A History of France from the Earliest Times to the Treaty of Versailles

by William Stearns Davis

France thus lies most decidedly in the cross-roads of world events. It is better to study her annals than those of any other one country in Europe, if the reader would get a general view of universal history. France has been a participant in, or interested spectator of, nearly every great war or diplomatic contest for over a thousand years; and a very great proportion of all the religious, intellectual, social, and economic movements which have affected the world either began in France or were speedily caught up and acted upon by Frenchmen soon after they had commenced their working elsewhere.

Contents: The Land of the Gauls and the French – The Roman Province and the Frankish Kingdom – From Franks to Frenchmen – The Golden Age of Feudalism: 996-1270 – Life in the Feudal Ages – The Dawn of the Modern Era: 1270-1483. The Hundred Years' War – The Turbulent Sixteenth Century: 1483-1610 – The Great Cardinal and His Successor – Louis XIV, the Sun King–His Work in France – Louis XIV Dominator of Europe – The Wane of the Old Monarchy – France the Homeland of New Ideas – Old France on the Eve of the Revolution – The Fiery Coming of the New Régime: 1789-92 – The Years of Blood and Wrath: 1792-95 – Napoleon Bonaparte, as Master of Europe – The Napoleonic Régime in France. The Consulate and the Empire – "Glory and Madness"–Moscow, Leipzig, and Waterloo – The Restored Bourbons and their Exit – The "Citizen-King" and the Rule of the Bourgeois – Radical Outbreaks and the Reaction to Cæsarism. The Second Republic: 1848-51 – Napoleon the Little: His Prosperity and Decadence – The Crucifixion by Prussia: 1870-71 – The Painful Birth of the Third Republic – The Years of Peace: 1879-1914 – France Herself Again

This book was originally intended for members of the American army who naturally would desire to know something of the past of the great French nation on whose soil they expected to do battle for Liberty. The happy but abrupt close of the war vitiated this purpose, but the volume was continued and was extended on a somewhat more ambitious scale to assist in making intelligent Americans in general acquainted with the history of a country with which we have established an ever-deepening friendship...

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France

625 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

William Stearns Davis was an American educator, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction.

Reviews

[Subodh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book seems to have begun as an introduction to French history for Americans participating in the first world war. By the time of its publication in 1919, however, the war was over. The author does a good job of presenting the essentials of French history to a reader like me, who has a fragmented idea of some major events in French history, but needs to connect the dots. Important events like the Hundred Years' War, the revolution of 1789, the defeat of 1871, and personalities like Phillipe Auguste, Louis IX, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Napoleon are covered in sufficient detail and fitted well into the overall context. The style is easy to read and holds the reader's interest. The coverage of events close to publication, like the Third Republic and the First World War is not as objective and unbiased as the rest of the book. The author presents France's role in the great war as more glorious than the perception today. Overall, I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in a general introduction to the history of this interesting and important nation.

[Bonnie Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gave me what I needed it to: a relatively concise overview of French history. However, I found the author's frequent interjections of his own opinions to be distracting "King such and such would have accomplished this if given an opportunity". I suppose I feel that if you are relaying history, you should just stick to the facts.

[Fabio Caiut · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interesting about this book is to read the opinion and the point of view from the perspective of someone in 1919, before the consequences of policy adopted by the Treaty of Versailles, before Hitler and the WW2.

[Steve Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent, concise narrative of French history whose most significant weakness is that it is written by a most opinionated reactionary.

[Robert Mcneill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was originally intended for American servicemen in WW 1 to gain an understanding of the land and people of France. Although labeled as a work of history from the foundation of the nation through the end of the war, the majority of the deals with the years 1715-1918.
The final chapter dealing with World War 1 barely passes as a work of history. It is clearly partisan towards France and overlooks many historic facts that would show the French approach and policy of the war in less than a patriotic light.
Although I learned much from reading this book, I believe there are better histories to cover the French nation. This would be a poor choice for someone without a solid background in the totality of European history, as this work maintains a very limited, and biased, viewpoint.

[Steve Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

I enjoy the older histories. They're more direct without revisionism. The author did a great job with an important topic.

[Jack Hrkach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before this history of France I read avery brief history that I found frivolous. Davis's history is also relatively short (260-some pages), but each page was packed with information. My knowledge of French history comes from years of studying French theatre for my history class at Ithaca College, from a seminar I taught only twice on the European Avant-Garde (approx 1890-1940), and from a seminar I taught at least 6 times on Performing Arts and the French Revolution. In other words, an incomplete sense of the whole long history of France. When I was buying this I for some reason or other thought it too was title "short" or "brief" but while there are not all that many pages Davis covers much in great depth, leaving out details of specific battles etc, details of diplomatic annals (thank God) and limiting if fairly strictly to France, insofar as that is possible.

