French Biography

The French Revolution came about because of a long-held displeasure at how the rich lived. While the rich lived comfortably, the common people were forced to pay taxes too high for them to pay. And there was not enough food produced for them to eat. French peasants became so impoverished that visitors to France said many of them were as skinny as skeletons.

After backpacking her way around Europe journalist Sarah Turnbull is ready to embark on one last adventure before heading home to Sydney. A chance meeting with a charming Frenchman in Bucharest changes her travel plans forever. Acting on impulse, she agrees to visit Fredric in Paris for a week. Put a very French Frenchman together with a strong-willed Australian girl and the result is some spectacular - and often hilarious - cultural clashes.

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy.

For three centuries, New Orleans has harbored dark secrets in its shadowy streets and atmospheric courtyards. While tourists flock to ghost tours and vampire fiction, locals whisper about something far more real—and infinitely more dangerous.Fangs of the French Quarter exposes the documented encounters, unexplained disappearances, and chilling testimonies that reveal the truth behind New Orleans' vampire legends.

Don and Mindy Wallace have always been Francophiles, so when they had the opportunity to buy a home on a small French island off the coast of Brittany, they jumped—sight unseen—into a crumbling mess that challenged their finances and their family. But when the Wallaces arrived on the island, they found a building in ruin, and it wasn't long before their lives resembled it. Plagued by emergency repairs, a stock market crash, and very exasperated French neighbors, Don and Mindy could have accepted their fate. Instead, they embraced it.

Can two Americans really become French? Val and Keith turned their lives upside down when they quit their jobs to begin a part-time life in Provence. But they wondered: Can we fit in? And maybe become French ourselves? There’s more to becoming French than just learning the language. If you want the inside scoop on la belle France, you won’t want to miss this delightful book!

20 mars 1995. Des disciples de la secte Aum lâchent du gaz sarin dans le métro de Tokyo. Qu'est-ce qui fait qu'une telle folie survient dans le quotidien le plus banal ? Comment est-il possible d'être endoctriné au point de commettre un tel crime ? Regroupant les témoignages de blessés mais aussi de disciples de la secte, Haruki Murakami cherche à comprendre. Victimes et coupables sont-ils vraiment si différents que les seconds soient considérés comme le diable en personne ? Et si les fanatiques d'Aum n'étaient finalement que l'effrayant miroir de ce dont nous sommes tous capables ?

Some months before, my husband, three children and I had casually unzipped and discarded our comfortable Australian lifestyle and slipped on life in the country of haute couture. On arrival, there was no celebrity designer waiting for us, ready to pin and fit our new life to us; so we threw it on and wore it loosely, tightly, uncomfortably, any old how—until we learned for ourselves how to trim, hem and stitch à la française. This book is testament to the joyous, but not always easy, journey that we took along the way.

Understand a crucial part of the history of French monarchy with this collection of portraits of some of the most spectacular rulers of France: Louis XI, Louis XII, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Louis XVII, Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe, and Henry IV, also known as the "Good King Henry". The history of the kingdom of France is crucial to understanding the shape of politics in Europe, and this detailed dive into the lives and reigns of these most famous rulers will familiarize you with the human and strategic stakes of this period.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Provence, 1970, a lively, dramatic account of the spectacular rise of French “nouvelle cuisine,” and the renegade chefs of the 1960s and 1970s who revolutionized modern cooking. In The Secret History of French Cooking, Luke Barr takes readers...

Reine d'Écosse six jours après sa naissance en 1542, mariée à François II et reine de France à dix-sept ans, veuve un an après, remariée à lord Darnley, amante du comte de Bothwell qui tuera Darnley, réfugiée auprès d'Elisabeth Ire qui la gardera captive pendant vingt ans, décapitée en 1587 pour s'être laissé prendre au piège d'une conspiration : Marie Stuart est l'une des figures les plus romanesques, les plus tragiques de l'histoire.

In I Buried Her in a French Press, Sarah shares how to build a path toward claiming self-worth, discovering inner-strength, and embracing self-love. A memoir and mirror, this book is a reminder that your voice matters, your story counts, and your next chapter can be the boldest one yet.

In her own words, here is the captivating story of Julia Child’s years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found her “true calling.” From the moment the ship docked in Le Havre, en route to Paris, in the fall of 1948, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon...

In an age where it was difficult to steer clear of a king's wrath and keep one's head for their entire life, Armand Jean du Plessis managed to become the power behind a king. The royal courts of 17th and 18th century France were famed for powerful and versatile Ministers like Talleyrand and the Comte de Vergennes, yet none have held as much sway like the man best known to the world today as Cardinal Richelieu.

At 47, Mark Greenside, a glass-is-half-empty native New Yorker living in California, unwillingly went to Brittany, and to his great amazement and surprise fell in love with the place and its people. Then, because love makes you crazy and do crazy things, he borrowed money from his mom and bought a 120‑year‑old farmhouse in Plobien, a village of 500 people.

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world “The depth of research in this book is astonishing, but even more...

From leading critic and essayist Emily Eakin, a stylish personal history of French theory and its unlikely domination of American culture When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors...

Ce livre raconte la vie de William Harben Carthew (1938-2023), alias Jean-Michel Beigbeder, l’homme qui choisissait les puissants en France, à la fin du XXe siècle. Comme il est dangereux d’écrire sur son père mort ! On risque de faire la connaissance posthume d’un espion franco-américain. De découvrir son enfance sinistre dans un pensionnat militaire catholique. D’en vouloir à sa famille qui a pourtant sauvé des juifs sous l’Occupation.

Les années 1933 à 1943 marquent le chapitre le plus noir de la modernité européenne. Face à la catastrophe, quatre femmes philosophes, à l'orée de leur 30 ans, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Ayn Rand et Hannah Arendt, développent leurs idées visionnaires : sur la relation entre l'individu et la société, l'homme et la femme, le sexe et le genre, la liberté et le totalitarisme, Dieu et l'homme.

Heydar Radjavi's evocations of growing up in Tabriz in the 1930s and 1940s describe a traditionalist Iran grappling with modernity, a process as fraught with contradictions and stresses then as it is in Iran today. The tone is always light, the memories wonderfully vivid, and the underlying theme of tension between old and new truly timeless.