France

The young men who surrounded the French king have been wrongly dismissed by some historians as effeminate, inconsequential sycophants. 

In the year 1765 Dr. Johnson’s future biographer set out on his journey to Corsica.

During the nineteenth century French taste reflected the social and political trends of the period; but it was also much influenced, writes Brian Reade,  by the work of English craftsmen.

The canal in Languedoc, between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean, was one of the remarkable achievements of Louis XIV’s reign, writes Roger Pilkington.

Cross-Channel relations were cordial during the reign of the Emperor Napoleon III, writes Joanna Richardson.

“How different were our feelings” wrote a Scottish sergeant, “from many of our countrymen at home, whose ideas of the French character were drawn from servile newspapers and caricatures in print shops.”

J.L. Carr describes how, in revolutionary France, the debonair delights of civilization were replaced by a more virtuous albeit often stale cultural climate.

In the reign of Francis I, writes Desmond Seward, the first modern and last medieval poet attended the French court.

John Terraine studies the effects of Napoleonic doctrine upon the leadership of mass armies in the Industrial Age.

‘Why not seize Malta?’ Napoleon asked Talleyrand, ‘We could be masters of the Mediterranean’. By Christopher Hibbert.