France

Guienne and Gascony were lost to the English Crown in 1453. General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall describes how Henry VIII had ambitions to regain them.

A man of letters in the German struggle against Napoleon, writes Douglas Hilt, August Wilhelm von Schlegel had many French connexions and is a renowned translator both of Shakespeare and Sanskrit writings.

In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, writes William Verity, the enterprising family of merchant bankers expanded their activities from Frankfurt to London and Paris.

Around the rising of the Paris Commune against the Provisional Government of France many myths have accumulated, writes John Roberts, which in varying versions have influenced all subsequent French politics.

‘The enemy’s resistance was beyond our powers,’ Ludendorff wrote, ‘the German Supreme Command was forced to take the extremely hard decision to abandon the attack on Amiens for good.’ The date was April 5th, 1918. By John Terraine.

John Terraine describes how, late in the First World War, the German Supreme Command launched a massive attack upon the Allied lines in France which very nearly succeeded.

Crevecoeur fought under Montcalm at Quebec in 1759 and, writes Stuart Andrews, afterwards settled in New York and Pennsylvania.

Harold Kurtz writes that the torments of a false conscience formed a secret experience that was with Talleyrand all his life.

What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?

Pre-revolutionary Paris, writes Jeffry Kaplow, was a densely populated city of over six-hundred-thousand inhabitants, where the social classes rubbed shoulders.