France: An Adventure History revisits his historical heartlands in an 18-chapter tour of the 'Hexagone'...It spans a vast terrain, from Brittany to the Alps, Flanders to Languedoc...Meanwhile, Robb traverses two millennia of change from Julius Caesar’s genocidal conquest of the Gauls to the 50,000 protesters, mainly women, who marched against sexual violence in November 2018, dreaming of 'a revolution beyond the settled storyline of History'...If not quite as original as 'The Discovery of France'—his (literally) path-finding account of the forging of a unified nation after the Revolution—this book offers a bulging cyclist’s pannier of insight and revelation...New companions on his rambling journeys could happily start here...They will find, as he writes after a quest to locate a legendary elm tree in the dead center of France, 'history in the raw... unembalmed by heritage committees'...From Joan of Arc to Napoleon, 'Madame Bovary' to Notre-Dame, we meet familiar icons along the way—but always spotted from an unexpected angle...With its quirky, irregular shape and enjoyably offbeat style, France: An Adventure History never pretends to offer a linear trip into the nation’s past...Still, it furnishes a meticulous chronology and 16 thought-provoking maps...Indeed, you could read the book as a bid to redraw the conventional map of France through time to depict the eccentricity of actual experience, rather than 'a simplified wall chart of regional produce'... Enhanced only by the heft of his learning, the keenness of his eye and the muscle of his prose, Mr. Robb’s own collaborations with the land have yielded another champion performance...Long may his wheels turn.
Beginning with the invasion of Caesar and ending on the eve of the pandemic, Robb ranges freely through time...In the meantime, Robb remains fascinated by the nuances of French language and culture...In this idiosyncratic and deeply personal history of France, Robb proudly distances himself from more conventional historians past and present...Let them assemble their 'unstoppable baggage train of documents labelled with their correct address in time,' if that is what they want to do...He prefers 'the darkening roads that stretch out before and behind us in the here and now.'
With joy, curiosity and more than a dash of ambition, [Robb] brings 2,000 years of French history to life, escorting readers from Gaul all the way to the eve of the pandemic. As a historian, Robb buries himself in national and local archives. As a vacuum cleaner of contemporary detail, he chronicles events by collecting whatever he can find: video footage, politicians’ speeches, press commentary, photographs, travel brochures, caricatures, street graffiti ... Like a demanding bike trip through the back roads of rural France, this is not an adventure for those with faint hearts. You have to love getting lost in Robb’s dense thicket of detail ... Even readers who think they know France will discover the lives and voices of forgotten characters ... Robb’s five-page guide at the end of his book is a perfect how-to for bike enthusiasts who want to duplicate some of his excursions ... I confess that I am not much of a bike rider. Severe nearsightedness, a horrible sense of direction and awkward balance contribute to my desire to either walk, ride a train or be driven around France. But this book is an adventure for all, even those unwilling to risk death on two wheels.
