In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything - an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centerpiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later.

    Bantam 2003) and driven the entire circumference of France (A Perfect Circle, pub. Bantam 2006), but cyclist she is not. By suggesting an electric bicycle to get her through the worst of the uphill slogs, her husband persuades her that travelling on 2 wheels is by far the best way to see the little-known, virtually undocumented part of France they plan to explore. And so, with not a few mishaps and misgivings, it turns out.The Valley of Heaven and Hell is a quirky, highly entertaining and endearing mix of personal travel adventure and French history. Alongside her energetic and resourceful husband (when he’s not zooming on ahead), Susie follows the identical route taken by Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI when they tried to escape from the Revolution, and their journey back to their executions. After a hair-raising journey through Paris that nearly ends in her own execution by traffic, Susie finds an area of calm waterways and tranquil countryside bursting with history. Idyllic territory for cyclists. Her route takes her from Versailles to the vineyards and champagne cellars of Epernay and Reims then through the Marne valley, the scene of unimaginable horror and devastation during World War 1.In three weeks Susie and Terry cycle 500 miles, dining sometimes in luxury and often on weird makeshift meals in their tent. Along the way there are traumas, epiphanies, occasional matrimonial disagreements and the odd glass of champagne. Keeping up appearances amongst the petite, chic French at some of Susie’s more luxurious stops creates some serious fashion moments, tempered, as always, by Susie’s good humour and resilience.

    Herstorytelling left me longing for more.’ — Susan Higginbotham, author of The Stolen Crown and The Queen of Last Hopes.‘A gripping tale of the French Revolution‘ – Catherine Delors, author of Mistress of the Revolution and For The King.When the beautiful Comtesse de Saint-Valèry is dragged unwillingly from her Parisian home in the dead of night, her three young daughters are left to an uncertain fate at the hands of their father in a world that is teetering on the very edge of Revolution.Cassandre, the eldest is a beautiful and heartless society beauty, trapped in an unhappy marriage and part of the dazzling court of Versailles. Lucrèce, her twin, is married to a man she adores but he pushes her away for another woman. Meanwhile, Adélaïde, the youngest, rebels against the destiny that her position in society appears to have doomed her to.As the horror, turmoil and excitement of the French Revolution unfolds around them, the three very different sisters struggle to survive the bloodshed, find love and discover their true selves…

    With few friends, many rivals, and ever-shifting loyalties, Louise learns the perils of her new role. Yet she is too ambitious to be a pawn in the intrigues of others. With the promise of riches, power, and even the love of a king, Louise creates her own destiny in a dance of intrigue between two monarchs-and two countries.

    Shot entirely in France, much on location at the Palace of Versailles, the film is visually stunning, bringing together a cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, and Marianne Faithful, and the extraordinary costume designs of Oscar-winner Milena Canonero (Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange). A moving story of naivety and responsibility, reputation and misunderstanding, Marie Antoinette is a film that Sofia Coppola has wanted to make for years. In a book that is at once the personal chronicle of a major work and a beautiful tribute to the potential of film, featuring elements of the director's own screenplay as well as captivating stills, the director's personal photos, and original designs for costumes and sets, Marie Antoinette is an essential companion for any lover of modern cinema.

    A mixed group of twenty-six men, some of the Marshals came from aristocratic backgrounds, some had originally pursued tradesmen careers as drapers and bakers, and others rose from total poverty to hold the highest positions in the empire below the emperor himself. Delderfield's exciting chronicle of these men and their battles tells of their origins, their elevation under the rule of Napoleon, the kingships achieved by some and the betrayals of others, and the Marshals' changing relationship with their leader as the fortunes of the empire rose and fell.

    Jean-Louis served Marie for fourteen years until 1789 when the Revolution swept across France, its wrath aimed at the extravagances of the Royal Court and those who served it. Fargeon, a lifelong supporter of the Republican cause but a purveyor to the court, was in a dangerous position. Yet he remained fiercely loyal to Marie Antoinette, beyond her desperate flight to Varennes, her execution and even through his own imprisonment and trial. A Scented Palace is a wonderful window into the world of France during its most brutal and violent days.

