Famous & Murdered - True Stories

Monday, October 5th 2020, it is 10.30 am. The history and geography teacher of the fourth year of the  Bois-d'Aulne secondary school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine is going to teach moral and civic education. He has decided, in accordance with the programme, to tackle the issue of freedom of  expression. He has been preparing his lesson for a long time, he is proud of it, his name is Samuel  Paty... 

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In 1887, Sadi Carnot was elected President of the French Republic. Today, he is only remembered for being the first president to be assassinated. This is how... 

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On August 28th,1963, Martin Luther King pronounced this short phrase that would remain famous: "I had a dream". This black American pastor dreamed of a world of peace, where all men would be equal and brothers. Although the laws establishing segregation had been repealed, the United  States still practices segregation between blacks and whites on a daily basis. And violence against African Americans has never stopped. Many people struggle against the injustice of a two tiered country. Some choose to respond to violence with violence, others take a different, less radical path. For Rev. Martin Luther King, hate did not eliminate hate, only love would. 

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You will recall that we left John the Fearless triumphant in 1407 when he had just had his cousin and rival Louis I of Orleans, brother of King Charles VI, assassinated. It was now 1419 and John had  come a long way. The unfortunate Charles VI, then known as the Mad King, had been ruling for thirty-nine years. His fits of madness lead cousin John to want to take over the throne. But Charles VI now had an heir, the dauphin Charles. And although some suspect that he was in fact the son of Louis I of Orleans, Queen Isabeau's lover before he was murdered, he was still the official heir...  

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The war between Armagnacs and Burgundians did not pit the lovers of a south-western brandy against those of a boeuf bourgignon, no. It was a civil war that took place  within the wider context of the Hundred Years' War. In those days, families did not hesitate to kill  each other to gain power... 

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The assassin of the day was a woman, which was so rare that there was no word in French for it. One  could say murderess, but the murder was more than a murder, since it was premeditated. And in the case  of Henriette Caillaux, there was no doubt that there was premeditation... 

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We all learned at school that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th 1914 was the trigger for the First World War. But how could the death of this crowned head in a  country that we couldn't necessarily place on a map trigger the First World War and plunge Europe into chaos ?  

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Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian investigative journalist and world-famous human rights activist.  She was an outspoken opponent of Vladimir Putin's regime, and tirelessly denounced his abuse of  democracy and corruption of power.  

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In 44 BC, Caesar, master of Rome, was at the height of his glory. Thanks to a series of stunning  victories, he had extended the borders of the Roman Republic. His military successes also increased his popularity. Rome was more prosperous than ever and his master had the confidence of the  people and senators. In short, all was well. Or almost.  

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A man walks through the snow-covered mountains at an altitude of 3,200 metres. He had stuffed his auroch skin shoes with grass, put on two coats and a bearskin hat. He was carrying a backpack, a deerskin quiver containing twenty arrowheads, a flint dagger, a copper axe and a deer antler tool. In a birch bark basket, he was carrying smouldering charcoal wrapped in young maple leaves. He was only about forty years old but his progress was difficult. He wanted to run, to escape from his pursuers, but he couldn't anymore. Perhaps he was afraid... This suffering and tired man was not yet famous, but he was going to be. A few moments later, he would die and his body would only be found five millennia later, at the very place of his death... 

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On December 15th, 1890, the sun had not yet risen over Standing Rock, one of the largest Indian reservations in the United States. Snow covered the mountains and the plain, burying the tipis. The snow was immaculate and crunched under the footsteps of the approaching men. They were Lakota Indians, part of the Indian police. There were about forty of them who gradually surrounded the tepee of one of the chiefs who was also one of the most famous Indians in America. His name was Sitting Bull.    

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 Christmas 1983. Marvin Gaye, the famous soul singer, was worried about his father's safety. He gave him a Smith and Wesson to defend himself against burglars... 

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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.    

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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... 

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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.  

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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...  

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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...    

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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.    

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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...

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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...

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On 31st July 1914, Jean Jaurès, founder and director of the newspaper L'Humanité,took his ournalists 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...

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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... 

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Near Médéa in Algeria, the Notre-Dame d'Atlas monastery in Tibhirine was a place of peace and recollection. Founded in 1938, it was a vast farm of twelve hectares where the Cistercian monks lived by working the land and prayed while respecting their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They got along very well with the Muslims in the area and did not seek to convert them. On the contrary, they were working towards reconciliation with Islam.   

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The 1980s in France were marked by the songs of Jean-Jacques Goldman. With Il suffirait d'un signe, Quand la musique est bonneand 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. 

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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... 

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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...  

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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... 

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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.   

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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... 

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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.   

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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.   

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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 Stonesmagazine. 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... 

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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... 

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On Friday May 16th, 1610, King Henri IV of France climbed into his carriage. He was going to meet Sully, his superintendent of finance, who was bedridden with a fever. As they were almost neighbours, the king felt that he didn't need to be escorted by the horse guard. Only a few infantrymen accompanied him and three or four dukes in the carriage. This would not be enough.   

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Agamemnon. A powerful, regal name that no doubt evokes memories of Greek mythology. The illustrious character belonged to the family of the Atreides, marked by murder, parricide, infanticide and incest. Enough to write beautiful tragedies...   

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Pier Paolo Pasolini's writings and films still form a disturbing body of work. This angry man spat out his hatred of morality and hypocrisy all his life. He never ceased to revile the old Italian bourgeoisie and the young protesters, to hate consumer society loud and clear and to denounce compromises, including and especially when they concerned the powerful. In various newspapers, he revealed the proven links between the government and the mafia. He shouted, they tried to gag him: each release of one of his films was accompanied by a controversy or a legal attack. So much the better: Passolini wanted to be the one who shocked, denounced and screamed in those years of darkness. But he underestimated the determination of his enemies to silence him.  

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It was not until the age of 31 that the American Dian Fossey discovered Rwanda and the great apes that still live there. This encounter deeply affected her. She became fascinated by the gorillas and decided to observe them in order to better understand and defend them. She had to approach them without frightening them, and for that, what better way than to look like them? So she reproduced their behaviour, walking on all fours, nibbling plants, imitating their cries, their gestures... Soon, the Rwandans called her Nyiramachabelli, which meant : "The woman who lives without men in the forest". She became more and more involved with the gorillas, including the big males who were so wild. And the more she cohabited with the apes, the less she tolerated humans... 

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At the beginning of August 1969, actress Sharon Tate returned to her villa on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. Built a few years earlier for actress Michèle Morgan, it overlooked Beverly Hills. The young actress and her husband, director Roman Polanski, recently had recently moved there because they needed a bigger house for their new baby... 

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