Insights
Colette’s Claudine novels begin with the apparent simplicity of a schoolgirl’s diary and gradually unfold into a sharp portrait of desire, education, marriage,…
Claude Lévi-Strauss changed the way many readers think about culture, kinship, myth, language, and social difference. His books move between travel memoir,…
Louis-Antoine de Bougainville occupies a distinctive place in the history of European exploration. Soldier, mathematician, naval officer and writer, he led the…
The memoirs of the Marquis de Lafayette offer a remarkable view of an age when political ideals travelled across borders, armies and generations. Lafayette was…
Augustin Thierry occupies a distinctive place in nineteenth-century French historiography. He approached the past as a dramatic account of peoples,…
Anatole France’s Thaïs is a historical novel set in late-antique Egypt, where Christian asceticism confronts the seductive power of theatre, beauty and worldly…
Guillaume Apollinaire stands at a thrilling point between nineteenth-century literary tradition and the experimental culture of modernism. His poems carry the…
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is one of the most disruptive plays in modern French literature. First performed in Paris in 1896, it turned a schoolroom parody into a…
Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way opens a vast literary cycle with an apparently modest event: a person remembers the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. From that…
Henri Bergson developed a distinctive account of consciousness, time, memory and creative change during a period when science, industry and democratic politics…