Showing titles in France

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than 20 years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory.

The Tour de France is the greatest bike race in the world, but it began as a humble promotional gimmick for a floundering newspaper. More than 100 years later, the Tour still captivates the world and is broadcast to over 180 countries. How did a few men looking for some way to save their struggling business become masters of a giant, successful enterprise? Les Woodland tells the inside story of the Tour de France through the prism of the men who started it, and those who now run it.

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach’s Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends.

When we think of France we often evoke images of fine food and wine, the elegant boulevards of Paris, the chic beaches of St Tropez. Yet, as the largest country in Europe, it is a place of huge diversity. The idea of 'Frenchness' emerged from over 2,000 years of history and it is a riveting story from Roman conquest to the present day.

Launched in the 1880s by the first baron, the Empain industrial empire spread from Belgium and France to span more than a dozen countries. When Baron Édouard-Jean “Wado” Empain took over, he further expanded the company, became a key player in France’s nuclear sector, and, by the mid-1970s, was one of the country’s most powerful business leaders - a self-described “master of the universe”. Wado’s vertiginous rise caught the eye of Alain Cailloll, a small-time gangster who had grown up in a wealthy family before embracing a life of crime.

Full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating, the first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair. Its riders included characters like Maurice "The White Bulldog" Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman whose parents were said to have swapped him for a round of cheese in order to smuggle him into France as a 14-year-old; and Hippolyte Aucouturier, who, with his jersey of horizontal stripes and handlebar moustache, looked like the villain from a Buster Keaton movie.

Emerging from France's catastrophic 1940 defeat like a bedraggled and rather sinister phoenix, the French State – better known to history as Vichy France or the Vichy Regime after its spa-town capital, stands in history as a unique and bizarre creation of German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's European conquests. A patchwork of paradoxes and contradictions, the Vichy Regime maintained a quasi-independent French nation for some time after the Third Reich invasion.

The French Revolutionary Wars catapulted Britain into a conflict against a new enemy: Republican France. Britain relied on the Royal Navy to protect its shores and empire, but as radical ideas about rights and liberty spread across the globe, it could not prevent the spirit of revolution from reaching its ships. In this insightful history, James Davey tells the story of Britain's Royal Navy across the turbulent 1790s. As resistance and rebellion swept through the fleets, the navy itself became a political battleground.

The year 1815 marked the beginning of a time of repression in Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated at Waterloo and sent to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, the torrent of blood unleashed by the French Revolution had finally run dry, and the dispossessed princes were returning to their thrones. Bourbon King Louis XVIII returned to Paris, King Ferdinand VII was restored in Madrid, and the numerous petty princes of Germany and Italy took back power in their localities.

During the 17th century, the Netherlands, despite having only 1.5 million people in 1600, became a global maritime and trading power. By contrast, France at the time had 20 million people, Spain had eight million, and England had five million. Nevertheless, Amsterdam became one of the most important urban centers in the world and the location of the world’s first stock market, and Dutch merchant ships and pirates plied the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean.

French Indochina: The History and Legacy of the French Empire’s Colonialism in Southeast Asia analyzes the colonization of Southeast Asia and what happened as a result of the decolonization. You will learn about the French in Southeast Asia like never before.

In many ways it is fitting that Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) is one of the best known figures of the French Revolution, if not its most famous. The early years of the Revolution were fueled by Enlightenment ideals, seeking the social overthrow of the caste system that gave the royalty and aristocracy decisive advantages over the lower classes.

On October 2, 1918, Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey led the 77th Division in a successful attack on German defenses in the Argonne Forest of northeastern France. His unit, comprised of men of a wide mix of ethnic backgrounds from New York City and the western states, was not a battalion nor was it ever "lost", but once a newspaper editor applied the term "lost battalion" to the episode, it stuck.

Juni 1940: Hitlers Wehrmacht hat Frankreich besiegt. Die Gestapo fahndet nach Heinrich Mann und Lion Feuchtwanger, nach Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel und unzähligen anderen, die in Frankreich seit 1933 Asyl gefunden haben. Sie alle müssen fliehen und geraten schließlich nach Marseille, um von dort einen Weg in die Freiheit zu suchen. Derweil riskiert der Amerikaner Varian Fry sein Leben, um die Verfolgten außer Landes zu schmuggeln. Szenisch dicht erzählt Uwe Wittstock die aufwühlende Geschichte ihrer Flucht unter tödlichen Gefahren, von unfassbarem Mut und größter Verzweiflung, von trotziger Hoffnung und Mitmenschlichkeit in düsterer Zeit.

Who was the first fascist? Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Morès was the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he took France by storm with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Morès invoked the fasces – the ancient Roman bundle of wooden rods – to symbolize the society he wished to create: a union of all social classes against their enemy, the Jews. In The First Fascist, award-winning historian Sergio Luzzatto explores the untold story of the rise and fall of the Marquis as well as his ominous legacy.

Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska's extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century's most devastating events.

La Seconde Guerre mondiale a été menée derrière les lignes ennemies par une armée du silence. Cette armée, c'est celle des réseaux de Résistance pilotés par les services secrets de la France libre et des Alliés. Leurs missions : recueil et transmission de renseignements, émissions radio clandestines, opérations secrètes et sabotages. Ces réseaux (Comète, Alliance, Saint-Jacques…) sont des acteurs majeurs de la victoire finale contre l'oppression nazie et fasciste. Leurs secrets ont été conservés dans des archives, ouvertes récemment.

Voici le livre de Loïc Prigent que tout le monde attendait : son histoire de la mode. Dans ce récit savant, personnel et aussi irrésistible que l'achat d'un vêtement superflu et donc indispensable, il dévoile la couture, du XIXe siècle à l'ouverture de la première boutique de Gabrielle Chanel en 1913. Des premiers grands couturiers (Worth) et des premières acheteuses stars (l'impératrice Eugénie) à l'industrie qui s'en mêle et aux débuts de la commercialisation de masse, nous découvrons les dessus et les dessous de cette folie française.

Frankreich in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts – es ist die Zeit von großen Veränderungen, die nach der Revolution von 1789 zu einer stürmischen wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung und einer tiefgreifenden sozialen Umschichtung führten. Gabriel Lambert ist ein Mann mit einer besonderen Fähigkeit und einem großen Wunsch: er kann die Feder grandios führen, er will unbedingt nach Paris. Henri de Faverne ist ein Mann mit zwei dunklen Geheimnissen – eines über seine Herkunft, das andere über seinen Reichtum. Welches ist die Beziehung zwischen diesen beiden Männern?