History

I can still hear her voice—confident, clear and a little plummy. After all, by that time, in 1989, she was 79 years old and had been through a lot. In fact, she’d been through...

Extravagant and sublime, the jewelry René Lalique designed at the turn of the 20th century makes him one of the most brilliant creative artists of Art Nouveau in France. In 1910, his work too...

An extraordinary exhibit offers the public a rare look inside the French Embassy in Rome.

Her real name was Martha Jane Cannary Burke, but she became famous during her lifetime as Calamity Jane (1856-1903), a frontierswoman and companion of Wild Bill Hickok who followed the Gold Rush and later...

A Best of France selection. Nothing really destined the Place Vendôme to be the nexus of French haute joaillerie, except that the sheer beauty of its late 17th-century architecture makes it a jewel in itself....

A Best of France selection. In 1740, a factory was established in the town of Vincennes, just outside of Paris, to produce soft-paste porcelain—a substitute for true, hard-paste porcelain—since deposits of the necessary ingredient for the...

Almost everyone has heard of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, a major 18th-century French artist, but few know that he was born in Grasse, France’s perfume capital, and the son of a maître gantier et...

When Henri IV succeeded to the throne of France in 1589, he was king of Béarn and Navarre. Knowing that his proud people would not relish being absorbed by the French, he declared to...

Nowhere else in France does the concept of terroir mean more than it does in Burgundy. Alsatian wine is also based on defined plots of land, but grape varietals take prominence; Bordeaux's château estates...

The bicentenary of Chopin's birth is being celebrated with great ceremony all over the world this year.