Philip did not invoke the so-called ‘Salic Law’

Even so, the assembly’s decision was not unreasonable. Made to choose between a little girl of dubious parentage supported by the lord of a far-off territory, on the one hand, and an adult man of certain pedigree who was now anointed with the heavenly chrism, on the other, they understandably approved Philip accession. But they also recognized Philip’s eight-month-old son Louis-Philip as heir to the realm. That act transformed what might have been a one-off decision into an enduring principle. ‘And so,’ concluded the chroniclers at Saint-Denis, ‘it was declared that women do not succeed in the kingdom of France.’ A verdict of monumental importance, the consequences of this flat denial of a woman’s right to rule France have echoed down the centuries, even to the present day. But opposition lingered, for Philip’s claim, said a chronicler, ‘could not be easily proven’. Indeed, there was no proof. Philip did not invoke the so-called ‘Salic Law’, a long-defunct sixth-century legal compilation which had little relevance to the case at hand. The first such reference to the Salic Law did not come until forty years later, and it was rarely cited until the fifteenth century. Unsubstantiated as well as unprecedented, Philip’s power-play worried some people and angered others.

J. Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France (2024), loc. 5,495

We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out

I miss being at home in a culture. Using English with other native speakers is what I might miss most. For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

R. Kushner, Creation lake (2024). loc 2,808

They usually ended up going back to the provinces, those, that is, who did not end up on the streets, or in jail, or in Indo-China.

Jacques had not wanted to have supper in his apartment because his cook had run away. His cooks were always running away. He was always getting young boys from the provinces, God knows how, to come up and be cooks; and they, of course, as soon as they were able to find their way around the capital, decided that cooking was the last thing they wanted to do. They usually ended up going back to the provinces, those, that is, who did not end up on the streets, or in jail, or in Indo-China.

J. Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956), 25

Drink Less, Drink Better

In the decade of the 1990s, total French consumption of wine dropped just 2 percent, but the decline in the lower-quality wines that are drunk daily was much more severe, falling 19 percent. The number of French people drinking wine daily or almost daily fell from 46.9 percent in 1980 to 23.5 percent in 2000. And people in their early sixties are four times more likely to drink wine daily than those in their early thirties. Some wine officials try to find solace in the fact that on average the French are drinking better wines. Boire Moins, Boire Mieux (Drink Less, Drink Better) has become the mantra of French optimists who hope that the business can make up in quality what it is losing in quantity. The higher-quality wines governed by the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system accounted for only 14 percent of domestic sales in 1950 but are nearly 50 percent today.

G. M. Taber, Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (2005), 281

A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye

I'm doing all of Brillat-Savarin's aphorisms together:

• A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye. (p.22)
• Gastronomy rules all life, for the tears of the infant cry for the bosom of the nurse; the dying man receives with some degree of pleasure the last cooling drink, which, alas! he is unable to digest. (36)
• Which one of us, condemned to the fare of the fathers of the desert, would not have smiled at the idea of a well-carved chicken's wing, announcing his rapid rendition to civilized life? (49)
• Give the most hungry man you can meet with the richest possible food, he will eat with difficulty. Give him a glass of wine or of brandy, and at once he will find himself better. (79)
• I observe with pride, that gourmandise and coquettery, the two great modifications which society has effected in our imperious wants, are both of French origin. (87)
• Thousands of men, who, forty years ago would have passed their evenings in cabarets, now pass them at the theatres. Economy, certainly does not gain by this, but morality does. (138)
• Monsieur, said an old marquise to me one day, which do you like best, Burgundy or Bordeaux? Madame, said I, I have such a passion for examining into the matter, that I always postpone the decision a week. (166)
• Take a raisin-- No I thank you; I do not like wine in pills.(167)

J. Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)

What possessed a nineteenth-century inventor to replace the simple Anglo-Saxon plug with this complex mechanism of ratchets and rods

Upstairs, an hour later, I wondered for the thousandth time why the French prefer such a complicated system to drain their bathwater. What possessed a nineteenth-century inventor to replace the simple Anglo-Saxon plug with this complex mechanism of ratchets and rods – a dial to raise the valve? Constant adjustment is necessary to ensure that the bath doesn’t drain as you fill, or resolutely refuse to empty

S. Loftus, Puligny-Montrachet (1992. New ed. 2019), 269

When Napoleon's remains were returned to France in 1840, no fewer than fourteen bogus emperors were admitted into care

It is perhaps difficult now to understand the posthumous impact of the French Emperor - what Chateaubriand called the 'despotism of his memory' - or how far and for how long his shadow stretched across Europe. Sightings of him were reported, supposedly accompanied by an astonishing array of troops, across much of Europe for years after. A recent history of French psychiatric institutions reveals that when Napoleon's remains were returned to France in 1840, no fewer than fourteen bogus emperors were admitted into care; there had been others before that and would be more in the following decade.  

