Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Julia French had little trouble, netting two goals for the Crimson. Bailliere, Julie Clifford, Sue Carls, Char Joslin, Karen Everling and Jenny Walser also chomped on the Big Red defense with a goal apiece...
This extraordinary history of the French Revolution begins with a three- story-high plaster elephant standing guard in the Place de la Bastille. Commissioned by the triumphant Emperor Napoleon, eventually to be recast in the bronze of captured cannons, the elephant was designed to make Parisians forget their revolutionary past and dream of an imperial future. Its real destiny -- like the question of what to remember -- proved quite different. "By 1830, when revolution revisited Paris, the elephant was in an advanced state of decomposition," writes Harvard historian Simon Schama. "One tusk had dropped off, and the other was reduced...
BOOKS: A masterly account of the French Revolution...
...example, the famous storming of the Bastille prison -- of which the French are noisily celebrating the 200th anniversary this summer -- was hardly a storming at all. The outnumbered and ill-supplied defenders (whose oppressed prisoners consisted of just two lunatics, four forgers and one aristocratic ne'er-do-well put away by his family) finally surrendered when they saw themselves confronting the rioters' artillery, which included a silver-inlaid cannon originally given to France by the King of Siam. And the commandant of the Bastille, who had tried to avoid further bloodshed, was subsequently hacked to death, his head stuck...
...that the author repeatedly feels a need to apologize for what he somewhat disingenuously calls a "mischievously old-fashioned piece of storytelling." If Schama's portrait of the revolution is often surprising in its closeup details, however, it is no less so in coloring the background imagery of the French society being overturned...