A panorama of people, places and things, factual and fictional, in the traditionalist French-speaking culture of 1850 to 1950.
A series of 13 talks by Richard Cobb. Professor of Modern History and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford
1: The Tempting Threshold
This series might well have been subtitled in French: L'histoire des petites gens. For that is what it is. ' L'histoire ' - the historical witness of fiction as well as fact. ' petites gens ' - this is a loving celebration of the old individualist French culture of the quarticr, the café des habitues, the small shop. Jacques Tati country, in fact; everything threatened by the New France of the technocrats.