France

This is the story of a thousand years, a must-listen narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury, and madness....

An NPR Best Book of 2017 Heiress to the nearly forty-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the fourteenth wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At ninety-four, she was embroiled in what has...

“A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their...

In the tumultuous world of revolutionary France, the enigmatic diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord survived–and shaped–five regimes.

The French and Indian War was the world's first truly global conflict....

From the bestselling author of The Storm Before the Storm and host of the Revolutions podcast comes the thrilling story of the Marquis de Lafayette’s lifelong quest to defend the principles of liberty and equality Few in history can match the revolutionary career of the Marquis de Lafayette...

From the moment Peter Mayle and his wife, Jennie, uprooted their lives in England and crossed the Channel permanently, they never looked back. Here the beloved author of A Year in Provence pays tribute to the most endearing and enduring aspects of his life in France—the charming and indelible...

This is the incredible true story of the greatest spy you’ve never heard of - as told to the author by the woman herself. At the outbreak of World War Two, Nancy Wake’s glamorous life in the South of France seemed far removed from the fighting....

The #1 bestseller that tells the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned, told by America’s master historian, David McCullough. Not all pioneers...

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE The captivating, deeply reported true story of how one of the most notorious novels ever written—Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom—landed at the heart of one of the biggest scams in modern literary history. “Reading The Curse of the Marquis de Sade...

Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in 18th-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it....

Public City/Public Sex examines how the notion that male sexual desire required suitable outlets shaped urban policing and development. Ross traces the struggle to control sex in public....

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941. Could it be that the Germans were using a sophisticated form of radar to direct their night fighters and anti-aircraft guns at the British bombers? British aerial reconnaissance discovered what seemed to be...

Brought to you by Penguin. In six weeks in 1940, France was over-run by German troops and surrendered. One junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his compatriots over the BBC, urging them to rally to him in London. At that moment...

The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written...

The classic account of the Allied invasion of Normandy....

In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society....

While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the...

The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) dominated life in England and France for well over a century. It became the defining feature of existence for generations. This sweeping book is the first to tell the human story of the longest military conflict in history. Historian David Green focuses on the...

In December 1943, with the rising realization that the Allies are planning to invade Fortress Europe, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is assigned the title of General Inspector for the Atlantic Wall. His mission is to assess their readiness....

The French Revolution is a time of history made familiar from Dickens, Baroness Orczy, and Tolstoy, as well as the legends of let them eat cake, and tricolors....

Crécy is a story of past and present. It is a new history of one of the most important battles of the Middle Ages: the battle of Crécy, in which the outnumbered English under King Edward III won a decisive victory over the French and changed the course of the Hundred Years War....

Written in the form of a letter to a Frenchman, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is an impassioned attack on the French Revolution and its hasty destruction of the Church, the old elites, and the Crown....

The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Victor Davis Hanson argues that neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual....