France

John Matusiak pricks the imperial pretension of the monarch who came to the throne 500 years ago

The tactics adopted by the Gallic leader Vercingetorix to resist Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul played into Roman hands.

Henry II was fatally injured by the Count of Montgomery during a jousting tournament. He died on July 10th, 1559.

Richard Cavendish looks back at the Capetian monarch, crowned aged seven, on 23 May 1059.

Mark Bryant on how French cartoonists of the 1870s responded to national humiliation at the hands of a beligerent Prussia.

The ascetic French philosopher Simone Weil spent the last months of her short life exiled in London working for de Gaulle’s Free French. But, her strange, austere vision for a France reborn after the tragedy of the Second World War was very different from that of the country’s future president.

Already rocked by defeats in the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV’s France faced economic meltdown as the chaotic nature of its finances became apparent. Guy Rowlands discovers striking parallels with the current credit crunch as he charts the crisis that was to lead, ultimately, to the French Revolution.

In his twenties, Philippe Maurice was sentenced to death by guillotine for murdering a policeman. Saved by a change of government, he transformed himself through prison study into one of France’s leading medieval historians. William Smith reports.

Beautiful, clever and determined, Yolande of Aragon was at the heart of the diplomatic and military campaigns that united 15th-century France. Margaret L. Kekewich charts her career.

Terry Brown explores the arborial legacy of a penny-pinching duke.