According to Zipcodesexplorer, France ranks first among wine producing countries around the world. The vine thrives there in numerous departments up to a limit line that could be traced from Saint-Nazaire to Mézières to Paris. Due to excessive humidity, it is lacking in Brittany, Normandy and Picardy, while its favorite domain is the Mediterranean region and mainly Roussillon and Lower Languedoc, where it thrives in the most diverse soils: in…
Read MoreFrance Agriculture Part I
France has always been and is still today a more agricultural than industrial region. Although there are fewer and fewer peasants out of the total population (75% in 1850, 38.3% in 1926), only a tenth of the country’s surface is not cultivated. Land ownership is very divided: the owners themselves cultivate 60% of the area under cultivation, leaving the tenants 27% and the settlers 13%. Small plots are therefore the…
Read MoreFrance and Italy
In France there was very early knowledge of the renewal that was taking place beyond the Alps. Since 1454 the painter Jean Fouquet has been in Rome, where he also painted a portrait of Eugene IV. He especially fell in love with the new architectural decorations and adorned many scenes of his miniatures (Heures d’Étienne chevalier, Chantilly; portrait of Juvenal des Ursins, Louvre). The French prelates to the Holy See…
Read MoreFrance Literature Part IV
To Blanchot, to Bataille, as to M. Leiris (born in 1901) or to Céline, who experienced a new success in the 1950s (see in this App.), And therefore to the more distant experiences of Sade, Lautréamont, Kafka, by Joyce, by Proust himself (for the technique of the interior monologue), some of the newest and most original novelists of the latter period are based, from M. Duras and P. Klossowski, to…
Read MoreFrance Literature Part III
According to Softwareleverage, the traditional novel, which still follows the thread of a chronological narrative and the tested conventions of “intrigue”, albeit already with a different awareness of linguistic tools, of objective representation, and of the literary “function” itself, have also addressed numerous writers of the post-war generation, and of recent years, without however reaching original results, or of “renewal in tradition”, if anything with an illusory out-of-time revival of…
Read MoreFrance Literature Part II
But it is certainly in the philosophy of the 1960s that these various influences find their point of convergence, with a clearer configuration of the phenomenon, also due to a sensational controversy which itself constitutes an important literary fact, and far transcends the terms of the question.. Already in 1957 J. Pommier, a professor at the Sorbonne, had severely criticized Barthes’s Michelet par lui-même (1954) and Richard’s essay on Baudelaire, collected in…
Read MoreFrance Literature Part I
According to Shopareview, the most conspicuous and most significant phenomenon in French literature of the last fifteen years is undoubtedly the “nouvelle critique”. Not only has literary criticism as never before enjoyed a robust and aggressive health as in this period, but it has managed to condition or bring out with more incisive evidence the metamorphoses and a new concept of literature, with essential modifications of terms, structures, expression. It…
Read MoreFrance History – The Second Empire Part IV
Eventually the Olivier tendency prevailed, and through a series of reforms implemented between 1867 and 1870 the constitution of the empire was changed in a distinctly liberal-parliamentary sense. The transformation carried out was sanctioned on 8 May 1870 by an imposing popular plebiscite: seven and a half million votes in favor against one and a half million opponents. According to Programingplease, the consensus of the huge majority of the population…
Read MoreFrance History – The Second Empire Part III
The great political crisis that began with the Plombières agreements in the summer of 1858 and ended in the spring of 1861 with the proclamation of the kingdom of Italy, allowed Napoleon to agitate in front of public opinion, at the end of the first decade of his personal regime, the result of reaching the natural borders on the Alps, that is, an increase in territory and power and at…
Read MoreFrance History – The Second Empire Part II
According to Physicscat, the first emergence of such a policy took place during the presidency, when Napoleon thought he could take advantage of the Austro-Prussian dissension over Germanic problems to try to get closer to Prussia, in view of an anti-Austrian action. The capitulation of the Hohenzollerns before the Habsburgs, sanctioned with the humiliation of Olmütz (December 1850), halted the development of the attempt and pushed Napoleonic politics to the…
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