the French revolution

The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’

13 July 2024 9:00 am

Matthew Lockwood traces Britain’s long history as a haven for refugees and argues that the nation has benefitted greatly over the centuries as a result

Is it an exaggeration to talk of a ‘gender war’?

5 February 2022 9:00 am

According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…

The men of blood get their comeuppance in Revolutionary France

28 August 2021 9:00 am

Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…

Not so dryasdust: how 18th-century antiquarians proved the first ‘modern’ historians

3 July 2021 9:00 am

Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…

The life and loves of Mary Wollstonecraft

9 January 2021 9:00 am

Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was

insects

Insects of the hour

20 June 2020 4:20 am

Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a…

William Sitwell’s history of eating out reminds us painfully of what we’re missing

9 May 2020 9:00 am

In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…

The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France

6 July 2019 9:00 am

I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…

Marat was assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday in 1793. Credit Getty Images

Horrors of the house of wax: Little, by Edward Carey, reviewed

3 November 2018 9:00 am

The reader of Edward Carey’s Little must have a tender heart and a strong stomach. You will weep, you will…

A butterfly-powered parachute gently ridicules the French obsession with flight in the late 18th century, illustrated in Gaston Tissandier’s Histoire des ballons et des aéronautes célèbres: 1783–1800

Steve Jones’s chaotic theory of history

7 May 2016 9:00 am

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…

To the ends of the earth — but not back

7 November 2015 9:00 am

What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing…

France’s favourite bedtime story: a sanitised version of the French Revolution

18 July 2015 9:00 am

The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…

James Gillray’s ‘Maniac Ravings or Little Boney in a Strong Fit’ (published 24 May 1803). From Bonaparte and the British: Prints and Propaganda in the Age of Napoleon by Tim Clayton and Sheila O’Connell (The British Museum, £25, pp. 246, ISBN 9780714126937). The book accompanies an exhibition at the British Museum until 16 August

Man of destiny: Napoleon was always convinced he was the chosen one

16 May 2015 9:00 am

It is almost inconceivable that there could be a more densely detailed book about Napoleon than this — 800 crowded…

When the money ran out, so did the idealism in post-Revolutionary France

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr

Jacques-Louis David, emboldened by Madame Vigée Le Brun, included a smiling display of teeth in his portrait of Madame de Sériziat (1795)

How the smile came to Paris (briefly)

13 December 2014 9:00 am

In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject…

This thriller is as good as anything by Hilary Mantel

30 August 2014 9:00 am

A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were…

Edmund Burke (left) and Thomas Paine, caricatured by Gillray and Cruickshank respectively

Where did the Right and the Left come from? 

15 February 2014 9:00 am

What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…