Quotes About France

When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.

When France fell in 1940, De Gaulle was a temporary brigadier general.

The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

The sudden, brilliant victory in France, like a Frankenstein monster, had turned against us; we had far outstripped our ability to supply the troops.

La vergüenza de la rendición francesa del sanjacato (distrito provincial) de Alejandreta —incluido Musa Dag— es una de las historias en buena parte no desveladas de la segunda guerra mundial. El temor a que Turquía se uniera al Eje alemán como había hecho en la guerra de 1914-1918 llevó a Francia a aceptar un referéndum en Alejandreta de modo que los habitantes armenios y turcos pudieran elegir su nacionalidad.

Sin embargo, cuando en el 2000 el Senado francés propuso reconocer el genocidio armenio de 1915, el secretario general del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores respondió con una declaración que podría haber sido emitida por la embajada turca. Loïc Hennekinne dijo que ésa no era tarea del parlamento y que la historia «debía ser interpretada por los historiadores».

Poland now was reduced to one-third its original size and a population of four million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great sixteenth-century principality of Kiev, "lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.

In 1902, Marcellin P. Berthelot , often called the founder of modern organic chemistry, was one of France's most celebrated scientists—if not the world's. He was permanent secretary of the French Academy, having succeeded the giant Louis Pasteur , the renowned microbiologist. Unlike Delage , an agnostic, Berthelot was an atheist—and militantly so.

If these self-anointed leaders did not keep the people aroused with calls to preserve the Revolution, or to defend it from one imaginary foe after another, then the people might shake themselves awake from the trance they were in and begin to question the very men who had drenched their streets in blood and make France pariah among the civilized nations of the world.

All around the world, tourist boards advertise trips to Britain with images of the great castles and cathedrals that occupy the commanding heights of our landscape. They seem timeless and typically English. It is rarely mentioned that they are predominately French - proud monuments to the invasion that signals the end of England's 'dark age'.

sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.

Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were.

The 72nd Division, which had opened the battle with 12,000 men, had lost nearly 10,000 men in three days; this is as many as all the Allied armies, navies and air forces lost on D-Day 1944 - and the French losses came from a single division.

While the folks at home embraced him as an improbable hero, Washington was denigrated in England as a reckless young warrior and in France as an outright assassin. He would have been crestfallen to know that, for some high-ranking folks in London, his behavior only confirmed that

The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate's tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.

Soon after being sworn in as president, John Adams learned that the Directory, the five-member council now ruling France, had expelled the new American minister, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and promulgated belligerent new orders against America's merchant marine. By spring, the French had seized more than three hundred American vessels.

But French people understand that

France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews the full rights of citizenship without qualification.

France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews the full rights of citizenship without qualification. Their position was further enhanced by Napoleon, according to whom Judaism was a religion, not a nationality. So long as French Jews regarded it only as a religion and gave their loyalty to France, they ought to be granted full

France] may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

If the government, by its sloth and criminal irresponsibility, had brought us, guests of France, into the dangerous situation that now faced us, the French people were doing their utmost to help us out of it.

There I had been for three-quarters of a year caught in that mousetrap of a France, unable to get permission to leave the country. Now, for a second time, I was to taste the pleasures of an internment camp.

The French indiscriminately interned any women who had at any time had anything to do with Central Europe.