France on vo.rs

Hellfest: France's Cathedral to Loud

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Clisson is the kind of town French tourist boards photograph at golden hour. Seven and a half thousand people, a ruined medieval castle on a rocky spur where the Sèvre Nantaise meets the Moine, and — this is the strange part — a skyline of Italianate loggias and terracotta arcades, because a sculptor named Lemot came home from Italy in 1807 and rebuilt the place to look like Tuscany. Around it spread the vineyards of Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine, Clisson itself now a named cru of the appellation, the white wine that goes with the oysters up in Nantes. It is bucolic, Catholic, deeply provincial western France. And for four days every June it becomes the loudest square kilometre on the continent.

The Panama Canal Bribery Scandal of the 1900s: An Early Template for Financial Cover-Ups

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 07:24:00 +0000

The Dreyfus Affair: How Forged Documents Nearly Broke a Nation

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:54:00 +0000

The Man in the Iron Mask: A Prisoner, a Legend, and a Velvet Cloth

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

On the morning of 19 November 1703, a prisoner died in the Bastille. The register recorded him under the name Marchioly, gave his age vaguely, and noted that he had been buried the following day in the parish of Saint-Paul. The gravediggers were paid, the cell was emptied, and the furniture he had used was reportedly burned. He had been a prisoner of the French crown for more than three decades, moved from fortress to fortress under the same jailer, and in all that time almost no one had learned his name or seen his face uncovered. From that scrap of official secrecy grew one of the most durable legends in Europe: a man whose face was locked inside a mask of iron so that no living soul could recognise the king he might have unseated. The truth is quieter, sadder, and in its own way more interesting than the iron.