In the midst of the terrors which unfettered Enlightenment ideology unleashed on the West, Christian hope arose anew to bring true light to one of history’s darkest hours.

    They guide even the modest cook through the making of the simplest pastry to the most mouth-watering confection.

    Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. Hôtel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; Forever Valley is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; Rose Mellie Rose is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Ôat.Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . [They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."

    Braudel questions the origins of frontiers, the growth of towns, how Paris became the capital and how France's unification came about.

    The mothers of the young couple had been childhood friends, but the differences in outlook of the children are exacerbated by the political polarisation that has come over France at the time. We are in the 1930s with Communists and fascists fighting in the streets. The marriage does not last and France goes to war. Bertrand, now a Prefect, is refused permission to join the army; but after France’s defeat and the armistice with the Germans, he decides that he cannot serve under Marshal Petain. He escapes over the Pyrenees and eventually reaches London where he places himself at the disposal of General de Gaulle. Bertrand’s life in France has introduced the reader to spies, priests, academics, criminals, politicians, prostitutes, policemen and refugees from the Spanish Civil War. In London, he becomes involved with the English and, when sent back to France by de Gaulle, with the different factions in the French Resistance. Bertrand becomes enmeshed in political infighting and mired in moral paradox as the story proceeds to a dramatic denouement. Awarded the Enid McLeod Literary Prize by the Franco-British Society

    It centers on the Alacalufs, an actual tribe of short, bowlegged sea nomadsnow extinctwho eked out a living off Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America. Hunting albatrosses and cormorants, living in wigwams, sniffing out williwaws or violent winds, the Alacalufs (who called themselves Kaweskar, "the People") might have continued their peaceful lifestyle,had it not been for European intruders. French ethnologist Raspail first delineates fictional Lafko, the last surviving Kaweskar, and his family, then shuttles back and forth as Magellan, King Philip, Catholic missionaries and a highly unsympathetic Charles Darwin all take part in the story of this tribe's doom. In the late 1800s captive Alacalufs were exhibited as fairground freaks in France. In exposing the cruelty of enlightened Europeans, Raspail shows that they, not the Alacalufs, were the "savages." Winner of three French prizes, this fiercely eloquent, heartbreaking novel is emblematic of Europe's conquest/discovery of America.

    The cross-fertilization of ideas, paradigms and methodologies have led to technological developments in areas such as information processing, full colour semiconductor displays, compact biosensors and controlled drug discovery. Experts in their respective fields discuss the latest developments and the future of micro-nano electronics.

    Learn why Little Red Riding Hood and her Granny told lies, how Jack the Giant-Killer flopped on his comeback, and how the Big Bad Wolf eventually caught the Three Little Pigs.

    Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity--the home, the workplace, and the street--Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.Fragile Lives reconstructs the rhythms of this population's daily existence, the way they met, formed relationships and broke them off, conducted their affairs in the community, and raised their young. Farge follows them into the factory and describes the ways they organized to improve their working conditions, and how they were controlled by the authorities. She shows how these Parisians behaved in the context of collective events, from festive street spectacles to repressive displays of power by the police. As the author examines interwoven lives as revealed in judicial records, we come to know and understand the criminals and the underworld of the time; the situation of women as lovers, wives, or prostitutes; anxieties about food and drink, and the rules of conduct in a "fragile" society. Elegantly written and skillfully translated, Fragile Lives is a book for the curious general reader and for those interested in social and cultural history.

    Ernest Sturm is Professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    This extensive selection of his letters—many translated for the first time into English—depicts a poet divided between despair and elation, thoughts of suicide and intimations of immortality; a man who could write to his mother, "We're obviously destined to love one another, to end our lives as honestly and gently as possible," and say in the next sentence, "I'm convinced that one of us will kill the other"; who courted and then suffered the controversy provoked by his masterpiece, Les Fleurs du mal; who struggled throughout his life with syphilis contracted in his youth, near-intolerable financial restrictions imposed by his stepfather, and conflicting feelings of failure and revolt dating from his school days. Writing to family, friends, and lovers, Baudelaire reveals the incidents and passions that went into his poetry. In letters to editors, idols, and peers—Hugo, Flaubert, Vigny, Wagner, Cladel, among others—he elucidates the methods and concerns of his own art and criticism and comments tellingly on the arts and politics of his day. In all, ranging from childhood to days shortly before his death, these letters comprise a complex and moving portrait of the quintessential poet and his time.

    Throughout his book, Kropotkin ties his interpretation of the course of the revolution to the continuous stream of popular action, which he sees as beginning long before the revolution itself. Volume One of The Great French Revolution illustrates clearly the regenerative power of the mass of the people and passes on an important message to future generations and future revolutions.

    Listed by Le Monde as one of the forty most important books published in France during the 1980s, this explosive work asserts that fascism was an important part of the mainstream of European history, not just a temporary development in Germany and Italy but a significant aspect of French culture as well. Neither right nor left, fascism united antibourgeois, antiliberal nationalism, and revolutionary syndicalist thought, each of which joined in reflecting the political culture inherited from eighteenth-century France. From the first, Sternhell's argument generated strong feelings among people who wished to forget the Vichy years, and his themes drew enormous public attention in 1994, as Paul Touvier was condemned for crimes against humanity and a new biography probed President Mitterand's Vichy connections. The author's new preface speaks to the debates of 1994 and reinforces the necessity of acknowledging the past, as President Chirac has recently done on France's behalf.