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 222-3

Its two main outside threats, the Turks and the French

Emperor Leopold I was seen mostly as a clumsy but reasonable and mild figure, the antithesis of a war hero, who nevertheless stood between the Empire and its two main outside threats, the Turks and the French. This reputation deviated from the heroic imagery of court spectacle, but was probably nearer to the mark.

J. Duindam, Dynasties: a global history of power (2016), 276-7

Bigger than the combined staffs of the six ministries running the French state

The household serving Louis XIV’s brother, approximately half the size of the king’s own household, was bigger than the combined staffs of the six ministries running the French state at the central level.

Duindam, Dynasties: a global history of power (2016), 224

In France, raising your children as vegan is classed as criminal neglect

Studies have shown that children raised on a vegan diet are often smaller and have low levels of certain nutrients such as riboflavin and B12, which, when extreme has led to high-profile deaths. In France, raising your children as vegan is classed as criminal neglect.

T. Spector, Spoon fed (2020), 126-7

Anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French

But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites – and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 760

France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power

In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation, with Marshall Petain’s Vichy regime playing Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 113

In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration

English is the only modern language in which it has been found necessary to borrow from the Latin a word with a depreciatory meaning, the word uxorious, for a man's devoted love for his wife. That love should absorb a man has seemed to them unworthy. In France a man who has ruined himself for women is generally regarded with sympathy and admiration; there is a feeling that it was worth while, and the man who has done it feels even a certain pride in the fact; in England he will be thought and will think himself a damned fool. That is why Antony and Cleopatra has always been the least popular of Shakespeare's greater plays. Audiences have felt that it was contemptible to throw away an empire for a woman's sake. Indeed if it were not founded on an accepted legend they would be unanimous in asserting that such a thing was incredible.

W. S. Maugham, The summing up (1938), 137

That moment when French culture was at its most refined, most searching

I've finally understood what this house is about, this extraordinary attempt to make one space after another work without discomfort or falsity. You want to make a perfect stage set for conversation, enlightenment, for that moment when French culture was at its most refined, most searching.

E. de Waal, Letters to Camondo (2021), 111

De Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'

 To Mitterrand, de Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'. After the General's death, he compared him to Henri IV, the great sixteenth-century King who ended the Wars of Religion, and Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to his son Louis XIII, who laid the foundations of modern Western statecraft.

...

The French stateman Mitterrand most admired was the seventeenth-century Cardinal Mazarin, preceptor and First Minister of Louis XIV, after whom he named his daughter, Mazarine.

P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 10 and 12

It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect

Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.

G. Stein, The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), 11

Politicians and commentators pushed three lines of attack against the immigrant Jews in France

Politicians and commentators pushed three lines of attack against the immigrant Jews in France: that they were taking jobs from the French, that they were Bolshevik revolutionaries determined to destroy France, and that they were diseased criminals.

H. Freeman, House of Glass: The story and secrets of a twentieth-century Jewish family (2020), 80

Mon cher, très à gauche, il est Orléaniste

I heard the following blissful remark – one old count to another old count about a third: ‘Mon cher, très à gauche, il est Orléaniste’! And the same ones about the Dsse de Vendôme whose death has plunged the Faubourg into widows’ weeds, ‘Well she must be in heaven by now’ as if she had caught a tram. Oh how funny they are.

Nancy to Diana, 4 April 1948,  ed. C. Mosley, The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters (2007), 265

Aunt Augusta's persistent view of France as a regicide nation

'I rather dread the next days as you can imagine,' she wrote to her aunt just before starting for France, 'it will all be rather difficult and unusual.' Although she did not, of course, share her Aunt Augusta's* persistent view of France as a regicide nation, Queen Mary was very much aware that this was her first state visit as Queen of England to a foreign republic. Some of her mother's greatest friends had been the Princes and Princesses of the exiled house of Orleans, and Queen Mary herself has always known and liked the Empress Eugenie.   

J . Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary (1959), 483

* Princess Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, 1822-1916

Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac

The individualistic, artisanal quality of the French baffled the men Paul called the “Marshall Plan hustlers” from the U.S.A. When American experts began making “helpful” suggestions about how the French could “increase productivity and profits,” the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.”

J. Child, My life in France (2006), loc. 1,441