France

France, Burgundy and England

'Gaul in three parts' - Charles Giry-Deloison discusses how new scholarship is affecting our view of a fifteenth-century triangle of power and diplomacy in Northern Europe.

Vichy: Pétain’s Hollow Crown

In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.

Stalin and de Gaulle

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.

The Assassination of Henry III of France

'For sale, our tyrant King! Five shillings and you can string him up'. Mark Greengrass probes the motives behind and reaction to the murder of France's last Valois monarch.

Carry on Cricket - The Duke of Dorset's 1789 Tour

An English cricket team set out on a goodwill visit to Paris in the turbulent summer of 1789. But the proposed tour never took place. Overtaken by events, it turned back at Dover. John Goulstone and Michael Swanton compile the following account from broadsheets and from correspondence, between certain of the personalities involved.

The Abortive Crusade

To export the Revolution's benefits across Europe was the early hope of the French - but the unenthusiastic response from the liberated peoples rapidly soured the vision. Tim Blanning chronicles that descent from optimism to realpolitik.

Voila La Citoyenne

Olwen Hufton chronicles the varied but influential voices of feminine awareness that intervened, often decisively and despite male misgivings, in the course of the Revolution.

Women Aviators in Pre-War France

In the years after the First World War, aviation became the most exciting form of transport, the spirit of a new age; but for French women, as Sian Reynolds explains, it was also a paradigm of their struggle for equality.