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At the Edge of the World

The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion

By: Jean-Vincent Blanchard

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At the Edge of the World

The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion

By: Jean-Vincent Blanchard

The remarkable story of the French Foreign Legion, its dramatic rise throughout the nineteenth century, and its most committed champion, General Hubert Lyautey. An aura of mystery, romance, and danger surrounds the French Foreign Legion, the all-volunteer corps of the French Army, founded in 1831. Famous for its physically grueling training in harsh climates, the legion fought in French wars from Mexico to Madagascar, Southeast Asia to North Africa. To this day, despite its reputation for being assigned the riskiest missions in the roughest terrain, the mystique of the legion continues to attract men from every corner of the world. In At the Edge of the World, historian Jean-Vincent Blanchard follows the legion's rise to fame during the nineteenth century--focusing on its campaigns in Indochina and especially in Africa--when the corps played a central role in expanding and protecting the French Empire. As France struggled to be a power capable of rivaling the British, the figure of the legionnaire--deadly, self-sacrificing, uncompromisingly efficient--came to represent the might and morale that would secure a greater, stronger nation. Drawing from rare, archival memoirs and testimonies of legionnaires from the period and tracing the fascinating career of Hubert Lyautey, France's first resident-general in Morocco and a hero to many a legionnaire, At the Edge of the World chronicles the Foreign Legion at the height of its renown, when the corps and its archetypically handsome, moody, and marginalized recruits became both the symbols of a triumphant colonialism and the stuff of legend.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802743889

ISBN 13

9780802743886

Éminence

Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France

By: Jean-Vincent Blanchard

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Éminence

Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France

By: Jean-Vincent Blanchard

Chief minister to King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu was the architect of a new France in the seventeenth century, and the force behind the nation's rise as a European power. Among the first statesmen to clearly understand the necessity of a balance of powers, he was one of the early realist politicians, practicing in the wake of Niccolò Machiavelli. Truly larger than life, he has captured the imagination of generations, both through his own story and through his portrayal as a ruthless political mastermind in Alexandre Dumas's classic The Three Musketeers. Forging a nation-state amid the swirl of unruly, grasping nobles, widespread corruption, wars of religion, and an ambitious Habsburg empire, Richelieu's hands were always full. Serving his fickle monarch, he mastered the politics of absolute power. Jean-Vincent Blanchard's rich and insightful new biography brings Richelieu fully to life in all his complexity. At times cruel and ruthless, Richelieu was always devoted to creating a lasting central authority vested in the power of monarchy, a power essential to France's position on the European stage for the next two centuries. Richelieu's careful understanding of politics as spectacle speaks to contemporary readers; much of what he accomplished was promoted strategically through his great passion for theater and literature, and through the romance of power. Éminence offers a rich portrait of a fascinating man and his era, and gives us a keener understanding of the dark arts of politics.

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Page Count

392

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802778534

ISBN 13

9780802778536