Shirer stood in the streets of Paris and watched the unending flow of gray German uniforms along its boulevards. In just six lovely weeks in the spring and summer of 1940 a single battle brought down in total military defeat one of the world's oldest, greatest, and most civilized powers—the second mightiest empire on earth and the possessor of one of the finest military machines ever assembled. How did it happen? After nearly a decade of research in the massive archives left from World War II and after hundreds of conversations with the Third Republic's leaders, generals, diplomats, and ordinary citizens, Shirer presents the definitive answer in his stunning re-creation of why and how France fell before Hitler's armies in 1940. His book is also a devastating examination of the confusion, corruption, and cynicism that drained the strength and toughness of a democracy which Thomas Jefferson once called "every man's second country." This book complements and completes the dramatic story of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and continues to rank as one of the most important works of history of our time.

    In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flAneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flAneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

    While public attention was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different...and more imaginative way...to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them. The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850s. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau; their most obvious expression was 'Art Nouveau,' a style closely interwoven with sinuous and half-unconscious eroticism. Philippe Julian takes the reader on a conducted tour through the bizarre symbolism of this half-forgotten world, introducing him to a large number of writers and artists. Many of these artists...Moreau; Toorop, the brilliant half-Balinese, half-Dutch painter and draftsman; the French Odilon Redon, the great master of Symbolist art; the Viennese Klimt; and the Belgian Khnopff...have been known for some time to a few enthusiasts; In this lively study their inventiveness and skill are explored afresh, and their fantastic imaginings and weird symbolism exposed to a sometimes ironic light. Proud of their romantic appearance, extravagant habits, and outrageous conduct, the artists of the 'mauve nineties' drew on a wide range of writers for their ideas, including not only Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, but also less well-known and stranger poets. The book ends with a short anthology of Symbolist themes taken from these writers, and 149 pictures drawn from museums and collection in the Europe and the U.S.

    She has been ruthlesslytorn from her beloved and sent to France, thrust into the most immoral courtin sixteenth century Europe. Catherine is a reluctant bride to Henry ofOrleans, the second son of the King of France. She was passionately in lovewith her husband, but was unwanted by him; humiliated and jealous, Catherinebegan to plan her revenge while spying on her husband's lovemaking with hislover, the infamous Diane dePoitiers. Henry soon rose to the kingship uponthe death of his brother; for thirty years, Catherine dreamed of a murdershe dare not carry through. "Madame Serpent" was born of years of sinisterplanning and jealousy. And like a serpent, she could work swiftly andlethally in the dark.

    His quietly phrased, brief devotions are -described as "miniatures," yet are monumental, capturing the pressure of history upon daily moments. By reducing the world to its small objects, every detail, every image becomes imbued with meaning.This bilingual volume, celebrating the centennial of Jean Follain's birth, is translated by W.S. Merwin, who writes in his introduction: "Follain's concern is finally with the mystery of the present--the mystery which gives the recalled concrete details their form, at once luminous and removed, when they are seen at last in their places, as they seem to be in the best of his poems."

    

    They had been rounded up for shipment to the German death camps, but they were not arrested by the Germans. That work was done, with alacrity and thoroughness, by the French police. This is the little-known story of those two fateful days, of a betrayal that today the French can scarcely believe.'"It began on July 16, 1942. The plot was part of "Operation Spring Wind." The result was the roundup, in one day, of 12,884 Jews living in France at the time of the German Occupation. Seized without warning, men, women, children, and old people, invalids too, were piled into buses and taken to a Paris sports arena, the Ve'lodrone D'Hiver, on the first stage of a journey toward death at Auschwitz.The story of this roundup of non-French Jews is told in Betrayal at the Vel d'Hiv with the ruthless economy of a documentary; the manhunt, the crowding of thousands of victims into the glassed cage of the arena, transportation of convoy after convoy from the Vel d'Hiv to Drancy and eventually to the "final solution".Wherever possible, the authors have quoted eyewitness accounts and transcribed documents. The contrast between the businesslike, clerical itemization of who is to be considered eligible for arrest and the moving personal stories creates a chilling picture of humanity overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of murder.Although there were Frenchmen who cared about and helped the hunted, the book in the main insists that we face terrible truths; the French police carried out the orders of the Germans with efficiency and without mercy. Many French citizens saw their neighbours taken away without batting an eye. The details build up convincingly until we come full circle and say, "No, it couldn't have happened." We know it happened. We feel it could not have. No one will read this book without reacting to it both with disbelief and with the horror that comes from believing."Illustrated with 16 pages of black & white photographs.

    And here, rising out of the criminal world of Paris, a miasma of fear and suspicion, is the gradual revelation of occult crimes – covens of witches and warlocks practicing “the old religion,” conducting black masses, arranging murders and abortions, concocting magic potions, aphrodisiacs, and poisons for their masked noble clients – as a poison psychosis strikes Versailles, ultimately threatening the very person of Louis himself.Most dramatic of all, the role of Montespan: the King’s Favorite, mother of his five “legitimized” children, an arrogant, highborn, voluptuous beauty, who dazzled Saint-Simon with the wit and brilliance of her conversation; whose intellect made her an arbiter of taste in a court embellished by a Molière (her protégé) and a Lully; whose pearls outshone the Queen’s; whose train was borne by a duchess; who by her strength and charm held the restless Louis bound to her for a decade.In the massive Poisons Affair inquiry that brought the most ancient names of France to trial, the name of Montespan was by royal edict forbidden to be mentioned, and evidence was destroyed. But the day-to-day private journals kept secretly in shorthand by the able and meticulous chief of the Paris police, Nicholas de Lay Reynie, escaped destruction – and they raise the question: To what extent was Montespan, the uncrowned Queen of France, implicated in these grave crimes?Using – brilliantly – the technique that distinguishes her earlier works, presenting her story through the diaries and letters of the principal actors and their contemporaries, Frances Mossiker illuminates this mystery and brings richly to life the antithetical worlds – the royal heights and the grotesquely sinister depths of seventeenth-century society – that came violently together in one of the greatest dramas of French history. [From the book jacket.]

    

    

    

    Ellis adores the infant on site and raises her as her own. On the brink of womanhood at seventeen, her aunt’s dying wish is for Marianne to wed Francis Cranmere, the son of an old friend and the story begins on her wedding night in 1809 – a wedding night that goes horribly awry with the turn of a card – and Marianne’s peaceful world is thoroughly turned upside down and inside out.

    

    In that short period the Normans spread out from their adopted homeland in the north-west of france and took their power and influence to places as far apart as England, Italy, Sicily and Syria.But the Norman achievement was more than military. The Normans created within the feudal system a method of government which brought order out of chaos and continuity out of continual disruption.