* 1513 – Battle of Guinegate ( Battle of the Spurs ) – King Henry VIII of England and his Imperial allies defeat French Forces who are then forced to retreat.

* 1808 – Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.

* 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: forces of the Holy Roman Empire defeat the French in the Battle of Konzer Brücke.

* 1522 – Combined forces of Spain and the Papal States defeat a French and Venetian army at the Battle of Bicocca.

* 1544 – French forces defeat a Spanish army at the Battle of Ceresole.

That he sustained defeat in 1809 was due in part to the great numerical superiority of the French and their allies, and in part to the condition of his newly reorganized troops.

The Battle of the Red Wall was marked with the total defeat of the French forces, with 5, 700 out of 6, 000 men killed.

The first option ( although it is debatable to what extent the Duke was committed to such an enterprise ) was a plan to transfer his forces from the Spanish Netherlands to northern Italy ; once there, he intended linking up with Prince Eugene in order to defeat the French and safeguard Savoy from being overrun.

In the words of Marshal Villars, the French defeat at Ramillies was – " The most shameful, humiliating and disastrous of routs.

Conversely, some of the Allied infantry who had just dealt a crushing defeat to the French at the Battle of Waterloo fully expected to have to fight again the next day ( at the Battle of Wavre ).

As Bonaparte's fleet crossed the Mediterranean, it was pursued by a British force under Nelson, sent from the British fleet in the Tagus, to establish the purpose of the French expedition and defeat it.

When the news became certain, the French press insisted that the defeat was the result both of an overwhelmingly large British force and unspecified " traitors.

" Among the anti-government journals in France, the defeat was blamed on the incompetence of the French Directory and on supposed lingering Royalist sentiments in the Navy.

However the French ships were hampered by their inadequate deployment, reduced crews and the failure of the rear division under Villeneuve to meaningfully participate, all of which contributed to their defeat.

In 1799, British ships harassed Bonaparte's army as it marched east and north through Palestine, and played a crucial part in Bonaparte's defeat at the Siege of Acre, when the barges carrying the siege train were captured and the French storming parties were bombarded by British ships anchored offshore.

After the defeat of the French Campaign in the Battle of the Nile, in 1801, the British Museum acquired more Egyptian sculpture and in 1802 King George III presented the Rosetta Stone – key to the deciphering of hieroglyphs.

After the defeat of the French forces under Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile in 1801, the Egyptian antiquities collected were confiscated by the British army and presented to the British Museum in 1803.

Félix Éboué in a contemporary World War II cartoonDuring World War II, Chad was the first French colony to rejoin the Allies ( August 26, 1940 ), after the defeat of France by Germany.

* 1805 – Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Austerlitz – French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte defeat a joint Russo-Austrian force.

* 1793 – Second Battle of Wissembourg: French defeat Austrians.

Against Eugene's advice Amadeus insisted on engaging the French at Staffarda and suffered a serious defeat – only Eugene's handling of the Savoyard cavalry in retreat saved his cousin from disaster.

* 1525 – Spanish-Imperial army defeat French army at Battle of Pavia.

Almost immediately, French forces faced defeat on many fronts, and were driven out of their newly conquered territories in the spring of 1793.

After the defeat at Savenay, when regular warfare in the Vendée was at an end, the French general Francois Joseph Westermann is argued by some historians to have penned a letter ( its veracity is disputed ) to the Committee of Public Safety, stating:

With the defeat of the Imperial Army, the Second French Empire fell and the Third Republic was created.

I worked for my Uncle ( an Uncle by marriage so you will not think this has a mild undercurrent of incest ) who ran one of those antique shops in New Orleans' Vieux Carre, the old French Quarter.

While convalescing in his Virginia home he wrote a book recording his prison experiences and escape, entitled: They Shall Not Have Me Published originally in ( Helion's ) English by Dutton & Co. of New York, in 1943, the book was received by the press as a work of astonishing literary power and one of the most realistic accounts of World War 2, from the French side.

Alarmed by this display of weapons, I looked toward the bridge and there saw, stretched across the near side, a cordon of policemen, their bicycles forming a roadblock before which stood several French officers in uniform and a small waspish man in a brown derby.

Sure enough, mail began trickling in, delivered by a talkative, highly amused French postman who informed me there had been quite a debate at the post office as to whether that address would be recognized.

For by now the original cause of the quarrel, Philip's seizure of Gascony, was only one strand in the spider web of French interests that overlay all western Europe and that had been so well and closely spun that the lightest movement could set it trembling from one end to the other.

The French were now occupying Gascony and Flanders on the technical grounds that their rulers had forfeited them by a breach of the feudal contract.

This lofty disregard for others was not shared by such men as Pierre Flotte and his associates, that `` brilliant group of mediocre men '', as Powicke calls them, who provided the brains for the French embassy that came to Rome under the nominal leadership of the archbishop of Narbonne, the duke of Burgundy, and the count of St.-Pol.

In spite of the armistice negotiated by Amadee two years earlier, the war between Bishop Guillaume of Lausanne and Louis of Savoy was still going on, and although little is known about it, that little proves that it was yet another phase of the struggle against French expansion and was closely interwoven with the larger conflict.

For a time it appeared that a common European army might be created, but the project for a European Defense Community was rejected by the French National Assembly in 1954.

It was not a part of any one of the three ( later four ) zones for occupation by Soviet, American, British, and French troops respectively.

A British writer, Richard Haestier, in a book, Dead Men Tell Tales, recalls that in the turmoil preceding the French Revolution the body of Henry 4,, who had died nearly 180 years earlier, was torn to pieces by a mob.

For a while his work was influenced deeply by the French impressionists, and by the patterned, mosaic-like paintings of Gustav Klimt, then the dean of Austrian art.

-- An unusual flavor can be achieved by marinating the franks in French dressing or a mixture of honey, lemon juice and brown sugar prior to the picnic.

In Berlin he published his views of the chemical laws of nature in German and this was issued in French translation ( Paris, 1813 ) under the title Recherches Sur l'identite Des Forces chimiques et electriques, a work held in very high esteem by the new generation of research chemists.

A biting, pithy parable of the all-pervading hollowness of modern life, the piece has been set by Mlle Lagoon to a sumptuous score ( a single motif played over and over by four thousand French horns ) by existentialist hot-shot Jean-Paul Sartre.

Since the complicated process of establishing new communes and reviewing the rudimentary plan left by the French did not even begin until the fall of 1957, this goal appears somewhat ambitious.

Today it is occupied by the French Embassy.

The discovery that movies are a form of fiction was made in the early years of this century and it was made chiefly by two men, a French magician, Georges Melies, and an American employee of Edison, Edwin S. Porter.

But by week's end the Laotian cry of invasion was read as an exaggeration ( see foreign news ), and the U.S. was agreeing with its cautious British and French allies that a neutralist -- rather than a pro-Western -- government might be best for Laos.

Claude Jannequin's vocal description of a battle ( the French equivalents of tarantara, rum-tum-tum, and boom-boom-boom are very picturesque ) is lots of fun, and the singers get a sense of grace and shape into other chansons by Jannequin and Lassus.

She closed her eyes, remembering the small French cemetery, enclosed by stone walls.