The Journey of Martin Nadaud - Softcover

Tindall, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712666648 ISBN 13: 9780712666640

Publisher: Pimlico, 2000

Synopsis

An exceptional work of miniaturist history, The Journey of Martin Nadaud reconstructs the experiences of an ordinary man who rose to meet the challenges posed by extraordinary times. Through the life of a little known French political figure, Gillian Tindall recreates the world of France's master stone masons-builders of the Pantheon and the Louvre-and brings to life the turbulent atmospheres of Paris and London during the19th century.

Born into a poor family in the rocky heart of France, tramping hundreds of miles to Paris to find work at age 14, Martin Nadaud became a stone mason, a revolutionary, and a Member of Parliament. After the failure of the 1848 Revolution, he was forced into long and lonely exile in England. Nadaud found work on the building sites of Victorian London and eventually, under an assumed name, became a schoolmaster in Wimbeldon. He made his final triumphant return to his homeland in 1870, as France sat poised on the brink of humiliation, bloodshed, and rebirth.

Publicly, his was a life finally crowned with success. But on a private level Nadaud suffered griefs and losses would leave lasting marks on the man. Examining family letters and personal papers that have lain unread for the last hundred years, Gillian Tindall has constructed a moving and compelling portrait of a working man and his colorful times.

About this title

About the Author:

Gillian Tindall is the author of two enduring books on the history of places, and a study of their meaning to writers. Two of her novels deal with rural France under the Occupation, and an early novel, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, is set in Paris. Her most recent book about nineteenth-century France, Célestine, won high acclaim from critics and from the Franco-British Society, which awarded the book its prestigious Literary Prize.

From Publishers Weekly:

Martin Nadaud (1815-1898) was a prominent and self-made figure of 19th-century French politics. Nadaud's life began and ended in the Creuse, a region in central France notable for its export of stone masons on annual migrations to construct the great public buildings of Paris. Nadaud entered history at age 14 on the first of his many treks to Paris. There, in addition to learning the mason's craft, he began to educate himself about the political interests of the working classes. In this way Nadaud began the journey of the book's title, which brought him to Parliament as its first working-class member; to a long exile in England when his liberal republicanism was displaced by the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon; and again to senior positions in the French government when Louis Napoleon fell in 1870. Tindall's account is especially strong in her evocation of the physical settings of Nadaud's life: the atmospherics of a Creusois village, the emergence of Paris as a modern city, and England during the Industrial Revolution. Nadaud, however, remains elusive as a personality. In part, this is because his memoirs and surviving letters tend to veil his experience as a private man. Historian Tindall (Celestine; Countries of the Mind) extracts all she can from the materials at her disposal, but the inner character of her subject stubbornly resists disclosure. We are left with a public figure compounded out of strenuous manual labor, impressive efforts at self-education and a dedication to the well-being of workers like himself. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0712666648
• ISBN 13: 9780712666640
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320