Episodes
List of latest episodes of L'Étranger can be found here. Follow on Bluesky or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be notifed when the latest episode drops.
France, 1429. A kingdom is on the brink of collapse.
The English have been besieging Orléans for months. The heir to the French throne has fled south and is clinging to power by a thread. An alliance between England and the most powerful duke in France has turned a war between two kingdoms into a civil war as well. By the spring of 1429, English victory looks not just likely, but inevitable.
And then a teenage girl from a village in Lorraine arrives at the royal court and says she has been sent by God to fix it.
What follows is one of the most extraordinary stories in history. A seventeen year old with no title, no army and no right to be in any room she walked into, who lifted a siege in nine days, destroyed the English field army at Patay, and delivered a king to his coronation through enemy territory. Who was then abandoned by that king, sold to his enemies, subjected to a rigged trial by the finest legal minds in Europe, and who never broke. Not once. Until they had to manufacture her downfall.
In the third episode of L'Étranger, we tell the full story: from the village of Domrémy to the court at Chinon, from the walls of Orléans to the coronation at Reims, from the gate at Compiègne that closed too early to the public square in Rouen where it ended.
And the question that has never quite gone away, did the king she saved lift a finger to save her?
France, 1793. A king is about to lose his head.
The trial of Louis XVI lasted weeks. The debate that preceded it lasted months. And the Revolution that made it inevitable had been building for years - fuelled in part by the very ideas Louis himself had helped export to America.
It is one of the most dramatic and morally complex events in French history. A decent man, catastrophic in power, walking to his death with more dignity than he ever managed in life. A nation that didn't want to kill its king, and did it anyway, by the narrowest of margins.
In the second episode of L'Étranger, we tell the full story: from the Flight to Varennes to the iron strongbox hidden in the walls of the Tuileries, from Robespierre's extraordinary speech to the scaffold at the Place de la Révolution.
And the Irishman who held the king's hand at the very end.
France, 1870. An empire is about to fall.
The Franco-Prussian War lasted less than seven months. In that time, Napoleon III surrendered his army in tears to a Prussian chancellor in an inn courtyard, Paris was besieged and starved for 135 days, and the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles - the most French palace on earth.
It is one of the most consequential and least understood wars in modern history. The conflict that ended the Second French Empire, unified Germany, and planted the seeds of both World Wars.
In the first episode of L'Étranger, we tell the full story - from Bismarck's trap to the fall of Paris, from the battlefield of Sedan to the bitter peace that left France humiliated and Europe transformed.