num_pages: 384
description: The bestselling author of Catherine de Medici returns to sixteenth-century Europe in this evocative and entertaining biography that recreates a remarkable era of French history and brings to life a great monarchFrancis Iwho turned France into a great nation. Catherine de Medicis father-in-law King Francis of France was the perfect Renaissance knight the movements exemplar and its Gallic interpreter. An aesthete diplomat par excellence and contemporary of Machiavelli Francis was the founder of modern France whose sheer force of will and personality molded his kingdom into the first European superpower. Arguably the man who introduced the Renaissance to France Francis was also the prototype Frenchmana national identity was modeled on his character. So great was his stamp that few countries even now are quite so robustly patriotic as is France. Yet as Leonie Frieda reveals Francis did not always live up to his ideal; a man of grand passions and vision he was also a flawed husband father lover and king. With access to private archives that have never been used in a study of Francis I Frieda explores the life of a man who was the most human of the monarchs of the periodand yet remains the most elusive.
language: English
title: Francis I: The Maker of Modern France
publisher: Harper