Hot answers tagged france
33
The sale of Louisiana was a FIRE SALE for France, and specifically, its self-appointed ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, for these reasons:
1) France had gotten "burned" with her earlier misadventures in North America. The French and Indian war cost her Canada and all of her other possessions on the east bank of the Mississippi. (She had managed to save ...
17
In short:
It was true until 2006. Now he can still run for president of France, but through the standard way : he can acquire French nationality through naturalization (like anyone) and run for president as a French citizen!
More precisely :
This article (Sorry, Bill Clinton. You can't be president of France or Ireland) explains deeply why :
Clinton ...
16
Because this question has been edited many times I have to clarify that I am answering the version that asks:
What caused the Iranian 1979 revolution to become Islamic?
Short Answer (more suited for causal conversations in bars): It was easier to portray the Shah as anti Islamic ruler in league with the Western powers bent on destroying Islam in an Islamic ...
16
The Phoney War (Sitzkrieg, Drôle de Guerre, etc.) seems destined to remain one of the great mysteries of history. It is difficult to comprehend now, after the fact, how such an astonishing combination of missed opportunities, wishful thinking, and indecisiveness on the part of not just one, but two great powers, could have carried on for more than half a ...
14
It is unfortunately far easier to prove the presence of seats than their absence. The newspapers worldwide covered the Eiffel Tower in great detail and I decided to check what they wrote about the elevators (which where obviously a particular point of interest). The National Library of New Zealand puts historical newspapers online and makes them searchable, ...
12
What you are referring to is commonly known as the "French Column". I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that English movies and the English version of Wikipedia are pretty dismissive of it. After all, that was the opinion of everyone's favorite English General, Wellington. And he was certainly able to back it up.
The first thing you have to realize is that ...
11
First of all, France's goal is not to "undermine its relationship with Turkey" as you have implied. Instead, this is a product of France's policy of recognising what happened during WWI as a genocide.
I believe the most important part of your question is why has France been the most assertive when it comes to recognition of the Armenian genocide. This comes ...
11
First, Belgium wasn't created by uniting the Walloons with the Flemish, but by secession from the Netherlands. This event is known as the Belgian Revolution.
According to the linked Wikipedia article, one of the reasons for the revolution was that many future Belgians, even Flemish, "regarded King William I's rule as despotic".
Moreover, Belgians are ...
11
Khomeini was in France because he had been expelled from Iran and then Iraq, and his aides had advised him to go to Europe, and because France granted him political asylum. He was at the time an aged and relatively obscure religious figure, a target of political persecution who had not been to his home country in well over a decade. They probably saw him as ...
10
Yes, all guillotines have been dismounted. Public executions are no longer popular, and even the memory of them is not something most people want to face. While executions were originally public, they gradually became less so: execution times changed over the 19th century to happen in the dead of the night, then at dawn; in 1939 (a lot later than in most ...
9
First off the wikipedia page that you cite to is based on the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index ("EIUDI") which is not an academic source. The methodology used to assemble the report is not known, but that doesn't mean that it is not useful.
With that in mind from the EIUDI 2011 Report:
Flawed democracies: These countries also have free and ...
8
Napoleon loved forward momentum - and he got it with the heavy column. The formation forced his infantry forward, the front ranks constantly pushed to the fore by the ranks behind them, and made opponents break formation to get the hell out of the way. This worked, because Napoleon was an artilleryman - he would disrupt opposing line formations with ...
8
In the middle ages, Belgium and the Netherlands belonged to an area called the "Low Countries". In 1384 this area came under the dominion of the Dukes of Burgundy, starting what is known as the "Burgundian Netherlands". These domions were merged into the Spanish crown as a result of the political marriage of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to Mary of ...
7
According to Cardinal Richelieu's Wikipedia page he was a cardinal priest until December 4, 1642, the day of his death. Mazarin is difficult to find specific information on. According to his Wikipedia page, Jules Mazarin succeeded Richelieu. Since I cannot find any information on which kind of cardinal Mazarin was, I can only assume that he was a cardinal ...
7
As far as I know, the main issues in French foreign policy of the period were:
Friendship with USA, with which France shared common ideological ground. In particular, the United States Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution and United States Bill of Rights much influenced the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and ...
