France

Mark Bryant admires a Russian artist whose lampoons of Napoleon inspired some notable British caricaturists.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, France was riven by political division as extremes of left and right vied for power. Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle tell the tragic and mysterious story of Laetitia Toureaux, a young woman swept up in the violent passions of the time.

Graham Goodlad examines the controverisal reputation of Napoleon Bonaparte as a military commander.

The Emperor divorced his first wife on December 14th, 1809.

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.