Few home-grown 20th-century leaders prompt as much discomfort for the French as Philippe Pétain. The head of the Vichy regime, who signed the armistice with Germany on June 22nd 1940 and was ...

“Treason,” the Napoleonic-era diplomat Talleyrand famously remarked, “is merely a matter of dates.” Yet it is really about so much more, as Charles de Gaulle biographer Julian Jackson illustrates in ...

“Tout est perdu fors l’honneur” (All is lost save honor), François I, King of France, is supposed to have written after the battle of Pavia in 1525. Never-say-die defiance of this sort has a ...

As we struggle to find our footing amid the Trump administration’s relentless assault on the rule of law and rights of citizens and non-citizens, an event that happened 80 years ago suggests reasons ...