L'Étranger Podcast

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 fortresses. A world that had existed for centuries. And a world that was about to be destroyed. In 52 BC, Julius Caesar was eight years into his conquest of Gaul. He had p...

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. You probably know Cardinal Richelieu from Alexandre Dumas. The cold, scheming villain in the black robes, pulling strings while the Musketeers blunder around bein...

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 embattled dauphin Charles with an impossible mission: lift the siege of Orléans, lead him through enemy territory, and deliver him to Reims to be crowned King of France. She w...

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. What followed was one of the most extraordinary political moments in modern history. A trial where the verdict seemed inevitable, but the arguments were anything but. Where law,...

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 had been proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. In this opening episode, we explore the causes, course and consequences of the Franco-Prussian War. From Bisma...