Quotes About France

obviously Huguenots

As you probably know, the Vikings invaded France, were bought off with Normandy, settled there, then used it as a base for invading Britain and many other places. The most bad-ass Normans crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror; the ones that stayed behind in Normandy spawned the generations who mostly enjoyed jousting and courtly love, etc. . .

The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.

Unlike Britain, France, Italy and Russia, however, Germany did not have access to the international bond market during the war (having initially spurned the New York market and then been shut out of it).

I mourn the fact that my beautiful country has deteriorated in every way.

Being from Israel and a Jew is complex already, but with France, there is a freedom and a mix of culture. I have met musicians from all over the world.

There is a racist attack against Muslims and Arabs, Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians in France.

I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history.

I scored my first goal with the national team against France.

I enjoyed playing for the national team, the French national team, because I think France gave me a lot and gave my family a lot, so to wear the French national team shirt was really good, and I wore it with pride.

Mbappe always performs whether that's in Ligue 1, Champions League or with the France national team.

To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.

Introduced by de Gaulle to protect France's 'vital interests', when there was a possibility that Britain would use it, the French wanted it abolished.

If you wanted to understand a politician you mustn't pay too much attention to his speeches, but find out who were his paymasters. A politician couldn't rise in public life, in France any more than in America, unless he had the backing of big money, and it was in times of crisis like this that he paid his debts. X

Charlot's eyes lighted up with fanatical fervor as he told about it; at last they were going to put down the labor unions and their revolutionary propaganda, and make sure that the traditional France would survive and dominate Western Europe. Lanny found the German Nazis strange and terrible people, but he found even more fantastic these Fascists of the Spanish and French Catholic pattern, who were building this machinery of repression in the name of Jesus Christ.

I have to report the painful fact that they have no idea of submitting to a popular verdict if it goes against them; that applies to Spain as to France. If they are forced to it, they will find some man like Mussolini, to hold you down and keep their seat on your backs.

That's exactly why the Cagoule was never purged in France; there were more than five hundred army officers involved in the plot, and the Cabinet voted against Léon Blum and Marx Dormoy, who wanted to root them out. The result was, they stayed in the army and went on making appeasement propaganda, even in the midst of war.

The declaration of Belgian neutrality had been one of Hitler's great diplomatic successes, very-little appreciated by the outside world. It left France with the northern part of her border exposed; the French armies could enter Belgium only after the German armies had done so, and would thus have no time to prepare positions.

the "two hundred families" which ruled France had made up their minds that their interests required the overthrow of the Third Republic, and the establishment of some sort of dictatorship which would break the power of the labor unions, as had been so efficiently done in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain.

The struggle inside France was between the Left, which had made an alliance with the Reds, and the Right, headed by the Comité des Forges, which wanted to break up this alliance, make friends with Germany, and join her in putting the Reds down for good.

might mean not merely a big order for planes; it might mean new expansion, fresh capital—for these men had gold, all the gold of the Banque de France, hidden in the most marvelous vaults in the world, underneath the sidewalks of Paris. They didn't own it, of course, but they could cause it to be expended by politicians whose careers had been financed by them and whose future was theirs to determine.

There, as in France, politicians wanted one thing and businessmen wanted another, and the latter had to pay, but they managed to get back still more. Businessmen knew that wars came and went, but business continued, and its interests were permanent

The fact was, these issues had become so urgent and feelings ran so high that tolerance was too difficult. All over France the various groups isolated themselves, and didn't go where they would meet their political rivals.

The British owned immensely valuable properties in Spain—Rio Tinto copper, for example, indispensable in making munitions—and certainly they didn't want strikes and Red commissars in those mines. On the other hand it might be fatal in wartime to have German submarines based on the Atlantic, and France enclosed in a pair of Nazi pincers.