Insights
François Guizot’s history of France offers a broad journey through the formation of a nation, from early medieval kingdoms to the political and social…
Jules Michelet’s The Sea is a work of marine writing, natural history and cultural reflection. Published in French as La Mer in 1861, it belongs to a period…
Alphonse Daudet’s Tartarin de Tarascon is a comic novel about reputation, imagination and the irresistible desire to appear heroic. First published in 1872, it…
Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen is one of the most recognisable French novellas of the nineteenth century, yet its compact form conceals a surprisingly broad world.…
Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et Camées occupies a distinctive place in nineteenth-century French poetry. First published in 1852 and expanded through later…
Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (Illusions perdues) is a searching novel about talent, vanity, money and the stories people tell to gain entry into a higher…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains one of the most influential and contested political thinkers of the modern era. His writings examine freedom, inequality, law,…
Pierre-Simon Laplace stands at the meeting point of astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. Writing during a period of extraordinary scientific change, he…
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, changed the way Europeans imagined the living world. His vast Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière brought…
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier travelled farther than most European merchants of the seventeenth century could imagine. Born in Paris in 1605, he crossed the Ottoman…