On April 9th 1865, the Battle of Appomattox in Virginia ended the Civil War. It was the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States, which set off the fuse in 1861 and provoked the secession of ten so-called Confederate Southern states. Lincoln was against slavery, as were the northern states, while the southerners could not imagine for a moment parting with their slaves, who were indispensable labour. After four years of civil war, the Northerners were victorious and slavery was abolished.

This July 16th 1918 was a day like any other at the Ipatiev villa in Ekaterimburg. The morning sun had given way to a grey day. Alexis was getting a bit cold and Tatiana was reading the Bible to her mother. At 4 p.m. Nicholas and his four daughters went down to the garden for their daily walk. After dinner, Tatiana and Nicolas played cards and went to bed at quarter past ten. The temperature was 15 degrees. Time passed slowly here...

For many years, the Wars of Religion bloodied the kingdom of France. Violent and hateful, they turned the country into a battlefield in the name of God. Two kings of France were assassinated by fanatics who believed they had a mission. Today we turn to King Henry III, who reigned in an extremely troubled time.

On the morning of July 15th 1997, on the porch of his sumptuous 5,800-square-metre villa in Miami Beach, Florida, a man was returning home. He had just bought some newspapers. The man was Gianni Versace, founder of the luxury brand that bore his name. Two shots rang out. The first bullet fractured the bottom of his skull and the base of his brain. The second bullet lodged in the right side of his face, near his nose, before fracturing the top of his skull. Versace collapsed...

On March the 1st 2005, Edouard Stern did not show up for work. He could not be reached by telephone. His colleagues were worried because this was not his boss's style. You don't become the thirty-eighth richest person in France by lazing around in bed on morning. They went to his Geneva home and it was Dolores, the cleaning lady, who allowed them to enter the luxurious flat whose alarm had not been set. Something must have happened to Mr Edouard...

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...

In the early 1930s in Spain, Federico García Lorca was a very famous poet and theatre maker. Romancero gitano, a collection of poems inspired by old Andalusian legends, brought him to the forefront of young Spanish poets. He was known and appreciated throughout Spain thanks to his travelling theatre company, La Barraca. It toured the rural provinces performing plays from the Spanish classical repertoire to the widest possible audience. The aim was to bring theatre to the most disadvantaged social strata who did not usually have access to it...

Like many people, you probably know the story of Empress Sissi from the series of films that have been shown on television. The young and beautiful Romy Schneider gave a face and a smile to Elisabeth of Wittelsbach, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. Her life, however, was a succession of dramas, as was her death in 1898.

Prague, May 27th 1942. Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik have been waiting for more than an hour in camouflage along a road in the suburb of Holechovitz. They are waiting to receive the signal that Reinhard Heydrich's Mercedes convertible was finally approaching. These two Czechoslovak resistance fighters were about to accomplish their mission, Operation Anthropoid...

Wild Bill Hickok is considered the first representative of order in the United States. He lived in a dangerous period, that of the conquest of the West, when bandits, thieves and lawless men abounded. He himself had a very personal sense of justice : more a professional killer than a servant of the law, he revealed very early on a certain aptitude for getting rid of his adversaries.

When Grigori Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, in 1903, his reputation was already very controversial. A wise man and healer for some, a debauchee, thief, alcoholic and womanizer for others, he had every intention of making his way to the tsar. For the capital's elite, this Siberian peasant's son became a kind of charismatic spiritual master. His strangeness intrigued and his powers fascinated.

December 8th, 1980. Annie Leibovitz, a photographer specialising in the portraits of stars, went to the Dakota Building in New York. She had an appointment with John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono for a photo shoot for Rolling Stones magazine. The photograph she took of the couple became extremely famous. It shows John Lennon naked, curled up in a fetal position, embracing his wife, who is fully dressed. A beautiful photo of a happy, fulfilled couple...

Caligula marked history by his cruelty and madness. He became master of the world, that is, emperor of Rome, at the age of twenty-four, although he was not destined to do so. But power undoubtedly went to his head...