Quotes About France

A chap wouldn't hole up in Occupied France just to get away from his wife, Vesta.

The only time France wants us to go to war is when the German Army is sitting in Paris sipping coffee.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

Europe is right to tell us to reduce this [France's budget] deficit and spend less. Europe is right to demand this of us but cannot at the same time demand us to increase our dues.

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

Now, I had been drawing all this time - especially in France of course - so, when I came back, my father gave me the chance to do a cover for one of the books he published.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.

Her mother won't stop her when she tries to make money. The child will say, I asked him for five hundred piastres so that we can go back to France. Her mother will say, Good, that's what we'll need to set ourselves up in Paris, we'll be able to manage, she'll say, with five hundred piastres. The child knows what she's doing is what the mother would have chosen for her to do, if she'd dared, if she'd had the strength, if the pain of her thoughts hadn't been there every day, wearing her out.

Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished.

It is the presence of salt throughout France, along with either cows, goats, or sheep, that has made it the notoriously ungovernable land of 265 kinds of cheese. French cheese makers were trying to be neither difficult nor original. They were all trying to preserve milk in salt so they could have a way of keeping it as a food supply. But with different traditions and climates, the salted curds came out 265 different ways. At one time, there were probably more variations than that.

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day

Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed the New France but shrinks from the tiny bite, pinchos/tapas thing: I still have an attention span. I can eat a meal.

Danton, Robespierre, and Tallien wish it—the mob of Paris wishes it—but the people of France does not wish to depose their King. But unfortunately, said d'Autachamps, it is Danton, Robespierre, and the mob of Paris who have now the supreme power, and for a time will have their way

In short, throughout the eighteenth century the English were regularly involved in wars with Catholic France and Catholic Spain.

None of this internecine combat affected the future of Catholicism quite so much as the dramatic, often horrifying events in France. In August 1792 a decree by the new French Legislative Assembly ordered all priests who refused the revolutionary oath to be expelled from the country. The King, Louis XVI, was put to death in January 1793 and in February France declared war on England.

It was the unhappy (Protestant) Huguenots, notably after the Massacre of St Bartholomew, who had sought to escape France and settle in England. Now the picture had changed. France was no longer a Catholic enemy, but an enemy representing Unbelief who was thus an enemy of Catholicism. It was a country in which nuns and priests were likely to be murdered, or imprisoned and executed during the Terror of 1792.

There was a significant reminder of the history they all shared: 'It is hoped that a difference in religious persuasion [Catholic as opposed to Protestant] will not shut the hearts of the English Public against their suffering brethren, the Christians of France.

The 1798' – the Irish revolt of the United Irishmen against English domination, potentially backed by French forces – was led by the Protestant Wolfe Tone.

France is the land where dalliance is so passionately understood.

There was nothing unusual in Britain finding herself at war with France. Six times in just over a century had the summons come and always against the same foe. At such moments the ordinary Englishman instinctively obeyed the precept Captain Nelson taught his midshipmen: to hate a Frenchman like the devil.

judges in seventeenth-century France were discouraged from socializing on the grounds that friends and acquaintances might one day be called before the court.

In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.