    During this period, the royal government of Paris gradually extended its sphere of control by taking power away from the powerful and potentially disloyal provincial governors and nobility and instead putting it in the hands of provincial power brokers--regional notables who cooperated with the Paris ministers in exchange for their patronage. The new alliances between the Crown's ministers and loyal provincial elites functioned as political machines on behalf of the Crown, leading to smoother regional-national cooperation and foreshadowing the bureaucratic state that was to follow.

    The twins were dominant and colourful characters, whose lives reveal many new points about the politics of the period, in particular the Norman rebellion of 1123-4, the wars of Stephen's reign in Normandy and England and the early years of Henry II. The book analyses the twins' followings, revenues and lands, and studies their relations with the church, their level of literacy, and heraldry. It also contains the first in-depth study of Norman feudal society in the duchy itself, suggests reasons why Normandy was more difficult to govern than England, and explores the use of patronage in twelfth-century society.

    Using much previously unpublished manuscript material, this studyexplains the nature of Europe's first stock exchange boom, the South Sea Bubble, and the Mississippi System, and shows how Cantillon's theorizing as an economist interacted with his activities as a banker-entrepreneur to make him one of Europe's wealthiest men in this period of frenetic stockexchange activity.

    Josipovici's novel is based on the life of Pierre Bonnard, the painter of enchanting domestic interiors and innocently unsensual nudes. A thoughtful and deeply felt piece told in three parts from the perspectives of Bonnard's wife, daughter, and the painter himself. The publisher is currently reprinting this title, reissuing it with a new cover ahead of the Pierre Bonnard exhibition, "The Colour of Memory," scheduled at Tate Modern, London (Jan-May 2019).

    As an additional treat, she also gives instructions in the correct use of impassioned Gallic gestures—those silent but expressive signals so beloved of the French motorist and shopkeeper. And, most important, she reveals how the French language, both spoken and visual, is a key to the spirit and character of the people who use it. With infectious humor, she exposes the idiosyncratic attitudes that have produced so great a wealth of vivid expressions.So now discover how the French really feel about sex, food, la belle France, foreigners, hygiene, death…Merde Encore! may confirm what you've always suspected.

    Topics include Auguste Renoir & his brother, Degas & his family in New Orleans, the Impressionist "brush," & more. 7 3/4" x 10 1/2". B&W & color illus., b&w photos.

    Traces the life and career of the French novelist, discusses his success as a playwright, and assesses his place in literature.

    Others might picture natural aspects like mountains, rivers, and landscapes that make their own country distinct. For Pierre Nora, these are historical and geographical conceptions of “space.” And, in the case of the French, these conceptions are not separate but instead uniquely linked. They are key to understanding French national identity. In Space, the second volume in the University of Chicago Press’s translation of Nora’s ambitious Les Lieux de mémoire, a group of France’s leading historians and cultural commentators call attention to the meaning of space for the French and the firm connection between the nation’s history and its geography. The essays gathered here cover the most essential approaches to French space: external and internal boundaries, the base unit of local space, and the mental construction that gives a general idea of the concept of landscape. The analyses focus on three aspects of natural boundaries: the forest, the north and the south, and the coastline. Each region of France, they show, is a space of memory that is the fruit of all the knowledge that gives it shape: statistical, cartographical, geological, and historical. A crucial piece in Nora’s profound historical project on the way the French understand themselves, this volume will be appreciated by any critical thinker with an interest in French history, politics, culture, or philosophy.

    French/English. Translated by Machlis.

    He is remembered as much for his traditional lyric poems as for the typographical experiments of "Calligrammes". He championed the Cubist painters, and his poetry is a literary counterpart to their innovative work.

    

    In this shocking and controversial book, Reyanld Secher argues that the massacres which resulted from the conflict between patriotic revolutionary forces and those of the counter-revolution were not the inevitable result of fierce battle, but rather were premeditated, committed in cold blood, massive and systematic, and undertaken with the conscious and proclaimed will to destroy a well-defined region, and to exterminate and entire people. Drawing upon previously unavailable sources, Secher argues that more than 14 percent of the population and 18 percent of the housing stock in the Vend�e was destroyed in this catastrophic conflict.Secher's review of the social and political structure of the region presents a dramatically different image of the people on the Vend�e than the stereotype common among historians favorable to the French Revolution. He demonstrates that they were not archaic and superstitious or even necessarily adverse to the forward-looking forces of the Revolution. Rather, the region turned agains the Revolution because of a series of misguided policy choices that failed to satisfy the desire for reform and offended the religious sensibilities of the Vend�ans.Using an array of primary sources, many from provincial archives, including personal accounts and statistical data, Secher convincingly argues for a demythologized view of the French Revolution. Contrary to most twentieth-century academic accounts of the Revolution, which have either ignored, apologized for, or explained away the Vend�e, Secher demonstrates that the vicious nature of this civil war is a key element that forces us to reconsider the revolutionary regime. His work, available for the first time in English, provides a significant case study for readers interested in the relationships between religion, region, and political violence.