Curious this book, it starts on a very personal account of the childhood of the author and from the middle of the book when the author at Sèvres between Communist and becomes the book takes a very impersonal and it is a turn analysis historian of the Revolution, the Republic, and their relationships with the peculiarities of the French provinces, particularly with Britain. I preferred the first half of the book which recounts her childhood Ozouf particulière.Orpheline a fairly militant Breton idealize it seems like every child who has not known a parent, lives cloistered in the school where teaches his mother, teacher, between this one and his grandmother. Oddly enough, especially for a Breton, it seems to have other family (or brothers or sisters or cousins or aunts, etc.) and therefore the child completely isolated, without friends his age, between two high taciturn women does not seem to be "funny", lives in books. Ozouf evokes all the books she read child, a sacred cocktail classics, militant books, storybooks Irish Celts, etc. Landscapes, adventures, heroes she finds all the books in real life there is nothing that the classroom. His childhood seems to me very sad, she seems to have missed singularly heat and emotions. All this is very "intellectual", was this really how the little Mona spent her childhood? On relations between Britain and the Britons, with France nothing new. And I'm not sure I really understood his views about language and "communitarianism".
