This astute man was born in 1767, in Extremadura, a well-named rocky wilderness bordering Portugal, with the vastness of Andalucía to the south. As a very young man…
Category: French History
The case of Alfred Dreyfus
Dreyfus was born into a Jewish family in France in 1859. The fact of his Jewishness was to prove a main factor in his future. He chose the…
The Austro-Prussian War (1866)
Though it has been put into the shadow by the Franco-Prussian War, this was one of the most important conflicts in the 19th century, because it overturned the…
Three battles at Ypres (1914, 1915 & 1917)
Ypres is a place in Belgium, known mainly by Great War enthusiasts who are taken on guided tours. In October and November of the first year of the…
What is the ‘Code Napoléon?
Napoleon Bonaparte gave his name to the civil code of 1804. Subsequent battles – Trafalgar, Waterloo etc. did not affect the Emperor’s Code, which has influenced existing…
François P. G. Guizot
This French Protestant intellectual and statesman was born in 1787; he was an infant when the revolutionaries guillotined his father during The Great Terror (q.v.). When the Revolution…
Louis Philippe, King of the French
He was a descendant of Louis XIII (the king in The Three Musketeers), and the eldest son of the Duke of Orléans. Both father and son openly supported…
The French Radical Republic (1899 – 1940)
The essential difference between a (strictly) democratic republic and a monarchy is that the first is a government elected by people who have the correct age and the…
How did the Tudors do it?
The ‘gentry’ in English history were and are middle to upper class folk, untitled except for the odd baronet or hastily-dubbed knight, owning land, serving as magistrates, being…
The revolutionary plot of M. Babeuf
Gracchus Babeuf was one of the first communists in history, not counting almost mythical characters such as such as Spartacus. He was born the son of a poor…