France

A fictitious army group commanded by a general who wasn't actually leading it convinced German high command the real invasion would land at Calais, weeks after it had already landed at Normandy.

The theorist behind a landmark treatise on raising children placed several of his own in a foundling hospital, and even he could not settle on one consistent explanation for why.

Joan of Arc's own words survive in unusual detail because two hostile courts, one convicting her and one clearing her decades later, both wrote everything down.

The line most people quote to sum up Louis XIV's absolutism does not actually appear in the standard record of what he said when he took personal power in 1661, which was a considerably more measured statement about governing for himself from then on.

Montesquieu's account of English government, quoted in colonial America more than any source but the Bible, may not have described how England was actually governed so much as how he wanted it to look.

Napoleon's own legal code freed Jews and abolished feudal privilege across Europe while, in the same years, he reinstated slavery in France's colonies, a contradiction his admirers and critics still tend to argue separately rather than together.

The scholar who inherited Descartes's papers edited his letters into a more saintly shape after his death, and even the standard story of his fatal illness has since been challenged.

1918

An emperor's surrender on a battlefield turned into a revolution back home two days later, which meant France's government changed hands before anyone in Paris had lost a single soldier there.

732

A German general designed a battle specifically to kill French soldiers rather than to capture ground, a strategy of attrition so explicit it survives in his own recorded planning language.

2016

1997

A French army convicted the wrong officer of treason on flimsy handwriting analysis, then spent twelve years defending the verdict rather than admitting the mistake.

1598

2003

1993

A telegram edited to sound ruder than it was pushed France into a war it declared and lost within a month, a defeat that finished German unification and started forty-three years of French resentment over two provinces.

A war named for its length actually ran on and off for a hundred and sixteen years, and its opening dispute was less about the French crown than about who an English king had to bow to as a landlord.

Working-class Parisians did most of the street fighting, a wealthy cousin of the deposed king took the throne instead of the crowd's own choice, and the arrangement pleased almost no one who had actually fought for it.

2016

2015

Britain's bill for winning a war fought on five continents came due in its American colonies, which makes this war's real ending arguably the Revolution it helped provoke a decade later.

1150

1789

1802

1957

1919

Louis XIV got the Bourbon king on Spain's throne he had spent the war fighting for, and still ended it financially exhausted while Britain rose without placing its own candidate anywhere near that throne at all.

1789

Voltaire's most famous line about defending a view he despised was never actually written by him, invented instead by a biographer paraphrasing his attitude nearly two centuries later.