50 Fun Facts About French History

Which Paris fortress-prison, stormed by a crowd on 14 July 1789, held only seven inmates at the time?

The Bastille's seven inmates included four forgers and a man who had tried to kill Louis XV, and the contractor who demolished it carved its bricks into souvenir models and sold them.

Which execution device, proposed to the National Assembly by a physician in 1789, was last used in France in 1977?

The guillotine first fell on a highwayman in April 1792 and stayed France's standard method of execution until the death penalty was abolished in 1981, four years after its final use.

On which South Atlantic island, 1,870 km off Africa, did Napoleon die in 1821 during his second exile?

Saint Helena was garrisoned by thousands of British troops with warships circling the island to hold one prisoner, who died there of stomach cancer aged 51, the disease believed to have killed his father.

In which country did French soldiers rebuilding a coastal fort dig up the Rosetta Stone in 1799?

Egypt lost the Rosetta Stone to Britain under the 1801 surrender terms, and the slab has been the most visited object in the British Museum almost continuously since 1802.

Which territory did Napoleon sell to the United States in 1803 for about fifteen million dollars?

The Louisiana sale covered 828,000 square miles at roughly eighteen dollars a square mile, nearly doubling the United States and later supplying all or part of fifteen states.

Which Caribbean nation, once France's most profitable colony, won independence in 1804 through a slave revolt?

Haiti paid for its freedom twice: in 1825 French warships anchored offshore until it agreed to 150 million gold francs in reparations to former slaveholders as the price of recognition.

Which Jewish artillery captain was wrongly convicted of spying for Germany in 1894 and shipped to Devil's Island?

Alfred Dreyfus was eventually exonerated and reinstated in the army, though at a lower rank than his seniority warranted, after an affair that split the Third Republic for a dozen years.

Which September 1914 battle, where Paris taxis rushed troops to the front, halted the German advance on the capital?

The Marne taxis, some 600 cabs commandeered at Les Invalides, dutifully ran their meters, and the French treasury paid the total fare of 70,012 francs.

Which fortified valley in northwest Vietnam fell to the Viet Minh in 1954 after a two-month siege?

Dien Bien Phu surrendered on 7 May 1954, the day before the Geneva Conference opened, and the accords signed ten weeks later ended French rule in Indochina.

Who became France's youngest president in 2017, aged 39, a year after founding his own centrist movement?

Emmanuel Macron took 66% of the run-off against Marine Le Pen without ever having won an election before, and his year-old En Marche then swept a majority in the National Assembly.

Which Arverni chieftain united the Gauls against Caesar but surrendered at Alesia in 52 BC after a relief army failed?

Vercingetorix was held six years in the Tullianum prison, paraded through Rome in Caesar's long-delayed triumph of 46 BC, then executed, possibly by strangulation.

Which king first united the Franks under a single ruler and was baptised a Catholic at his wife Clotilde's urging?

Clovis I chose Catholicism over the Arian Christianity of most other Germanic tribes, a decision that led to widespread conversions among the Franks and made his realm the seed of the Kingdom of France.

Which Frankish ruler defeated an Umayyad invasion force between Tours and Poitiers in October 732?

Charles Martel's Franks apparently fought without heavy cavalry, and Edward Gibbon later credited the victory with curtailing the spread of Islam into Western Europe.

Which Frankish king was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day 800?

Charlemagne was the first reigning emperor in the West since Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, and the title set him at odds with the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople.

Which military order did Philip IV have arrested across France at dawn on Friday 13 October 1307?

The last grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, and Philip, deeply in debt to the order from his war with England, was rid of what he owed.

Which 1415 battle, fought on Saint Crispin's Day, saw Henry V's outnumbered archers rout a French army?

Agincourt was won by English and Welsh archers making up nearly 80 percent of Henry's army, men who had marched 260 miles in two and a half weeks and were sick with dysentery.

Which Loire city's English siege collapsed in 1429, nine days after Joan of Arc arrived with a relief force?

Orléans had looked lost for half a year, yet within three months of its relief Joan stood beside Charles VII at his coronation in Reims, the goal she had insisted on all along.

