From the storming of the Bastille to the Terror and the guillotine, ordinary witnesses recorded the personal impact of 1789, political violence, revolutionary identity and everyday life in Paris. In ...

This scene during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, Friday, July 26, 2024, was meant to represent the Greek gods during a banquet, according to organizers. (Religious News ...

Why does France celebrate Bastille Day on July 14? Here’s the history behind French National Day, the Storming of the Bastille, the French Revolution, and why the holiday remains a symbol of liberty, ...

It was the summer of 1789, and a strange fever was sweeping across France. It wasn’t a plague, or at least not a plague of the body. To some, it a plague of the mind. Parisians had stormed the ...

David A. Bell teaches French history at Princeton. His “Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Two hundred twenty-six years after ...

Whenever a revolutionary movement begins calling for the existing social order to be overthrown, it doesn’t take long for a reference to July 14, 1789, to surface – that’s when an angry mob dismantled ...

1. The quality that makes Jules Michelet’s history so powerful is what the French call souffle—literally, breath; figuratively, inspiration, creativity, energy. Michelet understood the French ...