Evergreen Podcasts
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A weekly history podcast that will cover France from 3 million years ago to present. Presented by Dr. Gary Girod, with contributions by numerous scholars.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The French History Podcast makes France legible by connecting battles and statecraft with the markets, media, and private choices that altered everyday life.
Gary Girod moves between narrative history and interviews, treating France as a place where military power, private life, political ideas, and cultural fashion continually reshape one another.
A banned potato is your first clue that French history can get wonderfully strange.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Cartier's Atlantic voyages are placed inside France's broader struggle with Habsburg power.
Jacques Cartier's voyages are framed as one part of France's wider contest with Habsburg power. The episode moves from Francis I's pressure during the Italian Wars into Cartier's expeditions, then settles into close readings of the voyage accounts: the Gulf of St.
A restrained archival look at American sailors held in Napoleonic France, and the narrow chances some had to regain freedom.
Napoleon's American Prisoners brings a neglected wartime story into focus: about 1,500 American merchant seamen held in Napoleonic France, some for the full 11 years of the war.
A focused interview links the 1755 Acadian deportations with resistance, genealogy, and the work of restoring names.
The Acadian story is handled as both rupture and survival, with Nicole Gallant Nunez tracing how confiscated property, separated families, burned homes, killed livestock, and destroyed crops pushed many Acadians toward the deportations of 1755.
Eugenie's influence is traced through couture, furniture, and a practical concern for people around her.
Eugenie comes through less as a ruler in full and more as a cultural force: the clothes she wore, the designer she favored, and the interiors that shifted around her tastes.
A siege story that treats cannibalism as evidence, fear, and a test of social order.
Famine sits at the center of this episode, but the sharper question is what hunger does to social trust. Amanda Cote, a PhD candidate in history at Stanford University, looks at reports of cannibalism during the 1573 siege of Sancerre, where months of scarcity pushed residents…
C.J. Adrian follows chivalry from Poitiers to Agincourt as warfare bends toward the centralized state.
C.J. Adrian frames chivalry as an institution under pressure, opening at Poitiers in 1356 as French forces under Jean II try to stop Edward the Black Prince's scorched-earth campaign, then reaching back to the First Crusade and forward to Agincourt in 1416.
Parisian freedom changes shape when the archives trace enslaved lives through the city's legal order.
Dr. Miranda Spieler turns Paris into a place where freedom is debated, enforced, and repeatedly withheld. Her book on five people of color in eighteenth-century metropolitan France tests the old claim that the mainland was free soil, and the episode gives that argument real…
A steady look at Provence as a contested southern region shaped by shifting power and long political change.
Provence comes through as a southern region shaped by coastlines, borders, and shifting territory, and the episode keeps that instability in view without losing its footing.
British history through power, women, and memory.
History as context, consequence, and conversation.
Berlin history, fast banter, sharp human detail.
This interview explores the life of Empress Eugénie de Montijo, France's last empress, detailing her rise from Spanish aristocracy to political influence, her impact on fashion and women's rights, and her role in major events like the Suez Canal opening.
The episode places French politics inside a centralized state that keeps stirring protest, revolt, and revolution.
Philippe comes in from a position of strength.
Luke Barr explains why his book The Secret History of French Cooking focuses on Nouvelle Cuisine, a 1960s and 1970s French movement that reshaped restaurant culture around the world.
This episode explores how the French Revolution transformed Paris' most luxurious aristocratic gardens into public entertainment spaces.
This episode explores how France, under King Francis I, used Jacques Cartier's voyages to the New World as a geopolitical strategy to counter Habsburg dominance in 16th-century Europe.
The French History Podcast is brought to you by Evergreen Podcasts.
Dr.
This episode examines the reign of King Philippe Auguste of France, focusing on his surprising decision to abandon military expansion after his great victory at Bouvines in 1214.
The French History Podcast episode with Dr.
Charles Pappas ties his book Nobody Sits Like the French, Exploring Paris Through Its World Expos to a career at Exhibitor Magazine since about 2002 and to childhood memories of the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York.
C.J.
The French History Podcast episode on Philippe d’Orléans and Henrietta Anne of England follows a marriage shaped by court politics, same-sex desire, and recurring accusations of poison.
Dr.
This episode explores medieval France beyond the Capetian north, covering regions like Occitania, Provence, and Aquitaine, and discussing cultural, artistic, and intellectual developments such as troubadour poetry, the Albigensian Crusade, and Gothic architecture.
Nancy Goldstone connects The Rebel Empresses, Elizabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France, to a wider project about influential women in European history who are often overlooked.
Will Clark says Grey History has passed 100 episodes and is currently covering the Terror and dechristianization campaign in chronological order.
Philippe Auguste's reign is told as a story of power that lasted.
The episode opens by shifting south, away from the northern French story that has dominated the series so far.
The French History Podcast episode by Peter Roussela tracks Victor Hugo's shipwreck-lighthouse cycle through poetry, fiction, and 19th-century French maritime history.
Elias Forneris, a Cambridge-based scholar of WWII refugees, explores the life and London exile (1942-1943) of Simone Weil, one of the 20th century's most brilliant philosophers.
Anne Mordell connects her book Napoleon's American Prisoners to records on about 1,500 American merchant seamen held in Napoleonic France.
The French History Podcast episode “Fourteen Fun French Facts” moves from a 1748 Paris ban on potatoes to a 1803 law that lets a living person marry someone who has died.
Dr.
The French History Podcast turns to 19th-century Paris and the people who made a living arranging marriages.
Craig Willey joins The French History Podcast for a conversation about Gaullism.