50 stories set here.
Franz Reichelt, an Austrian-born Parisian tailor, designed a wearable parachute suit and obtained permission to test it from the Eiffel Tower — with a dummy. On the morning of 4 February 1912, before Pathé news cameras, he jumped himself. The suit failed and he fell 57 metres to his death.
Read the story →Charles Martel's Frankish army stopped the Umayyad Caliphate's northward raid into Gaul at a battle south of Tours on a date in October 732 CE. The Umayyad general Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi was killed. The Umayyad force withdrew south overnight; Martel chose not to pursue. The battle ended Umayyad ambitions of further northward expansion. The strategic significance has been disputed since the 19th century.
Read the story →The Bayeux Tapestry is a 70-metre embroidered cloth strip, approximately 50 cm tall, depicting the 1066 Norman conquest of England in 58 narrative scenes. It was almost certainly produced in southern England in the 1070s for the Norman bishop Odo of Bayeux. It has been displayed at Bayeux Cathedral or its successor museum since at least 1476. It is one of the most important surviving 11th-century European narrative artworks.
Read the story →Jean-François Champollion announced his decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script on 22 September 1822 — the famous *Lettre à M. Dacier*. He had been working on the problem for fourteen years. He reportedly fainted on the day of the breakthrough and was bedridden for five days. He died ten years later, aged 41.
Read the story →Approximately 156,000 Allied troops landed across five Normandy beaches on the morning of 6 June 1944 — D-Day. Allied casualties on the day were approximately 10,000 with 4,414 confirmed killed. Paris was liberated on 25 August. Germany surrendered eleven months later.
Read the story →Émile Zola's letter J'Accuse...! appeared on the front page of the Paris newspaper L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, naming seven French Army officers and accusing them of the deliberate frame-up of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The print run was 300,000 copies — ten times the paper's normal sale. Zola was convicted of libel within a month and fled to England. The letter is conventionally the founding document of the modern public intellectual.
Read the story →Émilie du Châtelet's French translation and mathematical commentary on Newton's *Principia* was completed in summer 1749 while she was carrying a fourth child at age 42. She finished the manuscript at Lunéville on 1 September 1749, gave birth on 4 September, and died of puerperal fever on 10 September. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, remained the standard French Newton until the 20th century.
Read the story →A Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille fortress prison on 14 July 1789. Bernard-René de Launay surrendered after the outer gates fell. The crowd released seven inmates and killed the governor. The date became the French national holiday in 1880.
Read the story →Henry V's English army of approximately 8,000 men defeated a French army of approximately 25,000 at Agincourt on 25 October 1415. The English longbow inflicted heavy casualties on the French heavy cavalry crossing a narrow, deeply muddy field. Henry ordered the killing of approximately 1,500 French prisoners during the battle. The conventional French casualty estimate is 6,000-10,000 dead against fewer than 500 English.
Read the story →Joan of Arc was tried for heresy at Rouen between 9 January and 30 May 1431 by a Church court under the Bishop of Beauvais Pierre Cauchon, who was on the English military payroll. Seventy specific articles were reduced to twelve and then to one — relapse into men's clothing. She was burned at the stake in the Vieux-Marché on 30 May 1431. The verdict was overturned in 1456 by the same Church.
Read the story →Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911. She died of aplastic anaemia at 66 in 1934 — a substantial direct consequence of forty years of unprotected exposure to the radium and polonium she had isolated. Her laboratory notebooks remain radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
Read the story →Margaretha Geertruida Zelle — performing as Mata Hari — was a 41-year-old Dutch exotic dancer convicted of espionage for Germany by a French court martial in July 1917 and executed by firing squad at Vincennes on 15 October 1917. The post-war access to the French and German intelligence archives substantially weakens the original espionage case against her.
Read the story →The Paris Commune ruled the French capital from 18 March to 28 May 1871. It was established after the Franco-Prussian War defeat and the bourgeois Versailles government's attempt to disarm Paris. The Versailles army retook the city in the Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week") of 21-28 May 1871, killing approximately 10,000-15,000 Communards in street fighting and executions.
