SOUVENIRS D'UNE AMBASSADE A BERLIN 1931-1938

For more than seven years, from September 1931 to October 1938, André-François Poncet was in charge of the French Embassy in the crucial period that determined Germany's fate and its separation from the rest of the world. Combining portraits of great acuity, often fierce and ironic, with accounts and masterful analyzes of key events, the book offers a sweeping narrative that is required reading for anyone interested in the history of those dark years. Having arrived when the Weimar Republic was beginning to disintegrate, the ambassador gives a vivid account of how it ended. He had a ringside seat when Hitler came on the scene and he describes the first year of his reign in which he implacably established his dictatorship. The Fuehrer then started the march towards war, violating the Treaty of Versailles before attacking Austria and Czechoslovakia (the narrative of the Munich conference is electrifying). The book ends with the story of the author's last meeting with Hitler in his 'eagle's nest', a prelude to a sharp, lucid and authoritative portrait of the German leader.
An exceptional chronicler, François-Poncet perfectly decrypts the foundations and ideology of the regime as well as the psychology of its leaders, masking its brutality for the democratic West, the better to divide it while playing masterfully on its fear of a new conflict.

After Berlin, ANDRÉ FRANÇOISPONCET held the post of ambassador to Rome from 1938 to 1940. Interned by the Gestapo for two years in the Tyrol, he would return as the first Ambassador of France to Germany in 1955. Author of a considerable body of work, he was elected to the French Academy in 1952.
JEAN-PAUL BLED is unanimously considered one of the leading French experts on Germany and Austria-Hungary. His latest book, Les Hommes d'Hitler (Hitler's men) (Perrin, 2015), was a popular success and received considerable acclaim from critics.