Raphaël Six

Portrayed by their contemporaries, the facial features of the two men illustrated on these pages – who, without ever having met one another, were perhaps the greatest antagonists in the 16th century – are impressive for their eloquence. * * * St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the prime of his …

The Ancien Régime – as the political and social system in France during the period immediately preceding the Revolution of 1789 came to be known – was a complex era. In it, all the tradition forged over the centuries by Christian Civilization often coexisted with the worst foolishness stemming from …

Whether as a hero or a villain, you could say that Talleyrand is a fairytale character… Of princely extraction, born in an “enchanted land”, which was the old France of the Ancien Régime, the kingdom of good taste, etiquette and douceur de vivre,1 Charles-Maurice finds in his story a surprising …

It was raining heavily in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1968. Some followers of Dr. Plinio had travelled to that city to carry out a campaign, a term used by members of the movement he founded to refer to the organisation’s public demonstrations, always in defence of the …