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“Kings,” Louis XIV once observed, “should enjoy giving pleasure” and when it came to the fairer sex, he obeyed this precept zealously and often. “They’re all good enough for him, provided they’re women,” his sister-in-law remarked, “peasants, gardeners’ daughters, chambermaids, ladies of quality”; women of every stripe benefited from the Sun King’s sexual largesse. Neither the bonds of matrimony (to the sad, neglected Marie-Thérèse of Spain) nor the intrigues of his “official” mistresses (one of whom, Athénaïs de Montespan, wasn’t above spreading the rumor that a particular rival had scabs all over her body) could deter him from sharing the...

Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul has made politics a lot more interesting this year. He believes a lot of things the GOP establishment doesn’t, and his entry into the race has made people discuss ideas that wouldn’t otherwise get put into the public forum. I salute him for contributing, but would rather take a pass on one his least useful contributions. Ron Paul has suggested taking the United States Dollar back on the Gold Standard and doing away with The Federal Reserve. For some reason, this whole debate over Ron Paul's platform and on full-bodied and specie-backed currencies, reminded me...

AS THE FINAL credits rolled for Sofia Coppola's new candy-colored teen-dream film fantasy about history's most notorious poor little rich girl, "Marie-Antoinette," the audience at the Palais du Festival began to hiss like a box of snakes. And then they booed. Booing at the Cannes film festival, at a screening before an audience of a thousand international movie critics and film writers, is never a pleasant way for a director to start the day. While no one in the mob was shouting "Off with her head," the European press couldn't resist the pun. "At Cannes, Marie-Antoinette Guillotined," declared a 24-hour...

PARIS (AFP) - The US Library of Congress and the French National Library have joined forces to launch a bilingual website exploring the history of the French presence in North America from the 16th to early 19th centuries. The site, which includes more than 100,000 images from the rare book collections of the two libraries, was launched at a ceremony in Paris on Tuesday. "In developing this web presentation both national libraries have done what they do best -- sift through an exhaustive amount of material in order to make our common histories comprehensible and accessible to the public," said...

The ignorance of political ranter Dick Morris is amazing. In a spiel for the NY Post (07/02/03), which is part of Rupert Murdock’s Evil Empire, he demanded that the U.S. Ambassador to France, Howard Leach, be sacked. Leach incurred Morris’s wrath for daring to suggest that the friction between the U.S. and France, over the Iraq War, is “in the past and now part of history.” Morris insisted that the French had betrayed America by refusing to endorse our invasion of Iraq. What drivel! The truth is the French were right. There were no WMD in Iraq, it was never...

<p>It seemed like a joke at first: A handful of restaurants changing the names of their French fries to "freedom fries," a few bartenders pouring French wine down street drains and a chain of French-owned hotels lowering their tricolor flags. The craziest idea, appropriately enough, came from Congress, when Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a Florida Republican, proposed exhuming the patriot graves of American soldiers buried in France and bringing them back to the U.S.</p>

The Little Tyrant A review of Napoleon: A Penguin Life, by Paul Johnson.Why do so many western intellectuals excuse thuggery and whitewash the crimes of megalomaniacs? I have received more angry mail, for example, over a brief article I published a few years ago called "Alexander the Killer" than about anything I have ever written. And the myth of Napoleon, like that of Alexander the Great, is also deeply enshrined in our collective romance—to question either risks real outrage. Both dictators were eerily similar in ways that go beyond being military geniuses who ruled entire continents by their early 30s....

"To the French lying is simply talking" -- Fran Lebowitz January 24, 2003: The utopian fantasists in our State Dept., having persuaded Pres. Bush to place his faith in the UN are now obliged to face reality. Will they? Colin Powell, the chief utopian, argued against deposing Saddam in 1991 in favor of the wishful fantasy that military defeat would be sufficient to defang him. It wasn't, because in Saddam's psychopathic world of brute force, survival against the United States constitutes victory and is concrete evidence of our weakness. Saddam would never allow an enemy to escape alive if he...