France

Marketed as the taste of French summer, Orangina’s origins are complicated.

The legend of Ravachol, the terrorist ‘mastermind’ of the fin de siècle. 

Paris was flooded with Eau de Cologne during the early years of Napoleon’s rule. Everyone was using it and everyone was selling it.

Jean Calas was sentenced to be broken on the wheel in front of the cathedral in Toulouse, on 10 March 1762.

It was not easy to be the second son. The younger brothers of the French kings could choose either to rebel or reconcile, but neither option was straightforward.

From alliances, to open warfare; from tense meetings on bridges, to collective mourning at family funerals: French and English royalty were united by marriage and divided by war.

During the Franco-Prussian War a British wine merchant was imprisoned in Cologne, accused of being a spy. The public clamoured for the government to secure his release, but wartime diplomacy was not so straightforward. 

Josephine Baker’s induction into the Pantheon is both a cause for celebration and a prompt to explore France’s progressive values.

The extraordinary insurrections of Gustave Paul Cluseret.