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In May 1968 students in Paris occupied university buildings to launch an avalanche of protests and strikes against the authorities. This was only the beginning of a wide-ranging social and cultural...
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The French adventurer and anarchist Zo d'Axa (1864-1930) exposed all kinds of misbehaviour in his magazine l'Endehors. In his opinion, hypocrisy ranked high in the spectrum of vice and he spotted...
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The Dreyfus affair had divided the French socialists on their attitude towards the (bourgeois) republican government. The 1899 socialist conference in Salle Japy in Paris, for the first time brought...
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Copper coins of unknown origin infiltrate France in 1780. The public at the marketplace and in shops is aggressively forced to accept the money. The Chamber of Finance under King Louis XVI issues an...
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The French revolutionary François Babeuf (1760-1797) went by the name of Gracchus. The Roman peoples' tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were his role model. In 1794 Babeuf had to hide from his...
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At the end of the seventeenth century, the French government strongly controlled the national press. Censorship was effective, and non-Catholics had a difficult time. Especially the Protestant...
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Socialist politician and philosopher Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was accorded the status of 'grand homme de la patrie' (great man of the nation) when his ashes were removed to the Panthéon in Paris on 23...
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Eugène Humbert and his partner Jeanne were advocates of free love and birth control. They spread these ideas not only in writing but in practice as well. In pre-war France this resulted in various...
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In February 1894 a bomb placed by an anarchist in Paris created an enormous fear of anarchism. This was the background for summoning the anarchist Jean Grave to court on 26 February. Grave was...
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The world exhibition of 1937 in Paris was special. While the Civil War raged in Spain and Germany tested its new weapons of war, in Paris various countries exhibited their most beautiful, modern...
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