France

The March Offensive, 1918: Part I

John Terraine describes how, late in the First World War, the German Supreme Command launched a massive attack upon the Allied lines in France which very nearly succeeded.

Talleyrand, Part II

Harold Kurtz writes that the torments of a false conscience formed a secret experience that was with Talleyrand all his life.

Talleyrand, Part I

What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?

The Urban Environment

Pre-revolutionary Paris, writes Jeffry Kaplow, was a densely populated city of over six-hundred-thousand inhabitants, where the social classes rubbed shoulders.

Jean-Paul Marat

The famous French revolutionary was a graduate in medicine from St Andrews University, writes W.J. Fishman, and was once a teacher at a Non-conformist College in Warrington.

Jacobins in Africa

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.