Books by Julian Jackson
Julian Jackson is Professor of Modern French History and Head of the School of History at Queen Mary University of London.
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
by Julian Jackson
🏆 Winner of the 2024 Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for nonfiction
“Pétain had been the hero of Verdun, a great figure, but he was being tried for treason for signing the armistice with the Nazi regime and being the leader of the Vichy regime in France. He was on trial for his life, accused of collusion with Nazi Germany, and the verdict wasn’t much in doubt. It’s about more than the fate of a particular person—it’s a judgment on these four years of French history. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to look back on what it had done and how it had come to this. It’s a terrible account of moral ambivalence, and what you should do when faced with a conquering army. France is asking itself what it could have done, faced with total defeat by Hitler.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden, Historian
Living in Arcadia
by Julian Jackson
This book is an important story about the prologue of sexual liberation in France. It has to do with a small and elite homosexual social club called Arcadie.
France
by Julian Jackson
One of the interesting things about this book is the way it sheds light on how the French have dealt with the events of the war. Julian Jackson explains to the British what actually happened, what the French have done since about the terrible things their government was responsible for. It’s a great book, a great work of history.
Interviews with Julian Jackson
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1
The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle
by Charles De Gaulle -
2
Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb
by François-René de Chateaubriand -
3
Notre Jeunesse
by Charles Péguy -
4
Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection
by Raymond Aron -
5
The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944
by Henry Rousso
The best books on Charles de Gaulle, recommended by Julian Jackson
The best books on Charles de Gaulle, recommended by Julian Jackson
Charles de Gaulle had ‘a certain idea of France’ which even he didn’t manage to articulate clearly. De Gaulle biographer and one of Britain’s leading historians of modern France, Julian Jackson, talks us through some key books to get a sense of France’s wartime leader and president, Charles de Gaulle.
Interviews where books by Julian Jackson were recommended
The best books on The Other France, recommended by Carmen Callil
Author and founder of Virago Press decries the absolute silence of the church during the Holocaust, and discusses five books on the “dark and murky side” the French have now “faced up to”
The best books on France in the 1960s, recommended by Richard Wolin
The author and historian Richard Wolin explains that French people in the late 1960s were desperate for a utopian political alternative.
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1
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
by Robert Darnton -
2
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
by Julian Jackson -
3
Monet: The Restless Vision
by Jackie Wullschläger -
4
Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849
by Christopher Clark -
5
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
by Nandini Das
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Susan Brigden
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Susan Brigden
If you’re looking for nonfiction with a literary sensibility and a historical bent, the books highlighted by the annual Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize are a great place to start. British historian Susan Brigden, author of Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest and one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the 2024 shortlist — from war and revolution to the splendours of Mughal India and Monet’s garden at Giverny.
