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£14.99
Published
25 March 2025
Hardback
978-1-913083-30-4
Ebook
978-1-913083-31-1
Press Release
Coming soon.
By Colin Jones:

 

From ‘glorious defeat’ in 52 BCE at the hands of Julius Caesar to the somewhat unexpected triumph of the 2024 Paris Olympics, The Shortest History of France charts more than two millennia of eventful and surprising history.

Climate and the colonies, religion and the economy, intellectuals and immigrants, sans culottes and gilets jaunes… Colin Jones expertly navigates the territory, showing that the nation’s glories owe as much to its openness to outside influence as to any innate genius. This is a timely, accessible and eye-opening history of our nearest neighbour.

Old Street Publishing The Shortest History of France

From ‘glorious defeat’ in 52 BCE at the hands of Julius Caesar to the somewhat unexpected triumph of the 2024 Paris Olympics, The Shortest History of France charts more than two millennia of eventful and surprising history.

Climate and the colonies, religion and the economy, intellectuals and immigrants, sans culottes and gilets jaunes… Colin Jones expertly navigates the territory, showing that the nation’s glories owe as much to its openness to outside influence as to any innate genius. This is a timely, accessible and eye-opening history of our nearest neighbour.

 14.99
 
 

‘Vital, incisive, revelatory’
—Hilary Mantel on The Fall of Robespierre

 
 
  • ‘A brilliant hour-by-hour recreation … Jones has a marvellous eye for colour’
    —Dominic Sandbrook on The Fall of Robespierre
  • ‘Enthralling, incisively argued … a thrilling moment-by moment examination’
    —Financial Times on The Fall of Robespierre
  • ‘The story of the Ninth of Thermidor has been told many times, but never so well as in Colin Jones’s The Fall of Robespierre’
    —The New York Review
  • ‘Intelligent, unpretentious and even mischievous’
    —Times Literary Supplement on The Smile Revolution
  • ‘Gripping, superbly researched, strikingly original’
    —Literary Review on The Fall of Robespierre
 
 
Colin Jones

COLIN JONES is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Queen Mary University, London. His books include The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize in 2021), Paris: Biography of a City (winner of the Enid MacLeod Prize) and The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris.