French History Quotes

“When Hitler marched
across the Rhine
To take the land of France,
La dame de fer decided,
‘Let’s make the tyrant dance.’
Let him take the land and city,
The hills and every flower,
One thing he will never have,
The elegant Eiffel Tower.
The French cut the cables,
The elevators stood still,
‘If he wants to reach the top,
Let him walk it, if he will.’
The invaders hung a swastika
The largest ever seen.
But a fresh breeze blew
And away it flew,
Never more to be seen.
They hung up a second mark,
Smaller than the first,
But a patriot climbed
With a thought in mind:
‘Never your duty shirk.’
Up the iron lady
He stealthily made his way,
Hanging the bright tricolour,
He heroically saved the day.
Then, for some strange reason,
A mystery to this day,
Hitler never climbed the tower,
On the ground he had to stay.
At last he ordered she be razed
Down to a twisted pile.
A futile attack, for still she stands
Beaming her metallic smile.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“Esprit de l’escalier. Staircase wit; the brilliant thing you should have said, coming to you only as you leave by the stairs”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Wars are senseless and cruel, fought for our power hungry emperor, not for the people.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Heard straight from Napoleon’s mouth himself,” I say. “Champagne! In victory we deserve it, and in defeat we need it.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“The more I get to know men, the more I love dogs.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights... but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man's table.”
― Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848

“Il n'est pas nécessaire de vivre.
Il est nécessaire de naviguer.”
― H. Will Bashor, JEAN-BAPTISTE CLERY: Eyewitness to Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette's Nightmare

“I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France.”
― Ashley Warlick, The Arrangement

“La grande courtisane, la petite sainte.”
― Natalie Barney

“If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence [...] but when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. This concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in its old order was so firm and wonderful - with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn't just swap it for another - you simply plummeted into the void.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“It is not the business of a Queen to be human.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“There must be no repercussions to this,” says Marie Antoinette. Her quiet voice slides through the room like the whisper of a steel blade.”
― Meghan Masterson, The Wardrobe Mistress: A Novel of Marie Antoinette

“I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.”
― Meghan Masterson, The Wardrobe Mistress: A Novel of Marie Antoinette

“[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“Motherhood had been metamorphosing Marie Antoinette into a more grounded and responsible woman. Her pregnancies had necessitated several months' absence from her usual round of gay amusements and she discovered that it was more fun to spend time with her children than it had been to play faro deep into the wee hours of the morning.
But her reputation as a frivolous, extravagant ninny and the marital issues in the royal bed had already demonized her in the eyes of the people at all levels of society.”
― Leslie Carroll, Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

“La liberté n'est pas un aliment que tous les estomacs puissent digérer sans préparation - Jacques Pierre Brissot, Le Patriote Français”
― Max Gallo, Révolution française

“The most oppressed man finds a being to oppress, his wife: she is the proletarian of the proletarian.”
― Flora Tristan

“The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.”
― Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace

“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle a highly recognized French General and Statesman was born in Lille, France on November 22, 1890. During the First World War he was wounded several times, and later taken prisoner by the Germans near Verdun. During the Second World War, during the German invasion of May 1940, he led an armored division which successfully counterattacked the German troops. Towards the end of the war he headed the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946. In 1958, de Gaulle was elected as the 18th President of France, an office he held until his resignation in 1969. As a war hero of the Allied forces and France, his memory continues to inspire the French people. Charles de Gaulle died of a ruptured artery on November 9, 1970 leaving his wife Yvonne Vendroux and two of their three children.
He is also credited with saying… “You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.”
― Captain Hank Bracker

“After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco.
In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."