France

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.

Tony Chafer examines the paradoxes and complexities that underlie belated recognition of the contribution of African soldiers to the liberation of France in 1944.

Tobias Grey meets the journalist who was at Charles de Gaulle’s side for twenty-six years.

Robert Gildea describes a new Europe-wide project to investigate the impact of 1968 and its sometimes bitter legacy.