Word: gramont
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE by Sanche de Gramont. 479 pages. Putnam...
Most authors approach the subject of France inductively, offering, like a Parisian épicerie, small, spicy dabs of this and that so that the whole, though piquant, is rarely filling. In one sense, Sanche de Gramont writes in the same vein. Tidbits of throwaway intelligence pop to the surface of his book like croutons in a steaming onion soup. The word bourgeois first appeared (as burgensis) in a 1007 charter establishing the free city of Loches. As a result of Versailles banquets, Louis XIV's stomach was found at his death to be twice normal size. The French Foreign...
Codified Concierges. But Gramont, a French count by birth and a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist by trade (via Yale and the New York Herald Tribune), is really offering a well-packaged literary supermarket. His hope, clearly, is that readers in need of predigested fact and opinion should search no farther. Furnished with a vast array of knowledge-much of it the result of his French secondary-school education -he includes generous helpings of statistics, history, philosophy and lore...
France is much in thrall to its own version of the heroic past. Accordingly, Gramont invokes, analyzes and denigrates Jules Michelet, the great French Romantic historian whose writings helped to "create" France's epic past. When Gramont describes French intellectual life, he gives a useful though jaundiced look at Descartes, including his life and times, his seminal Discours de la Méthode and the Freudian analysis of the philosopher's three dreams, which symbolized the difficulty of understanding the universe...
...Gramont sees it, the times were not so much ripe for revolution as overripe with monarchy. Louis XVI was so far out of touch with the changing political style that he did not even suspect a dangerous parallel when he saw one-the American Revolution. While Marie Antoinette gushed about "our good republicans, our good Americans," Louis, it is said, made a gift of a Sevres chamber pot with Benjamin Franklin's likeness on the base...