7
In the late part of 1858, Count Charles Montalembert of France was put on trial and prosecuted by the French government for writing an article titled "A Debate on India in the English Parliament". The French government took the position that certain passages of this article were "seditious and an outrage upon the existing Government" of France. (This link ...
7
First of all, Monaco was annexed by revolutionary France and was part of it from 1793 to 1814.
Before 1793 and from 1814 to 1860 it was surrounded by lands belonging to House of Savoy. (So for that specific timeframes, it would be pretty hard for France to annex Monaco without annexing Savoy's lands).
Monaco is surrounded by France from 1860 as a ...
6
Columns are an aggressive formation, that work best against "inferior" (slower-firing, -marching) opponents. That's because at the point of contact, the column is very deep, which means that it has a good chance of breaking the enemy line. It's weakness is that against a well-drilled opponent, the defender will pull back the line on either side, let the ...
6
Its true that he said it. However, the statement itself was not true. (Sorry, French Clinton fans!)
He apparently got that idea from an open letter a political scientist
wrote to him in the New York Times back in 2001 suggesting the idea.
The problem there, however, is that after that letter brought
attention to the Louisiana Purchase loophole, the ...
5
The Vichy French Gendarmerie was set at 60,000 men by the armistice agreement and following orders by the occupying Germans. Local police retained their normal duties although they were subject to German orders. They were not allowed to retain heavy military weaponry or motorized transport. They were also compelled to work with German occupiers. If the ...
5
At the moment of his election (1641), it seems that Mazarin was in minor orders - so called "lay cardinal". After that, there seems to be little consensus and pretty much no primary sources, but if anything, he was a cardinal-priest.
By the process of elimination, he was a cardinal-priest:
He was definitely not a cardinal-deacon. From "The Cardinals of ...
5
British colonial rule after the end of the Seven Year's War ended in 1763 gave the Canadians, including those in Quebec, little choice. Since the British ruled, their laws became the law of the land. It really wasn't so much of a transition as it was an imposition, in that the British imposed it upon the Canadians.
In 1774, however, the British Parliament ...
5
I found another hint in Histoire du dimanche: de 1700 à nos jours by Robert Beck page 154 on bottom. See the following google books link.
Le surplus en travail que provoque le rythme décadaire, pourrait également constituer une raison du rejet dont le nouveau temps est la victime.
[...]
Les instigateur des lois sur l'observation des décadis de l'an ...
5
Preparing for war takes place over a matter of months, if not years. This is true physically, logistically, and psychologically. Basically, the Germans were ready for war in September 1939, the Allies were not.
One advantage enjoyed by the German army was the "practice" it had obtained in the occupation of both Austria and the modern Czech Republic ...
5
Algeria was more then a colony, there were French Départements in Algeria, from 1848 on until 1962 it was an integral part of the French motherland.
See Wikipedia or the french wikipedia article for the French départements in Algeria
This does not mean, that Algerians were full citizens.
See also Process of Colonization:
Algeria was formally ...
5
The French Republican Calendar started counting years from 22 September 1792, the day the French First Republic was proclaimed. Year I was the first year of the Republic, and so on.
You can read more about the calendar's design on Wikipedia.
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A New York bar's website is one of a few sites which provide the following (seemingly) credible explanation for this practice:
No one is exactly sure of the reasons why larger format bottles were given biblical names. But, according to the Champagne expert Francois Bonal, winemakers in Bordeaux had been using the name Jeroboam for the four-bottle size ...
4
As far as I remember, mostly it was to survive against the onslaught of the rest of Europe. Most of the initial stage of the revolution was seen as an internal matter to France but some of the propaganda of the revolution was spread abroad. All the crowned heads of Europe were (rightly) worried about the events in France. So, spreading the revolution was ...
4
A general trend I have noticed in French history, dating from the fall of France after the defeat at Waterloo and the subsequent losses in the Congress of Vienna, is that there is a strong urge to regain a sense of international prestige. Through out the nineteenth century France slowly degrades from being the world capital of liberal democracy and ...
4
I recommend that you do some research into World War I, at least read this Wikipedia article on the subject (note: the section marked "belligerents").
More important than knowing who was who's ally, you need to know why the war started in the first place. Knowing that will give you an understanding of why major powers acted as they did. From the ...
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