In France profound : the long history of a house, a mountain town, and a people / T. D. Allman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allman, T. D., author.

Contributor:

Chaffer, Keith, cartographer.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lauzerte (France)--History.

Lauzerte (France).

Lauzerte (France)--Social life and customs.

Physical Description:

vii, 469 pages : illustration, maps ; 24 cm

Edition:

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.

Other Title:

Long history of a house, a mountain town, and a people

Place of Publication:

New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024.

Summary:

"From the National Book Award-longlisted author of Finding Florida, a sparkling, sweeping chronicle of the author's life and discoveries in an ancient town in "Deep France," from nearby prehistoric caves to medieval dynastic struggles to the colorful characters populating the area today. When T. D. Allman purchased an 800-year-old house in the mountain village of Lauzerte in southwestern France, he aimed to find refuge from the world's tumults. Instead, he found that humanity's most telling melodramas, from the paleolithic to the postmodern, were graven in its stones and visible from its windows. Indeed, the history of France can be viewed from the perspective of Lauzerte and its surrounding area-just as Allman, from one window, can see Lauzerte unfold before him in the Place des Cornières, where he watches performances of the opera Tosca and each Saturday buys produce from "Fred, the Foie Gras Guy"; while from the other side facing the Pyrenees he surveys the fated landscape that generated many events giving birth to the modern world. The dynastic struggles of Eleanor of Aquitaine, he finds, led to Lauzerte's remarkably progressive charter issued in 1241, which even then enshrined human rights in its 51 articles. From Eleanor's marriage to English king Henry II in 1154 dates the never-ending melodrama pitting English arrogance against French resistance; in 2016 Brexit demonstrated that this perpetual contretemps is another of the vaster conditions life in Lauzerte illuminates. Allman chronicles the many conflicts that have swirled in the region, from the Catholic Church's genocidal campaign to wipe out "heresy" there; to France's own sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, which saw hundreds massacred in the town square, some inside his house; to World War II, during which Lauzerte was part of Nazi-occupied Vichy. In prose as crystalline as his view to the Pyrenees on a clear day, Allman animates Lauzerte and its surrounding communities-Cahors, Moissac, Montauban-all ever in thrall to the magnetic impulse of Paris. Witness to so many dramas over the centuries, his house comes alive as a historical protagonist in its own right, from its wine-cellar cave to the roof where he wages futile battle with pigeons, to the life lessons it conveys. "The onward march of history, my House keeps demonstrating, never takes a rest," he observes, pulling us vividly into his world"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

44°15'4" North, 1°08'18" East

Discerning the face of the sky

The constant proscenium

Of wasps and wombs

Frying pan boy

In Bouvine's unseen wake

The sleep of reason produces monsters

Caedite eos

Vulgarium numerus infinitus

Secret routes

The remembered Montfort

Everything that rises

Of all her ilk

Swearing on the altar

Uninventable denouements

Our Quercy pope

Loving the shepherd

Brave widow Gandillonne

The black prince syndrome

Bridge of the devil

Even ancient walls shall be destroyed

Worth a mass

Jerry-built by Bonaparte

Paris is the pattern

Incunabula of the ATM

The voice in the loft

The wisdom of old houses

The pigeons are rrowing

Parallel lives

I stand with De Gaulle

Holes

For whom the bells tolled

Ambassadors of progress

Glass globe wars

Triumph of the traffic circles

Envoi : unto us the dead impart the sweetness of life.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Allman, T. D. In France profound.

ISBN:

9780802127846

0802127843

OCLC:

1437997450