In which Norman city, the English headquarters in France, was Joan of Arc tried for heresy and burned in 1431?

In Rouen Joan was burned aged about nineteen; an inquisitorial court overturned the verdict in 1456 as tainted by deceit, and she was canonised in 1920.

Which Protestant king converted to Catholicism in 1593, reportedly saying that Paris was well worth a Mass?

Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, ended the Wars of Religion with a 1598 edict of toleration, survived at least a dozen assassination attempts, and was stabbed to death by a Catholic zealot in 1610.

Which 1572 wave of Catholic mob violence erupted days after a royal wedding drew Huguenot nobles to Paris?

St Bartholomew's Day killings began on the eve of the apostle's feast, two days after a failed attempt on the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny, and were long blamed on Catherine de' Medici.

Which cardinal, chief minister from 1624, personally commanded the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle?

Cardinal Richelieu obtained the letters patent that founded the Académie française in 1635, while centralising royal power and fighting the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain.

Which king inherited the throne at four in 1643 and reigned for 72 years, the longest of any sovereign in history?

Louis XIV styled himself the Sun King, the centre of the universe without equal, and died of gangrene four days before his 77th birthday, leaving the crown to a five-year-old great-grandson.

Which palace, grown from a 1623 hunting lodge west of Paris, housed the French court and government from 1682?

Versailles remained the seat of king, court and government until 6 October 1789, when a crowd that had marched from Paris forced the royal family back to the capital.

Which civil war of 1648 to 1653, named after the French word for a slingshot, forced the royal court to flee Paris?

The Fronde ran in two acts, first of the parlements and then of the princes, and its name began as a derogatory term for the rebels during a financial crisis left by the Thirty Years' War.

Which three-order assembly, not summoned since 1614, opened on 5 May 1789 and set the Revolution in motion?

The Estates-General broke down within six weeks when the Third Estate, denied voting by head, declared itself the National Assembly on 17 June 1789.

Which vow did Third Estate deputies swear on 20 June 1789, pledging not to separate until France had a constitution?

The Tennis Court Oath was sworn in an indoor real tennis hall after the deputies found their usual chamber locked and guarded by soldiers, and only one of them refused to sign.

Which marquis, a major general in Washington's army at 19, later helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man?

Lafayette drafted the Declaration with Thomas Jefferson's assistance, and it invoked natural law in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence that Jefferson had written.

Which queen, the fifteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa, was executed for high treason in October 1793?

Marie Antoinette was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal two days into her trial, nine months after her husband Louis XVI, and died at the Place de la Révolution.

Which Jacobin lawyer, the face of the Terror on the Committee of Public Safety, was executed without trial in July 1794?

Maximilien Robespierre was executed with around 90 others the day after the Convention turned on him on 9 Thermidor, a date that gave the whole backlash its name.

Which 1792 war song, written in Strasbourg for the Army of the Rhine, became the national anthem of France?

La Marseillaise took its name from volunteers from Marseille who sang it marching into Paris, and the National Convention adopted it as the Republic's anthem in 1795.

In which church did Napoleon crown himself emperor on 2 December 1804 as Pope Pius VII looked on?

At Notre-Dame de Paris Napoleon removed his laurel wreath, crowned himself, then crowned the kneeling Josephine; in 1805 he was separately crowned King of Italy in Milan with the Iron Crown.

Which king, proclaimed after the July Revolution of 1830 forced Charles X to abdicate, was himself toppled in 1848?

Louis-Philippe, nicknamed the Citizen King, was the last French monarch to carry the title of king, and his abdication in 1848 opened the way for the Second Republic.

At which Ardennes town did Napoleon III surrender to Prussia on 2 September 1870, bringing down the Second Empire?

Sedan saw 104,000 French soldiers pass into German captivity along with 558 guns, and within days Paris had proclaimed a republic in the emperor's absence.

Which revolutionary government seized the French capital on 18 March 1871 and held it until Bloody Week in late May?

The Paris Commune began when National Guardsmen refused to give up 170 cannons on the butte of Montmartre, and the regular army crushed it in the semaine sanglante from 21 May 1871.