    Nikki McArthur aka ‘A mother in France’ opens up a window to her world and invites you to journey with her through the positive and negative experiences of the process of moving, settling, making a living and raising a family in a new country. Woven within the pages of the family’s experiences are a treasury of facts and information making it not only a fascinating read but a useful guide to living in France.Uncovering the thought processes behind why the family decided to move to France and how they went about it, the book reveals how to prepare for a move abroad, house hunting tips and the buying process. Discover what it was like when they arrived, the main difficulties and challenges they faced with settling in as a family, renovation challenges and experiences of developing a business and making a living. Follow the ups and downs of family life in France from pregnancy and childbirth through to adulthood with fascinating details on education, health, cultural differences and raising bilingual children. An intriguing mixture of facts backed by true life experiences and comparisons and a compelling read for anyone interested in or considering moving abroad.

    This honor catapulted her into contact with both high society and the greatest artists and writers of the day. Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and Lord Byron were only a few of her vast and prestigious clientele. While describing her life as an artist, Vigee Lebrun also provides an exciting account of the dramatic events of her day, particularly the French Revolution and the Terror, from which she barely escaped.

    This volume of interviews—hailed on its French publication as Duras’s “secret confession”—offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinions, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand , her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life.

    Rather, Chantal Thomas presents the history of the verbal and visual representations of Marie-Antoinette, the history of her mythification. Almost as soon as Marie-Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, was brought to France in 1771 as the bride of Louis XVI, she was smothered in images.In a monarchy increasingly under assault, the charm and horror of her feminine body and her destructive political power as a foreign intruder turned Marie-Antoinette into an alien other -- the bestial "arch-tigress of Austria." Working as a historian and writing like a novelist, Thomas reveals how Marie-Antoinette came to symbolize the marginalization and negation of women in French society before the French Revolution.In a series of pamphlets written between the 1770s and her death in 1793, Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as a frivolous and extravagant spendthrift and lesbian, an incestuous and bloodthirsty libertine, a poisoner and infant murderess. "Through her wickedness," writes Thomas, "she caused the Revolution."In her analyses of these anonymous pamphlets, seven of which are included here in translation for the first time, Thomas reconstructs how the pamphleteers' mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable and physical destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence. The Wicked Queen exposes the complex and complicated history and power of an image, the elaborate process by which the myth of Marie-Antoinette emerged as a crucial element in the successful staging of the French Revolution.

    The descent of the French Revolution from rapturous liberation into an orgy of apparently pointless bloodletting has been the focus of countless reflections on the often malignant nature of humanity and the folly of revolution.David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, presents a radically different account of the Terror. In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, he transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the Revolution. The violence, he shows, was a result of dogmatic and fundamentalist thinking: dreadful decisions were made by groups of people who believed they were still fighting for freedom but whose survival was threatened by famine, external war, and counter-revolutionaries within the fledging new state. Urgent questions emerge from Andress's trenchant reassessment: When is it right to arbitrarily detain those suspected of subversion? When does an earnest patriotism become the rationale for slaughter?Combining startling narrative power and bold insight, The Terror is written with verve and exceptional pace. It is a dramatic new interpretation of the French Revolution that draws troubling parallels with today's political and religious dundamentalism."A vivid and powerful narrative of the years 1789-95... The narrative is dense yet fast-moving, from the storming of the Bastille to the execution of King Louis XVI to the paranoid politics of the National Convention." --DAVID GILMOUR, THE New York Times Book Review"In such alarming times, it is important to understand what exactly terror is, how it works politically, and what, if anything, can be done to combat it. The historian David Andress has made a serious contribution to this central subject of our times with an accessible account of the way terror overtook the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century." --RUTH SCURR, The Times (London)DAVID ANDRESS, a leading historian of the French Revolution, is Reader in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

    Standing with her beloved Huguenots, Jeanne steps onto the battlefield of history during the tumultuous years of the Reformation (1517 - 1559). As deadly political events swirl around her tiny Kingdom of Navarre, Queen Jeanne is forced to choose: Will she hide the fleeing Huguenots under the very nose of Catherine de Medicis's henchmen or save her own life? The Chosen Daughters series highlights the lives of ordinary women who by God's grace accomplish extraordinary things.

    In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.

    This narrative history masterfully weaves together the sweeping events surrounding the so-called “Babylonian captivity” of the popes into the broader story of 14th-century Europe, a turbulent time of transition between Middle Ages and Renaissance when seven successive popes resided in Avignon in the south of France.