France

The decade before the Nazi occupation was a period of bitter division in France, raising questions about the nature of French fascism.

Widespread fever followed military sloth, writes Antony Brett-James, and the fiasco on Walcheren brought down the tottering British Government.

Though he didn't invent it, the guillotine was named for a French doctor, who died on 26 March 1814.

Throughout the Terror in 1793-94, writes Vera Watson, the British Government were being supplied with detailed reports on French Cabinet meetings. Who was the Spy among the thirteen members of the Committee of Public Safety?

During 1870-1871, the France of the Second Empire underwent one of those catastrophes from which nations strangely re-arise to greatness.

At the crisis of the battle Napoleon withheld the Imperial Guard, writes Michael Barthorp, only to commit it piecemeal at a later stage to its first and last defeat.

Joanna Richardson describes how after he had moved to Paris, Jacques Offenbach, the son of a cantor at the synagogue in Cologne, created an operatic epitome of the Second Empire.

For some sixty years during the eighteenth century, writes Sarah Searight, Louisiana was a colony owing allegiance to the King of France.

General and trooper alike, Napoleon's cavalry brought a superb panache to the drab business of war. James Lunt describes how, for fifteen years, there was “hardly a village in Europe between Moscow and Madrid” through which these dashing horsemen did not ride.

Napoleon’s attempt to form a second and more liberal empire was, like Waterloo, a close-run thing and “came nearer to success than is usually allowed.”