Which border territory did France cede to the new German Empire by the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt and regain in 1918?

Alsace–Lorraine was held as an Imperial Territory, and the German case for taking it rested on the German dialects spoken by most of Alsace and the Moselle, whatever its French speakers wanted.

Which interior minister escaped besieged Paris by gas balloon on 7 October 1870 to run the war from Tours?

Léon Gambetta flew out in the coal-gas balloon Armand-Barbès with Eugène Spuller, and on landing took charge of the provinces as minister of both the interior and war.

Which novelist's 1898 open letter to President Félix Faure accused the army of jailing an innocent Jewish officer?

Émile Zola saw the letter printed under the headline J'Accuse…! in L'Aurore, was convicted of libel within six weeks, and fled to England to avoid prison.

Which battle, the longest of the First World War, ran from February to December 1916 on the hills above the Meuse?

Verdun began when the German 5th Army attacked the fortified region on the right bank of the Meuse, aiming to seize the Meuse Heights and their commanding view for artillery.

Which prime minister, in office from November 1917 through the Paris Peace Conference, was nicknamed the Tiger?

Georges Clemenceau was also called Père la Victoire, Father Victory, and unlike Marshal Foch he judged the treaty harsh enough; Foch warned that it was not peace.

In which forest was the 1918 Armistice signed in a railway car that Hitler hauled back to the same spot in 1940?

The Compiègne wagon had been Marshal Foch's mobile headquarters, and the two signings, almost 22 years apart, took place on the exact same patch of forest floor.

Which chain of fortifications, named after a war minister, did the Germans bypass through the Belgian Ardennes in 1940?

The Maginot Line was impervious to most forms of attack and tied down about 36 French divisions in 1940, while the Germans struck just beyond its northern end.

Which general, who reached London on 17 June 1940, broadcast an appeal the next day urging the French to keep fighting?

Charles de Gaulle got his BBC airtime from Churchill, whom he had met the afternoon he arrived, and the broadcast is often taken as the birth of the Resistance, earning him the title the Man of 18 June.

Which 84-year-old marshal, made prime minister at Bordeaux in June 1940, at once sought an armistice with Germany?

Pétain was sentenced to death in 1945, had the sentence commuted to life because of his age and First World War service, and died at 95 on the Île d'Yeu after five years in prison.

Which spa town became the seat of the collaborationist French State that ran the unoccupied zone from July 1940?

Vichy kept Paris as its nominal capital, and any pretence of independence ended in November 1942 when Germany and Italy occupied all of metropolitan France after the Allied landings in North Africa.

Which former prefect, parachuted into France in 1942 under the codenames Rex and Max, unified the Resistance networks?

Jean Moulin chaired the first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance on 27 May 1943 and was dead less than two months later, tortured in Gestapo custody by Klaus Barbie.

Which constitutional order, born of the 1958 Algiers crisis and built around a strong presidency, governs France today?

The Fifth Republic replaced a parliamentary system with a semi-presidential one, and its first president, elected in December 1958, gained the right to dissolve the National Assembly.

Which March 1962 agreement, signed at a resort on the French shore of Lake Geneva, ended the Algerian War?

The Évian Accords ran to 93 pages, set a ceasefire for 19 March 1962, and promised the referendum on self-determination that sealed Algeria's independence that summer.

In which year did student protests at Nanterre and the Sorbonne escalate into a general strike of millions of workers?

The 1968 revolt brought France to the brink of revolution, yet after the Grenelle wage deal of 27 May the president dissolved the National Assembly and won a landslide in June.

Which Socialist president, elected in 1981, abolished the death penalty and twice governed with conservative cabinets?

François Mitterrand lost presidential runs in 1965 and 1974 before winning, was re-elected in 1988 and stayed in office until 1995, fourteen years in all.

Which president took 82% of the 2002 run-off after far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round?

Jacques Chirac had first won the Élysée in 1995 with just 52.6% against Lionel Jospin, and after the 82.2% landslide he remained the last president to be re-elected until 2022.