Read the story →A black Mercedes-Benz S280 carrying Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris at 00:23 on 31 August 1997. Fayed and Paul died at the scene; Diana died at La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 04:00. The 2008 British inquest jury verdict was unlawful killing through the gross negligence of Paul and of the pursuing paparazzi.
Read the story →The Reign of Terror ran from 5 September 1793 to 27 July 1794. The Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre executed about 17,000 people for political offences. About 10,000 more died in prison without sentence. Robespierre himself was guillotined on 28 July 1794.
Read the story →The British Fourth Army attacked German positions along an 18-mile front in northern France on the morning of 1 July 1916. Approximately 57,470 British soldiers became casualties on the first day — 19,240 killed, 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing, 585 captured. It is the bloodiest single day in British military history. The Battle of the Somme continued for four and a half more months.
Read the story →Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce was Bishop of Marseille from 1709 to 1755. He refused to leave the city during the 1720 plague, administered last rites at street corners, organised parish-by-parish burial details, and substantially defined the visible Catholic authority during the worst summer months. The French Catholic tradition substantially canonised him in popular memory.
Read the story →Clement VI had spent the worst weeks of the 1348 Avignon plague seated continuously between two large fires on the medical advice of his personal physician Guy de Chauliac. The fires worked, probably by the convection currents they generated keeping plague-carrying air away from the papal chair. Clement died of natural causes in December 1352, aged about 61.
Read the story →Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been convicted of treason on 22 December 1894. His public military degradation took place at the École Militaire in Paris on the morning of 5 January 1895 in front of approximately 4,000 spectators. His epaulettes were torn off, his sabre broken, his uniform stripes cut. The watching crowd shouted antisemitic slogans. He shouted that he was innocent.
Read the story →Marguerite Steinheil was 39 years old and the principal mistress of French President Félix Faure when Faure suffered a fatal stroke during a sexual encounter at the Élysée Palace on 16 February 1899. Ten years later she was tried for the murder of her husband and mother and was acquitted.
Read the story →Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg alley around 14 July 1518 and began dancing alone, silently, for no announced reason. She did not stop. Within a week thirty others had joined her. Within a month approximately four hundred people were dancing involuntarily through the city. Several died. She is the index case of the most-documented dancing plague in European history.
Read the story →Matteo Giovannetti of Viterbo was the principal painter at the Palais des Papes at Avignon from 1343 to 1367. His surviving frescoes — in the Saint-Martial chapel, the Saint-Jean chapel, and the audience hall — are the best-preserved examples of mid-14th-century Italian fresco work anywhere in Europe.
Read the story →A Belgian refrigerated truck carrying flour and margarine caught fire approximately 6 km into the Mont Blanc road tunnel on the morning of 24 March 1999. The 12 km tunnel had no ventilated emergency-refuge shelters and no continuous fire-suppression system. The fire burned for 53 hours at temperatures reaching 1,000°C. Thirty-nine people died.
Read the story →The Mur de la peste was a dry-stone wall approximately 27 km long, with guard posts at 100-metre intervals, built across the limestone garrigue of the Comtat Venaissin between September 1720 and August 1721. It enforced the cordon sanitaire that kept the Marseille plague from spreading north into the French interior.
Read the story →The Chevalier Nicolas Roze organised the clearing of approximately 1,200 plague corpses from the Esplanade de la Tourette at Marseille in September 1720. He used condemned galley convicts as labour, promising their freedom if they survived. Eight of his hundred labourers did.
Read the story →Voltaire wrote the *Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne* in mid-November 1755 — three weeks after the earthquake — as a direct philosophical attack on the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism. Rousseau answered with a long defence in August 1756. The argument substantially defined the French Enlightenment's theological position for the next generation.
Read the story →Guy de Chauliac served as personal physician to Popes Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V at Avignon between 1342 and 1370. His *Chirurgia Magna* (1363) was the dominant European surgical textbook from the 14th century to the 17th — and contained the most detailed eyewitness account of the 1348 Black Death by a doctor who survived it.
Read the story →A Paris roofing contractor named Henri Buronfosse reportedly confessed on his deathbed in 1927 that he and an unnamed accomplice had deliberately blocked the chimney of Émile Zola's apartment on the night of 28 September 1902, causing the carbon-monoxide poisoning that killed the novelist. The confession was relayed through a Catholic priest and was not published until 1953.
