It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
Feel free to submit!
Statue de Marie Fouré - Péronne
Catherine de Poix (or Marie Fouré) is an hero from the town of Péronne who defended the city when it was besieged by Charles V in 1536.
The legend says that during the siege, Marie Fouré saw a Spanish soldier trying to walk inside the city. He was wearing the enemy flag, and meant to hammer it into the ground to symbolise the surrender of Péronne.
So she went on the rampart and pushed him into the void, keeping his flag. She then walked to the town center with the flag, where she was acclaimed by the population
Manière dont combattent les Nègres, entre les buissons.
Eau forte. Gravure de Tardieu.
Extrait de la traduction française Voyage à Surinam et dans l’intérieur de la Guyane… par le capitaine J. G. Stedman, parue à paris, chez F. Buisson, an VII -1798-1799. Pl. 31.
In 1809, a former slave who became “maroon” for more than fifty years, Simon Frossard, managed to create a small community of fugitives, increased by the arrival of farmers escaping from the re-establishment of slavery in French Guiana in 1802. Having learnt how to survive in the Amazon forest by imitating the Natives, sometimes robbing and plundering plantations, two hundreds of people followed a rude discipline to keep their existence a secret.
With experimented leaders, they managed to create villages around 50 kms from the littoral, such as Jolie Terre commandé par Simon ; Couleuvre, commandé par Charlemagne, Berthier et Léveillé-Terrasson ; Sainte-Elisabeth, commandé par Georges « créole des Bois » et Paulin, commandé par ce même Paulin…
But the milicia of Cayenne, supervising the repression of marooning and counting 80 armed men was searching for them. Sévère Hérault, enrolled in the milicia, described the campaign: destroyed villages, burnt houses, maroons chased and killed in the woods, until the capture of Simon Frossard, whose head was brought back to Cayenne and exposed on the public place.
Sévère Hérault was impressed by the maroon’s fighting technics, really effective in the abrupt landscape and in the forest:
“Knowing all about the forest and the rivers, Simon Frossard never lost his way and always assured himself to meet us in tight pathways, nearly impracticable: it is where we took high risks and we got much everytime one of them touched or killed as they shot at us. As soon as they were done, they ran away screaming from joy. We replied, but against whom? We saw no one. Twenty feet away, they were hiding behind the bushes and welcomed us as usual. That was their way to wage war. Despair for the one who fell into their hands, he would be slaughtered without any doubt.”
The Monuments Men of World War II
The Monuments Men were a group of men and women from thirteen nations, most of whom volunteered had expertise as museum directors, curators, art scholars and educators, artists, architects, and archivists. The Monuments Men job description was simple: to save as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.
In 1960, Garanger, a 25-year-old draftee who had already been photographing professionally for ten years, landed in Kabylia, in the small village of Ain Terzine, about seventy-five miles south of Algiers. Garanger’s commanding officer decreed that the villagers must have identity cards: “Naturally he asked the military photographer to make these cards,” Garanger recalls. “Either I refused and went to prison, or I accepted.
“I would come within three feet of them,” Garanger remembers. “They would be unveiled. In a period of ten days, I made two thousand portraits, two hundred a day. The women had no choice in the matter. Their only way of protesting was through their look.”
Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2013/04/23/women-unveiled-marc-garangers-contested-portraits-of-1960s-algeria/#ixzz2RUaQLNXJ
Juillet 1918: le Friedensturm ou la seconde bataille de la Marne.Description : Château-Thierry, Aisne, quelques habitants restés pendant l’occupation de la ville.Date : Juillet 1918Lieu : Chateau-Thierry, AisnePhotographe : Maurice BoulayOrigine : ECPADRéférence : 104_SPA-45-BO-2021
This website (in French, sorry) is about the artistic depiction of WW1. It proposes some pieces of art created during the conflict by well known artists of that time, as well as extracts from soldiers’ diaries or novels about the war.
Le Massacre de Machecoul, peinture de François Flameng, 1884
The massacre of 150 to 200 Vendean Republicans by Vendean Royalists in Machecoul was the starting event of the War in the Vendée.
Tata sénégalais de Chasselay
The tata de Chasselay is a necropole located in Chasselay where 194 tirailleurs from different African coutries are buried, after being slaughtered by the SS division Totenkopf in 1940. The necropole arbours an African architecture. Tata, in wolof, means “sacred wall” where warriors are buried.
Maison Le Foll, crémerie à Reims. Devanture, un couple se tient sur le pas de la porte. Photographie prise par Fernand Cuville en 1917.
Camp des Milles
The Camp des Milles was a French internment camp, opened in September 1939, in a former tile factory near the village of Les Milles, part of the commune of Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône)
The camp was first used to intern Germans and ex-Austrians living in the Marseille area, and by June 1940, some 3,500 artists and intellectuals were detained there. Inmates included men of letters such as Fritz Brugel, Leon Feuchtwanger, William Herzog, Alfred Kantorowicz, Golo Mann, Walter Hasenclever, scientists such as Nobel Prize laureate Otto Fritz Meyerhof, as well as musicians and painters such as Erich Itor Kahn, Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, Hermann Henry Gowa, Gustave Herlich, Max Lingner, Ferdinand Springer, Franz Meyer, Jan Meyerowitz, Franz Waxman, François Willi Wendt and Robert Liebknecht.
Between 1941 and 1942 Le Camp des Milles was used as a transit camp for Jews, mainly men. Women were at the Centre Bompard in Marseille, while they waited for their visas and anthorisation to emigrate. As emigration became impossible, Les Milles became one of the centres de rassemblement before deportation. About 2,000 of the inmates were shipped off to theDrancy internment camp on the way to Auschwitz. After the war, the site was briefly re-opened in 1946 as a factory.
