I don't know if there's any website I experience more difficulty accessing than Gallica. Any given day it seems seems like a coin flip whether I'll experience errors trying to load it.

Unknown artist, "Portrait of Jacques Laffitte." Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featuring arguably too much Jacques Laffitte — or, as wags called him during his personal and political struggles in 1831, "Jacques Lafaillite" — Jacques the Bankrupt.

Photo of a cup of tea and several books, including “The July Monarchy: A Political History of France, 1830-1848”

Episode 50 chugging along!

The Siècle History Podcast The Siècle: Chronicling the forgotten French century from 1814 to 1914. A history podcast by David H. Montgomery.

If you want “reputable,” I’m not a credentialed academic, but you can reference my show’s extensive bibliography or the footnoted citations attached to each episode’s full transcript at thesiecle.com.

What a wild little story. (And the guy doubled down!) Sadly The Siècle does not appear to be popular enough to warrant the honor of being cloned.

Probably too late for me to counsel about the SEO difficulties involved in giving one’s French history podcast a name in French with an accent.

In hindsight, given how long it took me to nail this down, I absolutely had time to do an Interlibrary Loan request. But I'm normally writing on a short time frame, trying to turn around an episode in the next few weeks, so I often (mistakenly) pass on slow-moving solutions like ILL.

A photo of the family tree of the Lepeletier (or Le Peletier) family, from Laurence Constant's biography of Felix Lepeletier.

Laurence Constant's French-language biography of Felix Le Peletier didn't cover the Granville incident, but it did include a family tree that would have saved me a lot of headaches. That said, I had a reason for not reading this earlier — it required either ILL or really high shipping costs.

Barring that, I got unlucky by finding an 1877 history of the Trial of the Ministers written by Ernest Daudet for the Revue des Deux Mondes magazine, in which he mis-identified the Marquise — and not his later, expanded account in a book, where he identified her correctly and discussed his mistake.

So, knowing what I know now, how could I have gone about researching this in a saner way?

The simplest answer would have been finding Yves Murie's recent book on Polignac's flight to Granville, which laid everything out. Better Googling in French might have led me there.

"It'll be easy. How many Saint-Fargeaus could there be? Two? Three?"

In case you missed it — new episode! Come listen to me going slowly mad:

Episode 16: Romantiques A discussion with Philippe Moisan, a professor of French at Grinnell College, about the literary movement of French Romanticism — everything from what made i...

Over the past month I've suddenly getting lots of downloads for this old episode about Romanticism. I wonder if it got assigned for a college class or something?

Somehow this makes Felix’s playboy lifestyle make more sense to me now.

I can see why he might prefer to wear a wig even as they fell out of fashion!

This morning I closed literally 300+ open browser tabs for this research project, some of which I've had open since November.

Relatedly, my computer is suddenly running much more smoothly.

If he did it can't have been too bad, or I doubt he'd have been eating in public where an assassin could find him.

Thanks for looking into it! I'll take down the image.

Caricature of the 1830 arrest of Jules de Polignac.

Not that I found, other than this one. But I'm certainly not confident that doesn't mean there's none there. Gallica's search can be unreliable.

I was surprised I didn't find more caricatures of Polignac's arrest! It's the sort of event that I was sure would have been widely mocked in art, especially in the newly liberated post-July Revolution Paris newspapers. (And I'm sure it was but perhaps they haven't been digitized.)

Huh. I'll dig a bit deeper. Wikimedia does not source the image's provenance, unfortunately.

Yes! Though in my particular case the compelling mystery of the David painting was one of several topics that swamped my initial efforts to research the Marquise via web searches. 😂

I'm sure both are related to the same family! Though there were multiple branches of Le Peletiers besides just the Saint-Fargeau clan. (Another complicating factor in trying to conduct internet research on an unknown Le Peletier!)

Fact Check 4: The Marquise of Saint-Fargeau The Marquise de Saint-Fargeau tried to help Jules de Polignac flee France after the July Revolution. But who was this mysterious noblewoman? It seemed like a...

NEW EPISODE: After launching a failed coup, France's blue-blooded ex-prime minister Jules de Polignac tried to flee the country disguised as a noblewoman's manservant. (It went poorly.) But just who was the mysterious "Marquise de Saint-Fargeau" who helped him?

Merry Sièclemas!

Screenshot of an Indiana University Libraries entry for "Histoire des entomologistes français : 1750-1950" by Jean Gouillard

@rlspang.bsky.social Can you recommend someone at IU who might be able to photograph/scan a couple pages of this book for me? I'm looking for just a particular entry, for Amédée Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau; Google Books says he's on pages 59-60 (might be digital pages, not print numbering).

Thank you so much for everything!

I tried to buy some digital copies on sale from French websites but was region-locked out — they won't sell to the U.S.

Thank you!

A screenshot of that page would work for my purposes!