Word: xvi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During the reign of France's Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette supposedly once asked the Royal Finance Minister, "What will you do about the deficit, Monsieur le Ministre?" His reply: "Nothing, Madame. It is too serious...
...quickly won the friendship of George Washington, spent $3 million of his own funds on the colonial cause and performed bravely at Brandywine and Yorktown. When word of his exploits reached home, he became a drawing-room sensation. Beautiful women pursued him upon his return, and Louis XVI was even moved to authorize French aid for the Americans. Lafayette had convinced his countrymen, as he wrote in 1777, that "America's happiness is intimately linked to that of mankind...
...Nuit de Varennes. Louis XVI's flight from the French Revolution is acutely observed by Director Ettore Scola, who concludes that history is an accident, ideology an irony, humanity's greatest blessing its distractibility...
Suspenders hold up a lot of history. First worn by French aristocrats in the court of Louis XVI, they were considered a mark of the well-dressed American man from colonial times to the early 20th century. As late as 1910 it was difficult to buy a pair of trousers with belt loops. But when World War I doughboys came marching home, they wore coarse yarn belts, and by the late 1920s the popularity of suspenders began to wane...
...NUIT DE VARENNES is a multi-color, multi-costume pageant of one of the most famous days in French history--the moment in 1791 when Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette and the whole French monarchy collapsed once and for all. The occasion is no less than the climax of the Revolution, a pivotal moment in the story of Europe. The film, though, misses weighty historical drama by a good deal. Relegating the central political figures of the Revolution to the periphery of his film, Scola focuses on a lively troupe of contemporary notables, who talk and romp their way across...