French history
Versailles’s role as a palace of science
The vast seat of Bourbon power also doubled as a laboratory for experiments in astronomy, hydraulics, engineering, ballooning, medicine, mathematics and cartography
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
The long and the short and the tall
The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed…
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
Paris at its most liberated: the turbulent 1940s
We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s…
Everything is merde
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
A dogged opportunist
Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than…
