A full-color travel guide to Northern France, with comprehensive descriptions of all sights and attractions, and practical information. This guide covers the whole of this fascinating region in detail - from Calais and Lille in the north to Paris, Normandy, Brittany, the Loire Valley and Burgundy - with full-color photographs and maps throughout. The Features section focuses on the region's history, including its recent role in two World Wars.
This story is significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.
This guide provides full details of what to see in an area that stretches from the Belgian border to the river Somme. It suggests entertaining outings for all ages and provides a selection of hotels, B&Bs and restaurants.
Ten years ago, Janine Marsh decided to leave her corporate life behind to fix up a run-down barn in northern France. This is the true story of her rollercoaster ride.
Originally published in 1974. Focusing on a set of Jewish communities, Robert Chazan tells how, by the eleventh century, French Jews had created for themselves a role as local merchants and moneylenders in adapting to the political, economic, and social limits imposed on them. French society, striving to become more powerful and civilized, was willing to extend aid and protection to the Jews in return for general stimulation of trade and urban life and for the immediate profit realized from taxation. While the authorities were relatively successful in protecting the Jews from others, there was no power to impose itself between the Jews and their protectors. The political and social well-being of the Jews was, therefore, dependent on the will of the governing authorities who taxed their holdings and regulated their activities. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the position of the Jews was constantly under attack by reform elements in the church concerned with Jewish moneylending and blasphemous materials in Jewish books; these reformers were eventually devoted to a serious missionizing effort within the Jewish community. The Jews' situation was further complicated by deep popular animosity, expressing itself in a damaging set of slanders and occasionally in physical violence. Despite the impressive achievements of the Jews in medieval northern France, by the thirteenth century their community was increasingly constricted; and in 1306, they were expelled from royal France by Philip IV. Overcoming the handicap of a lack of copious source material, Chazan analyzes the Jews' political status, their relations with key elements of Christian society, their demographic development, their economic outlets, their internal organization, and their attitudes toward the Christian environment. As it highlights aspects of French society from an unusual perspective, Medieval Jewry in Northern France should be of special interest to the historian of medieval France as well as to the student of Jewish history. This story is also significant for all who are fascinated by the capacity of human groups to respond and adapt creatively to a hostile and limiting environment.
The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.
In the modern imagination the peasant survives as a creature of the land, suspicious of the outside world and resistant to change, either the repository of pristine innocence and virtue or the manifestation of everything nasty, brutish, and at best dull. The Land and the Loom replaces this picture with a richly textured, deeply researched portrait of the peasant's life and world in northern France in the early modern period. Supported by evidence culled from parish registers, notarial records, and judicial archives, this masterful depiction of village life, detailing the development of the linen weaving trade in Montigny, revises accepted notions of the peasant's place in rural industry. The peasants emerging from Liana Vardi's study are not the figures of tradition, driven solely by symbolic attachment to the land and unreasonably devoted to village solidarities. Instead they reveal remarkable flexibility and diversity, a readiness to adapt to changing incentives. As Vardi shows, they not only improved farming methods and raised yields during the eighteenth century, but also used land to finance investments in industry and to develop local business, far-flung commercial networks, and complex credit mechanisms. Vardi reveals how the peasants' responses to market opportunities depended largely on their status, with the very poor and the well-off staying out of the linen business, while a broad middle group leaped into the trade, setting in motion a gradual shift of wealth and power within the community. As this analysis makes clear, the importance of patrimony and tradition had much more to do with economic interests and common sense than with deep-seated cultural and emotional constraints. The eighteenth-century French countryside emerges as a region of capitalist experimentation, cut short by pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary crises. Meticulously documented, broadly interpretive, and beautifully written, this fascinating book will permanently alter conventional perceptions of peasant life and rural industry and, ultimately, the way ordinary people are seen in seemingly distant times and places.
The exceptional exploits, courage and leadership of British SOE Agent Trotobas have long been recognised in France but not in his own country despite being recommended for the Victoria Cross.Captured on his first mission, Trotobas led a mass break-out from Mauzac Internment Camp and eventually returned to England. He immediately volunteered to return and established and ran a resistance group around Lille and the Pas de Calais for a year. As the Nazis closed in, he refused to leave the French men and women who had shown him complete loyalty. He paid the ultimate price, fighting to the death rather than undergo capture.As well as describing the operations of the Sylvestre-Farmer circuit, the authors record the rivalries and intrigues that sprang up culminating in betrayals and extraordinary demand for the court martial and execution of the Circuit's British second in command.This book is a major addition to the bibliography of the SOE and French Resistance.
This volume explores the role of women in business in nineteenth-century Northern French textile centers. Lille and the surrounding towns were then dominated by big and small family businesses, and many were run by women. Those women did not withdraw into the parlour as the century progressed and the ‘separate ideology’ spread. Neither did they become mere figure heads - most were business persons in their own rights. Yet, they have left almost no traces in the collective memory, and historians assume they ceased to exist. This book therefore seeks to answer three interrelated questions: How common were those women, and what kind of business did they run? What factors facilitated or impeded their activities? And finally, why have they been forgotten, and why has their representations in regional and academic history been so at odd with reality? Indirectly, this study also sheds light on the process of industrialization in this region, and on industrialists’ strategies.
