French Archives

Why we are still living with the legacy of Waterloo – that ‘most bloody battle’

by History Guild | May 5, 2025 | Historical Sites, Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Our views of war are sanitised today. In an age of professional armies trained for increasingly technical tasks, few of us have witnessed combat, much less taken part in it. In that vein, commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo will focus on the battle’s strategic significance. There are, though, individual accounts that give us a glimpse into what sword fights and cavalry charges must have been like – and the deadly consequences of defeat.

Flies, filth and bully beef: life at Gallipoli in 1915

by History Guild | Apr 24, 2025 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Many factors contributed to making the Gallipoli battlefield an almost unendurable place for all soldiers. The constant noise, cramped unsanitary conditions, disease, stenches, daily death of comrades, terrible food, lack of rest and thirst all contributed to the most gruelling conditions.

What exactly is the Holy Grail – and why has its meaning eluded us for centuries?

by History Guild | Apr 14, 2025 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Type “Holy Grail” into Google and … well, you probably don’t need me to finish that sentence. The sheer multiplicity of what any search engine throws up demonstrates that there is no clear consensus as to what the Grail is or was. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people out there claiming to know its history, true meaning and even where to find it.

The Strangest Battle of World War II? Uncovering the Battle of Castle Itter

by History Guild | Apr 3, 2025 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In the waning hours of the war, exactly five days after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, a bizarre battle would commence in a small Austrian town, just south of the German border.
Seven hundred years after its construction in the 1200s, Castle Itter would host a battle between the Waffen-SS (the Nazi party’s specialist paramilitary) and a combined force of defecting German Wehrmacht troops, American soldiers, Austrian resistance fighters, and various French political prisoners.

April Fools! The History Behind the World’s Greatest Day of Pranks

by History Guild | Mar 27, 2025 | Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
The world loves a good April Fools’ Day prank – from telling your schoolmates it’s non-uniform to assuring a coworker the boss has definitely given everyone the day off, April 1st is a day of big and small pranks all around the world.
While mostly celebrated in Western countries such as Northern Europe, America, and other English-speaking countries like the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, much of the world knows of and sometimes takes part in the light-hearted tradition of April Fools.
But where does it come from?

The 7 Largest Empires in History

by History Guild | Mar 6, 2025 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
While very few exist today, the world’s history books are filled with hundreds of thousands of empires, ranging from a handful of islands to near-global domination.

A select few stand as the most infamous, such as the Roman Empire or the British Empire, yet many of history’s largest empires are less well-known. So, what were the world’s largest empires across history?

Free of the Trench: How British & Imperial Forces Overcame the Deadlock of the Western Front

by History Guild | Feb 20, 2025 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 12 minutes
The First World War came to an end just over 100 years ago, a mere moment’s time in human history. But as close as we are to it, a century is more than enough to surround that conflict with myth and misconception.

The image of the war on the Western Front, as brought to us through decades of outdated scholarship and popular fiction, is simple: two vast armies, each equipped with the latest murderous fruits of the industrial age, found they couldn’t decisively defeat one another in the field and so settled into a long, bloody, dirty, and consumptive war in which thousands of lives were thrown away every day, often for minuscule gains which would bring neither side meaningfully closer to victory.
The real story is more complicated. By 1916, it was plain to see that tactics like those championed by Haig, designed to draw out the enemy for a momentous set-piece battle, weren’t working, and even those neck-deep in the fight didn’t need the benefit of hindsight to recognise that.

Free France was African: the Story of France’s African Soldiers in WW2

by History Guild | Jan 23, 2025 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 15 minutes
From a humble, precarious exile in London, Free France patched together from soldiers and sailors of the scattered French military under the leadership of General Charles de Gaulle. One of the most storied resistance movements in World War II, far-flung Frenchmen swelled in number until hundreds of thousands could return to liberate France in 1944.

The First World War continues: Medina, Arabia, January 1919

by History Guild | Jan 6, 2025 | Military History, Political and Economic History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
or many in the West, the First World War in the Middle East was a sideshow to the Western Front. The story of the wartime siege of Medina is even less well-known. But in the region it is still debated and contested, for example in December 2017 when the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates accused Fakhri Pasha of stealing items from Medina, which earned a strong rebuke from the President of Turkey. The First World War in the Middle East had a profound effect on the region, with consequences to this day.

“Its Name Synonymous with Barbarism”: The Colonial Narratives that Destroyed Dahomey’s ‘Amazons’

by History Guild | Nov 20, 2024 | Military History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Tales of Dahomey’s fearsome female fighting force are writ large across the world, rippling from the far-fetched, bewildered accounts of colonizing Frenchmen to modern-day popular culture, in films like Black Panther and The Woman King. Though they were known in their homeland as the Agojie, their combat prowess and defiance of strict 19th-century European gender norms earned them worldwide fame–and infamy–as the Amazons of Dahomey.

Why we don’t hear about the 10,000 French deaths at Gallipoli

by History Guild | Nov 6, 2024 | Military History | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
With almost the same number of soldiers as the Anzacs – 79,000 – and similar death rates – close on 10,000 – French participation in the Gallipoli campaign could not occupy a more different place in national memory. What became a foundation myth in Australia as it also did in the Turkish Republic after 1923 was eventually forgotten in France.

Who Would Be the Roman Emperor Today?

by History Guild | Oct 10, 2024 | Political and Economic History, Social and Cultural History | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
The Roman Empire continues to fascinate the world and dominate many cultural aspects of modern Western life. From language to law, the Romans left quite the legacy.
But one thing they didn’t leave was a clear successor to the Roman Empire.
If the Roman Empire still existed today, how could we determine who its ruler should be?

Tag: French