It therefore assumes that one understands and already knows certain major eras and incidents. I had some sense of most of the references he made, but not all. This is fine, as you can certainly get a good sense of the country without knowing some or all of them, and of course in the age of Wikipedia etc you can look up anything you don't know rather quickly.

What made the book fascinating for me is that it was published only a year or two after the Great War, or World War I. He brings the history right up to date, ending at the Treaty of Versailles. But of course it is written with no knowledge of Hitler and World War II, of France's loss of colonial possessions in the post-colonial era, in particular of the French withdrawal from Vietnam (and of course the ill-considered and disastrous US entering immediately thereafter), even closer to today our fallings in and out of love with France (some US restaurants calling French fries "freedom fries" not long ago. I read books similar to it, written at about the same time, on Germany ahead of my recent trip there, and I'm leaving for France in late April, so this is serving a similar purpose - I love examining a book by an author who could not possibly know or even forecast events that I know well, much better in part because I've been alive for some of them.

He's a bit of an imperialist, not a monarchist (he's a good American) but certainly not a leftist. These inclinations show up in spite of an attempted clinical approach to each era he covers, and in spite of a very academic style. While the style is academic, it also manages to be florid. His chapter title on the Franco-Prussian War is titled "The Crucifixion," and as World War i approaches he speaks of a second crucifixion and references the Garden of Gethsemane. Examples of the melodramatic style can be found throughout the book, but let me quote one when he writes of the important WWI battle of Verdun - there

"the spirit of Jeanne Darc flung out its banner over the defenders. 'They shall not pass!' was the answer from the living wall of the poilus, whom Teuton shells could mangle, but Teuton valor could not break."

Whew! Still I enjoyed it and got a good bit out of it. You might as well.

[Rindis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another Lecturable book for Kindle that I had bought (for $2) before actually starting A History of the Babylonians and Assyrians , and finding out how abysmal the editing was on that volume. Thankfully, it is much better here. There's still lots of OCR-derived problems, but not nearly as frequently. If most of their books are of this quality, I'd say they're generally worth what I paid for this one, though no more.

This was intended as a guide to French history for American servicemen going over to France in WWI. However, the book was not actually completed until 1919, making it too late for that purpose. In general, it is a good survey of French history, though as it gets closer to the current (1919) day, it suffers from more and more bias, culminating with an entirely off-balance view of WWI (which given the original intended audience, is somewhat understandable...).

This is quite at odds with the generally even-handed tone of earlier parts of the book. Davis is not a Francophile it would seem, but a raving Third Republic-phile. Indeed, the creation of the Third Republic is the trigger that brings about this shift in tone, as can be seen the following quote: "The 'Military Law of 1872' was the foundation for that magnificent fighting engine which, under Joffre, Pétain, and Foch, was to stand between world-civilization and barbarism on so many desperate occasions from 1914 to 1918."

It is a shame that the book becomes victimized by rhetoric for the last chapters, for it actually succeeds at its primary job until that point.

[David Bennatan · Rating 3 out of 5]

To date, all the reviewers of this book on the site agree that it is a good history book that declines in value as the author approaches and then briefly discusses the First World War. I fully concur.

I wanted to learn about French history. It had been many years since I last read a book on the subject as I have been concentrating on English and U.S. history. This book proved to be very useful. Perhaps even the biased portions of the book, in particular his defense of the Versailles Treaty, shed light on how people made the mistakes that cost the world the tragedy of World War II.

I recommend the book as a good survey of French history which can be conveniently purchased for a very low price.

[Lavinia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was actually a very very good history book. I'm a bit bummed that I was in a bit of a rush reading it, mostly because I didn't want to finish it too long after I left France, so I'm convinced that I didn't get the most of all the information and I surely started forgetting a lot anyway :)

It's a very good book for those like myself who knew about isolated major events in France but never really paid attention to the whole picture or how the country evolved. I would say that it's more than an introduction, but much less than the whole thing. Good for noobs. I'll come back to it in the future when I'll visit France again for a longer period of time, probably years from now.

[John Latham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fantastic book written for American soldiers going to fight in WWII. It covered the time of Caesar and the Gauls through Charlemagne, through Cardinal Richileu, through the King Louis, through the revolution, through Napoleon, through Louis XVIII, Napoleon III, and finally the end of WWW from the French perspective.

It was exhausting, but totally worth getting to know France's rich history.

[Habib Malik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out well, I gained much information regarding the history of France from this book. However, after it gets to the modern era part, the book started to be filled with heavily biased opinion -- rather than important facts. It's okay to write a book with several opinion -- but there's too much of it in the last third of the book.

[Caroline Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Re-written for American soldiers stationed in France during WWll in lecturable format. I need a newer, more dynamic version so that I can LIVE THAT HISTORY. Otherwise, useful and informative, Although Davis didn't leave me "done" with France.