Tag
France
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Pied Noir Homesick Blues
Camus opens the book with Meursault’s life, but François Ozon opens the new film adaptation with Meursault’s specific moment in history: the brutal French colonization of Algeria.
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The Failure of Climate Philanthropy
For most large climate funders, environmental protection and a liberal economic order are not only compatible but mutually reinforcing.
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Ethnographers of Ourselves
What would you be willing to do for a friend from 20-odd years ago if you suddenly learned they were on the verge of becoming homeless or found them …
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May 1968 @50
On April 27, 2018, a hundred people showed up at Columbia University to talk about the French student and worker revolts of May–June 1968. Many such conferences are taking place around the world to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that eventful and turbulent year. What made this meeting distinctive was that throughout the afternoon heady…
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Women of the Algerian Resistance
On May 8, 1945, France joined the festivities of V-E Day, celebrating the total defeat of Nazi Germany as well as the …
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Keyword of the Week: France
On Sunday, eyes were on the French election as two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, advanced to a runoff that will determine the presidency next month. This week’s Public Bookshelf features four of our favorite PB articles about France, ranging from a special series on Thomas Piketty (in collaboration with La Vie des Idées) to an essay about the PEN–Charlie Hebdo controversy.…
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The Intrusion Artist
By the late ’50s, when he was already widely considered one of France’s finest filmmakers, Robert Bresson would confess in interviews that he hardly ever went to the movies. There was something about how people behaved in front of the camera that repelled him and that he had lost the power to block out. “I…
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All About My Mother
In her canonical 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wonders how a coherent past may be reconstructed from countless angles, styles, and past selves. How do we choose from so many snapshots and memories? And how do we differentiate ourselves from the people and surroundings that shaped us? Woolf ultimately decides to…
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Transplant Melodrama
Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants, beautifully translated into English by Sam Taylor and published as The Heart, has been something of a publishing sensation in France, and beyond. I am reading it at a café by a small lake in a South Indian town, where I have just been talking to a transplant surgeon…
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A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other inhabitants and observers, I find it difficult to comprehend why the militants assaulted this historically working-class, vibrant, multicultural, and youthful neighborhood—admittedly often characterized…
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How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the restaurant—with a menu that includes frog legs and a bottle of Bordeaux that sells for $2,000—is an incongruous new addition to an area of Brooklyn where…
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Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies …”
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Stunt Double: Twice Fallen
The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the French Algerians, derisively called pied-noirs, the flesh-and-blood symbol of French Colonial rule (1830–1956), still haunt the land they fought so viciously to keep…
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Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest
Reading Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst is eerily similar to contemplating a wound that won’t heal, inspiring trepidation at what might soon—or potentially worse, not ever—change. Such was my experience of following the novel’s protagonists, Raynand and Paulin, as they attempt to make modest yet always ill-fated bids for basic human happiness in a Haiti in…
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Reading Charlie Hebdo across the Atlantic
Like many French citizens, I have never purchased a copy of Charlie Hebdo, the provocative satirical newspaper whose cartoonists were tragically massacred by jihadists earlier this year. A struggling publication with a limited readership, Charlie Hebdo has received extensive attention lately due to its willingness to publish caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that some people…
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Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists …
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“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
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The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what its pursuit means to us have all changed significantly over time. In these two essays, which we publish in…
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Democracy’s Candide
The atrocity last month at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo reminds us that a free press is as basic in France as it is in the United States. This is one of the freedoms Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, urged his countrymen to adopt in the early days of…
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Paris Streets, January 11, 2015
An estimated 3.7 million people rallied across France this past Sunday, January 11th. Roughly 1.6 million marchers were in Paris, where the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred. Friends report that the route was so impossibly crowded that people spread into nearby streets to create a slow river moving from Place de la Republique to Place de…
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Weekend Reading: Laughter in the Dark
2015 has gotten off to an unnerving start, to say the least. The week has been dominated by the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent standoffs, and the bombing at a Colorado NAACP office, both of which (the former much more so than the latter, more on that later) have sparked a lot of…
