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Gisela of France
Gisela of France was a legendary 10th-century CE Francian princess, who, according to tradition, was married off to Viking leader Rollo of Normandy. Her name, Gisela or Gisla, comes from an Old German word meaning "to pledge", the French...

Definition
Flight to Varennes
The Flight to Varennes was a pivotal moment of the French Revolution (1789-1799), in which King Louis XVI of France (r.1774-92), his wife Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-93), and their children attempted to escape from Paris on the night of...

Article
Why Did Britain & France Appease Hitler?
The policy of appeasement towards the demands of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) regarding Nazi Germany's territorial expansion ultimately failed when the Second World War (1939-45) began. The reasons appeasement was adopted by Britain and France...

Article
The Three Estates of Pre-Revolutionary France
Society in the Kingdom of France in the period of the Ancien Regime was broken up into three separate estates, or social classes: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. These classes and their accompanying power dynamics, originating...

Article
France’s 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State
The 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State was enacted as the climax of decades of conflict between monarchists and anticlerical Republicans who viewed Christianity as a permanent obstacle to the social development of the Republic. The...

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Lafayette and Marie Antoinette
The Marquis de Lafayette kisses the hand of Queen Marie Antoinette of France following the Women's March on Versailles on 6 October 1789. An excellent showman, Lafayette always knew how to put on a performance to please the masses. Old engraving...

Article
The Dreyfus Affair & the Separation of Church and State in France
The Dreyfus Affair, or L'Affaire as it has become known, demonstrated the competing forces at work to either reestablish the monarchy and the Church in power or to solidify and advance the unfulfilled ideals of the 1789 French Revolution...

Article
Grief & Consolation in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess
In Geoffrey Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess (c. 1370 CE), two genres of medieval literature are combined – the French poetic convention of courtly love and the high medieval dream vision – to create a poem of enduring...

Definition
Antoine Barnave
Antoine Pierre Joseph Marie Barnave (1761-1793) was a French lawyer, politician, and one of the most influential orators of the early stage of the French Revolution (1789-1799). He is notable for being a champion of constitutional monarchy...

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Marie Louise of Austria, Empress of the French
Portrait of Marie Louise of Austria (l. 1791-1847), oil on canvas by Robert Lefevre, 1812. Daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria, she was the second wife of French Emperor Napoleon I and was therefore Empress of the French from 1810 until...