L'Étranger Podcast
You think you know French history. The Revolution. Napoleon. The guillotine. But France's past is wilder, darker and more extraordinary than any highlight reel suggests.
From the medieval battlefields that forged a nation, to the corridors of Versailles, to the smoking ruins of the Paris Commune - French history is an endless procession of towering personalities, catastrophic miscalculations and moments that changed the world forever. Most of it you've never heard.
L'Étranger takes a fresh look at the stories you think you know, and shines a light on the ones you don't. French history from a foreign perspective - told with curiosity, passion and a deep love for one of the most fascinating countries on earth.
Episodes
5 episodes
Episode 5: Vercingetorix - The Last Free Gaul
Before France, there was Gaul.Long before the France of Joan of Arc, Napoleon, or the Revolution, the territory we now call France was home to something older and wilder. A patchwork of Celtic tribes, Druid priests, and hilltop fortresse...
Episode 4: Cardinal Richelieu - The Most Dangerous Man in Europe
He served a king he privately considered inadequate. Outmanoeuvred a queen mother who thought she had destroyed him. Crushed the most powerful nobles in France, starved a city into submission, and rebuilt French power from the ground up....
Episode 3: Joan of Arc - The Girl Who Saved France
A teenage girl from a village no one had heard of walks into a royal court and tells the King of France she has been sent by God to save his kingdom.He listens.In the spring of 1429, Joan of Arc arrived at the court of the ...
Episode 2: The Day the King Lost His Head
A king is put on trial by his own people. And in his final moments, he turns to an Irishman.In January 1793, Louis XVI stood before the National Convention, accused not just of crimes, but of betraying the nation itself.Wha...
Episode 1: The War That Made the Modern World
The war that reshaped Europe began with a diplomatic insult and ended with the collapse of an empire.In 1870, France and Prussia went to war. Within months, Napoleon III was captured, Paris was under siege, and a new German Empire...