If you check out The Siècle's YouTube page, you might notice a bit of a visual makeover in progress...

I am trying to find a digital copy of Laurence Constant-Ancet's "Félix Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau : un itinéraire, de la Révolution à la monarchie de Juillet" with some urgency. If you can help feel free to DM!

Time for a night of light musical theatre! This should have a happy ending, right?

In case anyone wonders: I don't use AI tools to write The Siècle, or to record it. (The em-dashes are all me.) I've occasionally used AI for research, but only to help find sources. I never use AI summaries as source material. More:

What a great opportunity for content I can put on thesiecle.com.

because one (1) person asked for it here is a thread comparing the various governments of France from 1789 to the present as Arrested Development characters.

I'm one of the guest voices here recording a story from 15th Century Burgundy, about a soldier who insisted that the straps for attaching armor on a prisoner's shirt constituted "weapons," and was therefore forced by an angry noble to fight a duel with only buckle-straps for weapons.

ICYMI: new episode!

In 1830, France's king and his ministers suspended the constitution. But the people of Paris resisted and overthrew the regime. Now crowds are chanting "Death to the ministers." The ex-ministers are on trial — but so is France's new regime. NEW EPISODE: thesiecle.com/episode49/

Someone I know once jokingly described the Marquis de Lafayette as "a golden retriever in human form" and he doesn't exactly do a great job disproving the allegations here.

NEW EPISODE: The July Revolution is done, but Paris isn't sure if it's done with revolution. Protests and riots, treason trials and lynch mobs, suspicious deaths and epic betrayals — it's all here in Episode 49: The Trial. thesiecle.com/episode49/

Hello! Are we listening to the latest gastro-adventure? podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t... #πodcast #food #greekfood #greekcheese #greekrecipes

Merry Sièclemas!

A little oiseau just told me to listen for something new tomorrow... 😉

I get a lot of spam on my podcast email, usually people offering to SEO my YouTube videos or whatever. But the ~weirdest~ spam is this Italian pergola manufacturer, whose mailing list I have been unable to get off of for YEARS.

There are few types of paragraphs I enjoy writing more than "Here's a new person, but actually, he's been in the background for half a dozen episodes and I'm only properly introducing him now."

🤫

France's Bourbon Restoration seemed like it might last forever, before being swept away in three days in 1830. How that happened is fascinating, and to understand it better I want (in this thread) to focus on the Restoration's opposition politicians. 1/

It's morning on Monday, July 26, 1830, and the Duchesse de Gontaut, royal governess, brings King Charles X his grandchildren. He asks if she's read today's Moniteur. "No, Sire, it is stupid, & no one gets anything out of it." "I fancy it will not bore you today!" #julyrevlive

Henri V of France, the sole legitimate heir to France’s Bourbon dynasty, will return in Avengers: Doomsday (but he’s got some stipulations about the logo).

As someone born in Argentina, it was so interesting to learn from @dhmontgomery.com at @thesiecle.com about an important original driving force behind the Monroe Doctrine. thesiecle.com/episode19/

I currently have 51 Google Translate tabs open related to my forthcoming episode, why does my browser keep crashing?

Today's challenge: Find a way to accurately describe the August 1830 death of the Duc de Bourbon without getting my podcast slapped with an Explicit tag...

Okay, rude.

Throwing this out for anyone who might be able to help! I am trying to track down the woman mentioned in these documents, the memoirs of the Comte de Semallé (1772-1863), and in this 1829 report on former colonists from Saint-Domingue/Haiti. Claims made about her in these sources (cont):

A teaser trailer for the next episode of The Siècle (featuring guest narration from @lafayettepodcast.com!):

A teaser trailer for the next episode of The Siècle (featuring guest narration from @lafayettepodcast.com!):

Very grateful, when browsing the French history section at my local bookstore, to find a book that doesn’t make me read the back cover or inside flap to decide if I should buy it.

It's remarkable how many amazing resources there are for 19th Century French history, freely available online. (And one day, perhaps, a vintage copy on my shelves...)

If you haven't already, you should subscribe to The Siècle on YouTube:

1/ Studying 19th Century France, you quickly learn that many people think "Les Misérables" is set in the French Revolution. (It's not.) For @today.yougov.com, I polled Americans about when they think it's set. Lots of Not Sures. But 2/3 of those with an opinion say it IS in the French Revolution:

ICYMI, new episode!

A fascinating and compelling portrait (the podcast not the doodle 🍐) Looking forward to more great episodes!

can't be denied philipon got his ass

How do you do, Fellow Citoyens?

King Louis-Philippe I was conscientious and hard-working. So it's a little unfortunate — but extremely funny — that the defining image of him became a caricature drawing his jowly face as a pear. Find out more in my latest episode! thesiecle.com/episode48/

NEW EPISODE: After the July Revolution of 1830, France has a new king. And Louis-Philippe wants everyone to know he's not like a regular king, he's a cool king. thesiecle.com/episode48/

Surprise! @jeanettepatrick.bsky.social and I have teamed up with @lynnprobbins.bsky.social and @patricklong.bsky.social at Primary Source Media to bring you Revolutions in Retrospect, a podcast that explores the histories of the revolutions that remade the Atlantic world.

Folks might want to set aside half an hour of listening time on Thursday. No reason in particular…

LLMs have tons of accuracy issues but I must note as an expert that 19th Century *human* historians were also very capable of confidently hallucinating “facts,” extrapolating wild nonsense based on a single misunderstanding.

I encounter more DNS errors trying to visit Gallica than any other site on the Internet…

“Soult was no more a party politician than [Marshal Étienne] Gérard, yet he was a strong believer in discipline and order, and this he imposed [as War Minister] with an efficiency he had not always shown on the battlefield.” — Hugh Collingham

Pretty good haul for a neighborhood used bookstore!

To my listeners for whom English is a 2nd language, YouTube is strongly encouraging me to turn on "automatic dubbing" for The Siècle, in which their AI will produce translated dubs in other languages. My first instinct is "hell no" but I'm willing to be persuaded — do any of you like this feature?

A long thread worth reading if you can stop scrolling. You will see how much history rhymes. Quite astonishingly so, actually.

Can anyone suggest any good sources (ideally at least *somewhat* specialized, not zoomed-out pop-histories) I could cite to discuss the limited constitutional role British monarchs played circa 1830 (so I can contrast it to Louis-Philippe's conception of his role)?

Are any of my followers historians specializing in the American Revolution?

In December 1976, thieves broke into the Louvre. An alarm prevented them from staying long, but they made off with a priceless artifact: a diamond-studded sword made for the 1825 coronation of King Charles X. (It is still missing.)

The Doctrinaire leader Pierre Paul Royer-Collard was once asked whether he had called his erstwhile disciple François Guizot an "austere intriguer." "I did not say austere," Royer-Collard replied.