Le Siège de Calais, hailed by its author in 1765 as France’s ‘première tragédie nationale’, rolled into Paris like a storm. Pierre-Laurent de Belloy’

The first study of French theater and war at a time of global revolutions, colonial violence, and radical social transformation.

Casts new light on of the 'official' French nineteenth-century narrative by examining how historians and philosophers conceived of the country's past.

Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-r