France

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.

D.G. Chandler offers his examination of Napoleonic strategy during the “golden years” of the First Empire.

During over half a century, writes W.J. Fishman, Blanqui virtually personified the revolutionary movement in nineteenth-century France.

The famous French revolutionary was a graduate in medicine from St Andrews University, writes W.J. Fishman, and was once a teacher at a Non-conformist College in Warrington.