If you are planning a vacation to France, you can take its history with you in your carry-on. In fact, for ladies, you can put it in your purse. Whether or not you are actually planning to visit France or simply wish to learn about its history in a very timely manner, Colin Jones’s recent “The Shortest History of France: From Roman Gaul to Revolution and Cultural Radiance—A Global Story for Our Times” is an ideal work.
Around 300 pages, Jones has stuffed approximately 2,000 years of history into a readable, insightful, and entertaining book. Perhaps “stuffed” is not the correct term, because it is not stuffy, nor do the topics feel squashed together. Amazingly, the historical eras—from the reign of Clovis and the rise of the Franks to the military and ideological struggle between French Christendom and the surge of Islam to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic times to the modern era of the 20th and 21st centuries—flow quite seamlessly from one to the other.
