Patrick Boucheron

You can read my full review here:

https://thebeerthrillers.com/2021/04/13/book-review-machiavelli-the-art-of-teach...

A quick excerpt from the review:

"....The underlying theme that runs current through the thirty small chapters is that Machiavelli is much aligned and isn’t the “cutthroat monster” we have been pretty much led to believe by historians and history itself, by the way his name is used eponymously and how he is portrayed in fiction and even by scholars themselves. As the cover shows, (a grafitti’d Machiavelli, with devil horns), Machiavelli is believed and portrayed as this cutthroat man who believed “the ends always justify the means” and almost a “anything goes” attitude towards princes, and kings, and those in power; as a form of keeping their power, and making sure the government they are in control of continues on.......

....Machiavelli did have a lot to teach about fear, its usage, its power, its conception, its control, its psychological importance, etc. He had as much to teach us about it as he did the Princes and the rulers. And as Boucheron showcases here, he had much more to show us – the common folk, the peasants, the non – rulers – about fear than he did the Cesare Borgias and Medicis of the world. And that is why we still read (and still need to read) Machiavelli in today’s world, and in today’s context.

My LibraryThing rating: ***3/4
My GoodReads rating: ****
Global Average GoodReads Rating: 3.68 (as of 4.7.21)"… (more)

160 short pieces on French history, together they form a doorstopper of more than 1.000 pages. Of course, I've not read them all, I estimate about a 5th of them, spread throughout the book. I'm sure I'm regularly going to return to this book to read other pieces. In global, they offer a nice overview of French history, but - to my surprise - rather traditionally sticking to the classic highlights (Alesia, Clovis, Charles the Great, the War against the British, etc). There sure is a revisionistic tendency in this book (going against the tide of the hyper-nationalistic identity-crave), but not really a 'global history'. Still, worth reading. Ratingn 2.5 stars.
A more in depth-review in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3978020656… (more)