The traditions of organized statehood in the countries of French West Africa stretch back for some fifteen centuries. During the past sixty years, writes Basil Davidson, French influence has greatly strengthened the feeling of federal community that inspires many of the newly evolving republics of the Western Sudan and the Guinea coast.
During the American War of Independence, writes T.H. McGuffie, Gibraltar was saved by an intrepid Commander from Franco-Spanish conquest.
Hotman and Bodin were among those who laid down new lines of political thought in Europe, writes J.H.M. Salmon.
Bela Menczer describes the various intellectual and artistic personalities who conspired to produce the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in 1867.
Sometimes admired, even occasionally popular; John Roberts describes how Georges Clemenceau towered over French political life for nearly half a century.
The revolutionary upheaval that brought down Louis-Philippe swept into power a famous French Romantic poet. Gordon Wright describes how Lamartine acquitted himself with courage and energy; but his fall was as swift and sudden as his rise.
J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.
During the years before the French Revolution, writes D.M. Walmsley, Mesmer’s treatment of patients by 'animal magnetism' in some ways foreshadowed the methods of modern pyschiatry.
In 1680, writes Joanna Richardson, the mistress of Louis XIV was concerned in a scandal that involved both poisoning and black magic.
Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.
