* 1781 – American Revolutionary War: British and French ships clash in the Battle of Fort Royal off the coast of Martinique.

In 1796, during the French Revolution and three years after the declaration of war between France and Great Britain, Étienne-Gaspard Robert met with the French government and proposed the use of mirrors to burn the invading ships of the British Royal Navy.

* Several US Navy ships have been named the or the, the latter being a French translation of his penname " Poor Richard ".

On 28 November Teach's two ships attacked a French merchant vessel off the coast of Saint Vincent.

Hume reinforced his crew with musket-armed soldiers and joined up with HMS Seaford to track the two ships, to no avail, though they discerned that the two ships had sunk a French vessel off St Christopher Island, and reported also that they had last been seen " gone down the North side of Hispaniola ".

When Nelson's fleet arrived off Egypt on 1 August and discovered Brueys's dispositions, he ordered an immediate attack, and his ships advanced on the French line.

Trapped in a crossfire, the leading French ships were battered into surrender during a fierce three-hour battle, while the centre was able to successfully repel the initial British attack.

With Brueys dead and his van and centre defeated, the rear division of the French fleet attempted to break out of the bay, but ultimately only two ships of the line and two frigates escaped, from a total of 17 ships engaged.

Within a week Bonaparte had resupplied his ships, and on 19 June his fleet departed for Alexandria in the direction of Crete, leaving 4, 000 men at Valletta under General Claude-Henri Vaubois to ensure French control of the islands.

Although he now had enough ships to challenge the French fleet, Nelson suffered two great disadvantages: he had no intelligence regarding the destination of the French, and no frigates to scout ahead of his force.

Striking southwards in the hope of collecting information about French movements, Nelson's ships stopped at Elba and Naples, where the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton reported that the French fleet had passed Sicily in the direction of Malta.

He instructed his naval commander, Vice-Admiral François-Paul Brueys D ' Aigalliers, to anchor in Alexandria harbour, but naval surveyors reported that the channel into the harbour was too shallow and narrow for the larger ships of the French fleet.

However, he had made a serious misjudgement: there was enough room between Guerrier and the shoal for an enemy ship to cut across the head of the French line, allowing the unsupported vanguard to be caught in a crossfire by two divisions of enemy ships.

Brueys ' dispositions had a second significant flaw: the 160 yard gaps between ships were large enough for a British ship to push through and break the French line.

At 14: 00 on 1 August, lookouts on HMS Zealous reported the French anchored in Aboukir Bay, its signal lieutenant just beating the lieutenant on HMS Goliath with the signal, but inaccurately describing 16 French ships of the line instead of 13.

The French initially reported just 11 British ships, as Swiftsure and Alexander were still returning from their scouting operations at Alexandria, and so were to the west of the main fleet, out of sight.

By 16: 00, Alexander and Swiftsure were also in sight, although some distance from the main British fleet, and Brueys gave orders to abandon the plan to remain at anchor and instead for his line to set sails, although Blanquet protested the order on the grounds that there were not enough men aboard the French ships to both sail the ships and man the guns.

The reporters were questioning the Interior man and the French officer, both of whom remained noncommittal as to what action, if any, would be taken in my regard.

Though Catherine was vexed at the number of French officers streaming to the Turkish standard, there were several under her own, such as the Prince De Nassau ; ;

The great spectacle was a source of rancor, and Son et Lumiere, which the French were trying to promote with the Athenians, was the reason.

The Artists contended that the Philistines, gross of soul, were all for having Son et Lumiere, since the French were footing the bill and the attraction, wherever it had been done, had proven popular.

When the negotiations began, his quarrel with the king of France was temporarily in abeyance, and he had no intention of reviving it so long as there was hope that French money would come to pay the troops who, under Charles of Valois, the papal vicar of Tuscany, were so valuable in the crusade against the Colonna cardinals and their Sicilian allies.

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.

The Indochina struggle was a war to stay out of in 1954, when Gen. Ridgway estimated it would take a minimum of 10 to 15 divisions at the outset to win a war the French were losing.

Wildcat and The Unsinkable Molly Brown were originals, but pretty bad, leaving top honors again to an import -- the jaunty and charmingly French Irma La Douce.

The Ifni crisis in the fall of 1957 postponed further consideration of elections, but French consultants were called in and notices of further investigation appeared from time to time.

Although we enjoyed our rounds of the government offices in Vientiane, with officials offering tea and pleasing conversation in French, we were getting nowhere.

The director of the post at Mobile kept an adequate amount of French goods, of a kind to which they were accustomed, to supply the Indian needs.

The Chickasaws finally were the occasion for the most disastrous wars during the French control of Louisiana.

Bienville realized that if the French were to hold the southeastern tribes against the enticements of British goods, French traders must be able to offer a supply as abundant as the Carolinians and at reasonable prices.

These agents were to ascertain the difference between English and French goods, and the prices charged the Indians.

Do you say chantey, as if the word were derived from the French word chanter, to sing, or do you say shanty and think of a roughly built cabin, which derives its name from the French-Canadian use of the word chantier, with one of its meanings given as a boat-yard??

He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair ( later to become George Orwell ) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn ’ t keep discipline.

Now prosperous, his parents were able to send Nobel to private tutors and the boy excelled in his studies, particularly in chemistry and languages, achieving fluency in English, French, German, and Russian.

His later novels included fixups such as The Beast ( aka Moonbeast ) ( 1963 ), Rogue Ship ( 1965 ), Quest for the Future ( 1970 ) and Supermind ( 1977 ); expanded short stories ( The Darkness on Diamondia ( 1972 ), Future Glitter ( aka Tyranopolis ) ( 1973 ); original novels such as Children of Tomorrow ( 1970 ), The Battle of Forever ( 1971 ) and The Anarchistic Colossus ( 1977 ); plus sequels to his classic works, many of which were promised, but only one of which appeared, Null-A Three ( 1984 ; originally published in French ).

According to M. Forrest, the French knights were so encumbered by their armour that they were exhausted even before the start of the battle.

The French were hopeless disciplinarians .. Germans good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn.

The citizens are slow to realize the magnitude of the danger because they do not believe in pestilence or that it could happen to them, just as the French were complacent at the beginning of the war.

But before that, many Britons were more scrupulous at maintaining the French form.

Invented around 1890 by French scientist Édouard Branly, it consists of a tube or capsule containing two electrodes spaced a small distance apart, with metal filings in the space between them.

The bars are supposed to be equally spaced as can be seen on most images relating to the Free French Forces, though variations are common.

His early compositions are typically triadic, often with widely spaced harmonies, giving them a distinctly American tone, but some of his works are consciously French in style.

In French, the percent sign is also always spaced because the percent is considered as a unit.

Hatching ( hachure in French ) is an artistic technique used to create tonal or shading effects by drawing ( or painting or scribing ) closely spaced parallel lines.

Louis-Antoine Ranvier ( 2 October 1835 – 22 March 1922 ) was a French physician, pathologist, anatomist and histologist, who discovered nodes of Ranvier, regularly spaced discontinuities of the myelin sheath, occurying at varying intervals along the length of a nerve fiber.