France

A French-Colombian professor wants to rewire our metropolitan areas – and the city of lights is first

One scene, for which she was not prepared, defined the career of an actress who never wanted to be a star

What a new collection by some of France’s greatest writers tells us about the art of the short story

For over half a century, a Parisian company based in an old munitions factory has been delivering explosive theatre

How France’s invasion of the Ruhr and its execution of a saboteur 100 years ago fuelled Hitler’s rise

The French composer who grew up in a cult and found solace in the power of music

Nearly 20 years after his death Sacha Distel is enjoying an afterlife through his music

Not many people travel from the extreme left to the hard right and back again. But Robert Ménard has

Only a third of Leavers still see it as a success. So why won’t Starmer speak up?

He is little-known today, but when he died in 1952, thousands lined the streets of Paris to show respect. What happened to Paul Éluard?

The French director's obsessive desire for perfection proved ultimately self-destructive

Despite British perfidy over the protocol, and the reneging of basic humanitarian values when it comes to migration, the French seem more bemused than belligerent

The National Gallery’s failure to properly showcase female artists continues with its treatment of Eva Gonzalès

Migrants on the southern border are causing France to re-examine its own history

Anne de Henning left a career in Paris fashion to become a photo-journalist – and ended up recording ‘history in the making’ at the birth of Bangladesh

Why Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel remains a story for all eras

Headscarf protests by Iranian women have electrified the world. Will a similar rebellion follow in France?

The prestigious French award is a reliable source of controversy

The lives of the early 20th-century gentry who fled to safety – but also to poverty – in Paris

Macron wants a reset, but unravelling the country’s tangled legacy in the continent is proving harder than it sounds

The one-time middleweight Greco-Roman wrestling champion of Europe was a a surprisingly nuanced screen presence

Netflix's retelling of a French tragedy depicts the humanity of events with a beautiful rawness

Kylian Mbappé is becoming such a prima donna that he risks destabilising the clubs that pay his fortune

The stripped-down prose and raw honesty of Nobel prize for literature winner Annie Ernaux

After fighting the Nazis in the second world war, Paul Barrière fought to save his outlawed sport

Before the Romans arrived in south-west France along with Latin, people there spoke what we now call Aquitanian

The city of light always looks lovely in films like Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.. but the truth about the French capital is a little different

A recent visit to Algeria was part of efforts to write a new chapter in diplomacy - but the ghosts of France's exploitative colonial past linger on

He still dabbled in the art world, but the last four decades of the Frenchman’s life were focused almost entirely on the game

The comic actor said he’d never join a club that would admit him. Will Liz Truss apply the same rule to Macron’s new European forum?

The city of light has – finally – stopped taking its historic trees for granted and is devising ways of preserving them

At the height of his fame, the star of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day called time on his movie career. Why? So he could study philosophy at the Sorbonne