Read the story →The Palais des Papes at Avignon was the residence of the seven Avignon popes between 1335 and 1377. It is the largest Gothic palace in Europe — about 15,000 square metres of floor area, with walls up to 50 metres tall. The French Revolution turned it into a barracks. Most of the original interior was lost.
Read the story →Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was the German military attaché at the Paris embassy from 1891 to 1897. The bordereau — the handwritten memorandum that produced the original 1894 Dreyfus treason conviction — had been retrieved from his embassy wastepaper basket by the French intelligence service through its routine cleaning-staff espionage operation. He spent the rest of his life refusing to comment.
Read the story →Alexandrine Zola was sleeping next to Émile when the chimney filled their Paris bedroom with carbon monoxide on the night of 28 September 1902. She woke up. He did not. She lived another twenty-three years, becoming the principal custodian of his literary estate and an unexpectedly forceful figure in the post-Affair Dreyfusard movement.
Read the story →Anatole France delivered the funeral oration for Émile Zola at Montmartre Cemetery on 5 October 1902. His phrase that Zola had been "a moment of the human conscience" became one of the most quoted lines in French public memory. France was effectively shunned by the antisemitic faction of the Académie française for the next decade.
Read the story →The Great Western Schism (1378–1417) followed directly from the seventy-year Avignon papacy. Rival lines of popes at Rome and Avignon (and later at Pisa) excommunicated each other and divided the Catholic Christian world along approximately Anglo-French political lines for a generation.
Read the story →The *Grand Saint-Antoine* arrived at Marseille on 25 May 1720 with a hold full of Levantine silk and several already-dead crew members. The harbour authorities knew the ship was infected. They cleared it anyway. The resulting outbreak killed about half of Marseille and approximately 100,000 people across Provence over two years.
Read the story →When Émile Zola's remains were transferred to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908, the journalist Louis Grégori shot Alfred Dreyfus twice in the arm at point-blank range. Both bullets struck. Dreyfus survived. Grégori was acquitted by a Parisian jury three months later.
Read the story →While [Alfred Dreyfus was held in solitary confinement on Devil's Island](/articles/dreyfus-devils-island), his wife Lucie wrote to him every week and waited months for replies. Most of her letters were heavily censored by the colonial administration before they reached him. Most of his were censored before they reached her. They corresponded for almost five years across a 7,000-kilometre gap without knowing whether the other was still alive.
Read the story →Francesco Petrarca grew up in Avignon when his exiled Florentine father followed the papal court there in 1311. He spent four decades in and out of the city while writing the most famous polemical attacks on the Avignon papacy ever produced — coining the phrase "Babylonian captivity" that has defined the period since.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →Georges Picquart was the head of French Army intelligence in 1896 when he realised that the wrong man had been convicted of treason and sent to Devil's Island. His superiors ordered him to keep quiet. He refused, was framed for forgery, and was imprisoned. Twelve years later he became Minister of War.
Read the story →Pope Clement VI spent the Black Death sitting in a heated room in Avignon, protected by a wall of fire on the advice of his physician. He issued the bulls that tried to stop the massacres of Jews. They did not stop.
Read the story →Alfred Dreyfus spent four years and seven months in solitary confinement on a small island off French Guiana. He was the only prisoner. His guards were forbidden to speak to him. He kept a diary and survived.
Read the story →Before he killed Richard III at Bosworth and founded the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor was a 14-year-old Welsh nobleman fleeing England after the Yorkist victory of 1471. He spent the next fourteen years as a guest, prisoner, and pawn at the Breton court.
Read the story →In December 1804, Pope Pius VII traveled from Rome to Paris in winter to crown Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French. Napoleon took the crown from his hands and placed it on his own head. Five years later he had the pope kidnapped.
Read the story →Émile Zola was found dead in his Paris bedroom on the morning of 29 September 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a smoking fire. The chimney was blocked. A bricklayer's deathbed confession decades later named the man who had blocked it.
Read the story →A torn-up scrap of paper from a German embassy wastebasket convicted the wrong man in 1894. France spent the next twelve years arguing about it.
Read the story →On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.
Read the story →A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.
Read the story →Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.
Read the story →In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.
Read the story →Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.
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