On Sunday December 2nd 1945, on the Boulevard des Invalides in Paris, a man was changing the flat tyre of his car. His companion had just gone to get a taxi. He was alone and it was raining. His body was found a few metres from his vehicle, dead, with a large-calibre bullet in his back. In his pocket, twelve thousand francs and his papers : Robert Denoël, forty-three years old, one of the greatest French publishers, had just been murdered.

On 22nd November 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was assassinated while on an election tour in Dallas. His presumed assassin was quickly arrested. He was Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the book depository from which the fatal shots were fired. He denied any involvement in the crime...

November 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was in Dallas, Texas. Although very popular, he chose to start his re-election tour in the bastion of the American right that hated him. Several advisers suggested that he cancelled his visit. Hate songs were sung in town and posters have been put up accusing him of treason. But the president persisted in his choice...

On 31st July 1914, Jean Jaurès, founder and director of the newspaper L'Humanité,took his journalists to a café for dinner. He pushed open the door of a restaurant on the corner of rue du Croissant and rue Montmartre. The Café du Croissant was crowded but the owner found them a table near the window overlooking the street: Jaurès was a regular and the furniture could be pushed aside for him...

The James family was on the Southern side when the American Civil War began in 1861. Jesse was too young to be a soldier, so at sixteen he joined the gang of a notorious outlaw named Quantrill. He took part in the massacre of the village of Lawrence and boasted of having killed thirty-six men in a single day...

The 1980s in France were marked by the songs of Jean-Jacques Goldman. With Il suffira d'un signe, Quand la musique est bonne and Je te donne, he reached the top of the Top 50. In 1987 he wrote a song called La-bas. It was a duet he was to perform with a woman. It is about a man who wants to leave and travel and a woman who begs him to stay and start a family with her. To record it, he needed a female voice...

The weather was fine and warm in August 1572. Paris was celebrating : a royal wedding was taking place in the Louvre between Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre. This surprising marriage between a Catholic princess and a Protestant king was the result of the efforts of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. She hoped to appease the religious wars that were bloodying the kingdom...

Malcolm Little was 13 years old when a teacher told him that he would never be a lawyer because he was black. For white Americans in the 1950s, young black men were nothing but seeds of gallows. And the young boy had no trouble embodying this destiny. His delinquent youth led to an early addiction to drugs and a stay in prison. It was there that, at the age of 21, he began to educate himself, because he understood that without an education, one gets nowhere in this world. It was also in prison that he joined the Nation of Islam. This was a small organisation that called for the creation of a state for blacks in the American South and considered whites to be the incarnation of the devil on earth...