France is well-ordered gardens and boulevards, lucid Cartesian thinking, the raison d’état of a Cardinal Richelieu and the fairmindedness of the Code Napoléon. France is also the warlike and amorous passions of the troubadours, pleasure palaces on the Loire, tragic love affairs, powerful emotions and elegant seductions – in literature and theatre, film and haute couture.
Finally, France is the subversive spirit of Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Voltaire’s mockery, Baudelaire’s morbid poetry, and Asterix the Gaul. Volker Reinhardt shows how the striving for clarity and order, religious, intellectual and erotic passions and the spirit of infiltration and subversion combine to produce the unmistakeable flair of French culture. His book, written with a wonderfully light touch, invites the reader to be captivated by the esprit and passion of ‘sweet France’.

• With over 100 illustrations, some in colour

• The first cultural history of France written in German

• Extensively researched, elegantly written

• The ideal gift for all Francophiles