French history
The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
France will always have a love-hate relationship with its heroes
The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed…
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
Paris at its most liberated: the turbulent 1940s
We all have our favourite period of Parisian history, be it the Revolution, the Belle Époque or the swinging 1960s…
Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
What took Francis Mitterrand to the top?
Of a dashing political rival, François Mitterrand once remarked: He was more intelligent than I was, he thought faster than…
