Mission to Civilize [antikvár]

Author's Note this is a reporter's book on a passionate subject. Reporters pick one of three roads, and they owe their readers some signposts. They can report facts, filtering out any point of view. They can write as editorialists, selecting an argument and then marshaling the facts to support it. Or they can analyze, looking at facts as they fmd them, and then saying what they think. My choice is the last. The French like to say qui aime bien châtie bien. He who loves well punishes hard. My attraction to France might qualify me for shelter under such a formula. But my purpose is neither love nor punishment. As a journalist and not a historian, I am tortured by the inability to ring up Richelieu and say, "Come on, you didn't say that?" I have borrowed liberally from historians, with careful adherence to the two-source rule and attribution where possible. For current sources, I have omitted some last names, and some names altogether. I chose their absolute candor over full identification; often, both are not possible. All characters are real. In the reporting for this book, and over the past nineteen years, I have traveled to nearly every bit of real estate that flies—or flew —the Tricolor. My interest in the French civilizing mission antedates my move to France in 1977: a French mercenary officer taught me how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew a decade earlier, in the Congo jungle. Some of the reporting has overlapped my main purpose in life as a correspondent for The Associated Press. Nothing within these