| | The History of the Pyrenees inevitably draws on that of both France and Spain, although the ages of border region has often found itself well out of the social and political mainstream. The following summary highlights the salient events and trends which directly impinged on the mountains and their people | |
| |  | Pyrenean history begins with a man who died aged 20 some 455,000 years ago near the present-day village of Tautavel in the Fenouilledes foothills. Excavated from the floor of a limestone cave in 1971, the ... | |
| |  | Before the start of the Bronze Age (around 2000 BC), Pyrenean people began to move into fortified villages, and from then until the thirteenth century AD, when the Muslims were effectively driven out of Spain ... | |
| |  | With the Visigothic in terminal decline, the Moorish (or more properly, Muslim North African) conquest of Spain was startlingly rapid. In 711, less than a century after Mohammed had left Mecca, governor of ... | |
| |  | Charlemagne's grandsons divided his empire between themselves after 843, and it was only a matter of time before the Frankish empire fell apart. In the face of destabilizing attacks by Normans and Norsemen ... | |
| |  | The northern part of the Angevin empire was lost by King John in 1204, and from then on the Capetians steadily chipped away at English rule in Aquitaine. When the Capetian male line expired in 1328, the French ... | |
| |  | In 1635 an ascendant France and a greatly weakened Spain were again at war, and by 1640 the Catalans had taken advantage of this state of affairs to declare themselves an independent republic, under the ... | |
| |  | With the death of the Habsburg King Charles II of Spain in 1700, the throne was offered to the grandson of Louis XIV, Philippe d'Anjou, provided he renounce his rights to the throne of France ... | |
| |  | On the evening of July 28, 1789, a group of strangers arrived in the Roussillonnaistown of Prades, sounded the alarm bell and forced the doors of the salt store, instrument of the hated gabelle (salt tax) ... | |
| |  | Following the end of Napoleonic rule, France endured over half a century of turbulence despite nominal restoration of the monarchy in 1815. There were reversals of revolutionary tenets under a series of reactionary kings or self ... | |
| |  | On July 17, 1936, the military garrison in Morocco rebelled under the leadership of Franco, the agreed signal for revolt throughout Spain. Sanjurjo, by now in exile in Portugal, was the Military Union's choice ... | |
| |  | Ironically, the outbreak of World War II soon led to a refugee movement in the opposite direction. With the capitulation of France in spring 1940, small numbers began making their way over ... | |
| |  | These later refugees fell into for categories: Allied personnel, mainly airmen who had been shot down; evade (e)s, who had escaped prison or internment in France though the word evade(e)s tends to be applied ... | |
| |  | Although the Spanish Civil War had left mote than half a million dead, destroyed a quarter of a million houses and sent a third of million Spaniards into exile in France and Latin America, Franco was in no ... | |
| |  | By the end of World War II, during which Spain was neutral if actively pro-Nazi, Franco ranked as the last remaining fascist head of state in Europe, and had in fact sanctioned more judicial deaths than any ... | |
| |  | In May 1981, Parisians gathered spontaneously at the Place de la Bastille to celebrate the victory of Mitterrand’s Socialists, the first left-of-centre triumph in France since the 1930s. Just over a year later ... | |
| |  | The first major crisis for Prime Minister Edouard Balladur’s centre-right government in early 1994 was the violent reaction to his proposal of reduced wages for young people. A similar response ... | |
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