Europe’s increasingly muscular brand of secularism has an unofficial capital: Strasbourg, France. Over the past decade, the quaint city of 273,000 near the German border — home to the European Parliament and other key international bodies —...

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified. Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated...

Gwen Le Berre doesn’t understand the ‘’electrometer'’ machine he keeps in his Normandy bedroom. He just knows it’s a piece of kit from the Church of Scientology, which he blames for his mother’s death. Four days...

One word was on the minds of Italians yesterday: blackmail. Could the claims emerging daily against Silvio Berlusconi leave him open to the kind of persuasion that makes holding political office impossible? Would he be tempted to cut a deal to suppress...

Napoleon massacred more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves and should be remembered as a genocidal dictator and inspiration for Hitler rather than a military genius and founder of modern France, a French historian said yesterday.