Institut français

Peronism, a political and social movement, has structured life in Argentina since the 1940s, and has been emulated elsewhere in Latin American. But it eludes any precise definition. Neither a dictatorship, nor a democracy, this plebiscitary regime is based on the army and trade unions.

Paris, 1933. Oscar Dufrenne, a music hall mogul and notorious homosexual, was found murdered in his office. Even though a suspect was arrested, the investigation led nowhere. The case paints a portrait of interwar France in its desire to restore order, its political violence, and the slow evolution of social mores.

How did people living in Paris, New York and London slowly gain access to running water? Although private companies shared the water market from the 17^th to the 18^th centuries, cities slowly realised the need for a public network.

How does big data contribute to our understanding of Hugo, Balzac or Flaubert? A great deal, because far from being a mechanical accumulation of data on literary texts, the digital humanities transform our relationship to works and the way we read them.

Why do people strip naked in the public space? Under French law, public nudity is considered a form of indecent exposure, however more often than not it is in fact about the pleasure of a lifestyle or about conveying a message.

How do children perceive the world around them, from the circles closest to them – their friends and family – to the most distant spheres – work and politics? In a recent book, two French sociologists open up a critical dialogue with psychology to describe the socially differentiated processes through which children learn to think and think about themselves.

Le négationnisme économique. Et comment s’en débarrasser (Economic Denialism, and How to Get Rid of It) has sparked lively discussion in France. What can we draw from this book for a reflection on social science methods and the terms of scientific debate?

Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld’s argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.

Since Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, cinematographic representations of the extermination of the European Jews have seemed impossible. Son of Saul has challenged this assumption. Nonetheless, the aesthetic and narrative choices this film makes are problematic.

“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it would be an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor is not highly regarded. Making use of some impressive documents, Donatien Grau analyses the image of the hated emperor from the first century AD to the present day. The story of Nero reads like a history of the West.

The proposal by a group of academics to institute a parliament of the euro area has garnered considerable attention. However, according to S. Vallée, this institutional reform would hinder the development of a transnational European democracy. What follows is the first part of a debate between the authors and their critics.

Ancient philosophy offered consolation for loss, separation, and death. Modern philosophy no longer does so, considering that it should limit its role to the quest for truth. This renunciation has, according to Michaël Fœssel, deep consequences for our current politics and their lack of any broader perspective.

French law is not always very clear when it comes to punishing racist speech. Judges, aware that this prohibition is crucial in a democracy, are forced to interpret the law with the utmost rigour.

What determines the value of a drug? Quentin Ravelli’s ethnographic study of the pharmaceutical industry reveals the ubiquity of drugs manufacturers, from university training programmes to doctors’ practices, and the commercial logic that underpins the medical use of drugs.

A meticulous historical enquiry reveals the liberties taken by the author of Journey to the End of the Night in recounting his war experience. These flattering inventions made it possible for him to disseminate his pamphlets in the 1930s and clear his name in the purge.

In a desire to write a total history, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel proposes a novel sociocultural and transnational approach to the artistic avant-gardes. Beyond a mere history of styles, the avant-gardes appear in her book as genuine political and social events, caught in complex networks of influence.

Through an ethnographic investigation behind the closed doors of the European quarter in Brussels, Sylvain Laurens studies the relationships between the business community and European institutions, showing that their proximity derives less from ideological complicity than from a shared history.

It is now incongruous to imagine Vietnamese people identifying themselves as “Indochinese”. For a long time, however, the colonial territory served as a framework for the expression of Vietnam’s national identity. This phenomenon does not illustrate so much the effectiveness of the education given in schools under the French empire as the negotiated nature of colonisation in Asia. A fresh look at a classic work.

With the ‘Arab Springs’, the question of revolution was raised afresh. Taking a comparative approach, H. Bozarslan and G. Delemestre analyse the link between revolution and the democratic process, focusing on the role played by intellectuals in the revolutionary dynamic.

Climate change has fueled scientific, economic, and political debates for over fifty years. Roman Felli offers an economic history of the idea of adapting to climate change and denounces the way it has been instrumentalized by market principles at the expense of society’s most vulnerable citizens.

By studying political and legal debates over citizenship through the prism of the colonial situation in the nineteenth century, in the metropole as well as the colonies, Silyane Larcher proposes a new genealogy of citizenship and asks us to rethink how the French Republic was constructed.

By building markets, distributing information, and developing adapted incentives, modern economic theory claims to lead us to the common good.

Political leaders are often accused of cynicism in their handling of international relations. Others see such behavior as no more than “realism.” But what exactly does this term mean? Two recent works reconsider the origins of the concepts of Realpolitik and geopolitics and challenge the dichotomy between values and interests.

Looking at the mutations of photography since its origins, one realizes that contrary to what is often believed, it exalts artificiality, fiction and imagination and relies on an anti-naturalistic aesthetic. Could the 19^th century be the matrix of our artistic modernity?

The national park is not only a space dedicated to walks, recreation, and even wondrous contemplation, it is also a tool used by the Nation. Guillaume Blanc analyses this overlap between environment and politics through the cases of France, Canada, and Ethiopia.

Do consumers have any kind of real countervailing power in the age of neoliberal globalisation? A new book analyses the political role of boycotting and of exercising economic power “from below”.

The Syrian revolution is orphan because the repressive, authoritarian and increasingly ferocious regime of Bashar al-Assad is still in place. According to Ziad Majed, the lack of response from the international community is largely responsible for this state of affairs.

Two recent books explore the importance of quantification in contemporary technologies of power and forms of resistance to them. But is activism on behalf of an emancipatory rather than subservient use of numbers possible or even desirable?

The Front National has been an established player in French political life for thirty years now. Nevertheless, behind the figure of its historical leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the development of the party itself has had its fair share of vicissitudes.

No problem in the world is more important than climate change. In her latest book, Naomi Klein aims to show that fighting global warming means fighting capitalism. But how?

To understand the symbolic revolution Manet launched, it is necessary to break with traditional representations of art history. This requires an intellectual revolution in its own right. Thus behind Manet, there lurks another heresiarch: Bourdieu himself.

Poet Jean-Christophe Bailly argues that contemporary urban spaces, whether sites of historic importance and cultural heritage or serving a purely functional purpose, no longer lend themselves to wandering and strolling. He compares the memories imposed in museums and on the construction sites of new cities with those of passers-by as they wander through the cityscape, the latter pensive memories he believes are the sole source of utopia.

What is anthropology, and what type of knowledge does it produce? Gérard Lenclud applies his background in epistemology and questions the future of anthropology in relation to other disciplines as a means of highlighting both the similar challenges they face and the different methodologies they employ.

Democracy is not the government of the people, by the people. Rather, it is a permanent process of conquering new rights. This is the argument of Catherine Colliot-Thélène’s book, which examines the tension, found throughout democracy’s history, between individual emancipation and political affiliation.

Representations of “the people” tend to be highly policed: they smother its inherent diversity and particularity, and typically distort it. Such is the conclusion reached, each in his own way, by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière. This is also the reason why, they argue, one must pay attention to images which demonstrate the people’s singularity and power.