A Brief History of France

I read about half of it. The writing itself is pretty mediocre. I was mostly interested in the medieval history stuff which is only ~50 pages out of a 330-page book. Half of this book is set after the French Revolution which I do not particularly care about, thus I decided to finish just before the French Revolution started.

It was a strange book at times. It attempted to argue that modern ideas of capitalism, identity and nation could be present in the 1500s which I disagree with. These are modern terms for modern concepts; attempting to graft these modern concepts onto the past is just anachronistic. It feels that most of the interest was placed in modern history and not in medieval history.

Do I recommend it? Not really. I read it to see if I was interested in medieval French history and I am so I suppose I got that but I do not think I needed to read half a book for that, I could have been fine if I read a Wikipedia article most likely. It is not bad, just not a great use of time.