France

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.”

Joanna Richardson describes how the last Emperor of the French died at Chislehurst, Kent; his son was killed in the British Zulu war.

F.J. Hebbert and G.A. Rothrock introduce the greatest military engineer of his age, Vauban, who served Louis XIV with unflagging devotion.

William Allan introduces the Napoleonic military genius; in Napier’s words, ‘the best loved Frenchman England ever fought’.

After the dismissal of popular ministers in 1792, writes M.J. Sydenham, a widespread conviction that the King was bent on thwarting the Revolution led to the invasion of his palace by the Parisian mob.

N.M. Sutherland describes how two Swiss brothers, studying medicine at Montpellier, recorded the tenor of life in sixteenth century Southwestern France.

Thomas Pakenham describes the ill-fated but remarkable efforts of a tiny French naval expedition to help conquer Ireland for the rebels during the 1798 Rising.

Written by a master, Mérimée declared, history was ‘as much superior to all novels and all plays as a diamond is to paste’. By A.W. Raitt.