, on the basis of institutions dating”
― Jonathan Fenby, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror

“The republican ideal, harking back to the ‘good’ elements of the Revolution, assumes that France is a nation of progress on the side of the secular angels. But the various narratives of the last two centuries have shown that the country invariably opts for right over left with occasional eruptions to prove that its revolutionary legacy is not dead. Thus, 1830 was followed by the bourgeois monarchy when those unhappy with the system were told that the answer to their complaints of exclusion was to enrich themselves as conservatism was entrenched under Guizot’s golden mean. Within four months of the revolution that created the Second Republic, troops were liquidating the worker barricades of the June Days and, in 1851, Louis-Napoleon staged his coup. Two decades later, the Commune was suppressed with equal bloodshed. The Third Republic was slow to introduce social reforms, shied away from an income tax for decades and denied the vote to half the population. While introducing historic and lasting changes, the Popular Front collapsed after two years and Paul Reynaud set to work to chip away at its legacy.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror

“According to de Gaulle’s account, Blum assured him of his interest in the soldier’s ideas. ‘But you fought against them,’ his visitor observed. ‘One changes one’s point of view when one becomes head of the government,’ came the reply.”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved

“Cecil von Renthe-Fink, a tall Prussian aristocrat who advocated the creation of a European confederacy under German leadership with a single currency and a central bank in Berlin, was sent to mind the Marshal.183”
― Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved