France

Paris was flooded with Eau de Cologne during the early years of Napoleon’s rule. Everyone was using it and everyone was selling it.

Jean Calas was sentenced to be broken on the wheel in front of the cathedral in Toulouse, on 10 March 1762.

It was not easy to be the second son. The younger brothers of the French kings could choose either to rebel or reconcile, but neither option was straightforward.

From alliances, to open warfare; from tense meetings on bridges, to collective mourning at family funerals: French and English royalty were united by marriage and divided by war.

During the Franco-Prussian War a British wine merchant was imprisoned in Cologne, accused of being a spy. The public clamoured for the government to secure his release, but wartime diplomacy was not so straightforward. 

Josephine Baker’s induction into the Pantheon is both a cause for celebration and a prompt to explore France’s progressive values.

The extraordinary insurrections of Gustave Paul Cluseret.

The recently discovered chronicle of an opinionated, elderly aristocrat provides a vivid portrayal of Paris during the most febrile days of the French Revolution.

Revolutionary soldier or tyrannical emperor? The question is as pertinent now as when Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on remote Saint Helena in 1821.