Mathilde Damoisel

Sugar is sweet, seductive, addictive - but built on human suffering. This feature-length reveals how an enticing luxury became the engine of a global system powered by slavery, exploitation and environmental destruction, a legacy still shaping the world today. From the 19th-century slave plantations to modern refineries in the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Reunion, India, South Africa and Europe, the series traces how sugar fuelled colonial empires, drove some of the worst aspects of international trade and commerce, and left deep social and ecological scars that are still present in labour abuses and exhausted landscapes today.

In 1847, British writer Emily Brontë (1818-48), perhaps the most enigmatic of the three Brontë sisters, published her novel Wuthering Heights, a dark romance set in the desolation of the moors, a unique work of early Victorian literature that stunned contemporary critics.

During the Second World War, the allies' key objective was to crack the German army's encrypted communications code. Without a doubt, the key player in this game was Alan Turing, an interdisciplinary scientist and a long-forgotten hero.

England, 1960. The Crown sues the publisher Penguin Books in order to ban the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel by the British writer D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), published privately in Italy in 1928, which celebrates nature and deals with sex without taboos.

The abusive harvest of a simple fruit built an empire: the United Fruit Company. A fruit that conquered the markets of the world, but devastated Central America. The amazing story of the banana: pioneers of globalized capitalism, dictators of banana republics, revolutionaries, the inventor of modern advertising, tons of bananas, bloody shades of yellow. The story of a ruthless enterprise, without borders or rules to respect, except the cruel law of supply and demand…

The image of Paris as the capital of love seems to be obvious today. However, it is only in the 19th century, with its "haussmannisation", that it acquired this title. How did this reputation impose itself on the whole world? From the grand boulevards to the banks of the Seine, through the darkness of the porte cochères, the documentary "Romantic Paris, Erotic Paris" looks back at the making of this myth and revisits, through emblematic characters and tasty archives, a century of cultural and social history. From the boudoirs of the great courtesans of the Second Empire to free love in the post-war Saint-Germain-des-Prés, through the interloper nights in the cabarets of the Occupation, a look back at a part of the history of the capital.