Books & ideas

A micro-history of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Thierry Amalou — 2024-03-19T08:00:00Z

Jérémie Foa has written a history of the “other side” of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Nameless people, thrown into the Seine or buried in mass graves, succumbed to the blows of killers as well as to collective forgetting, which the historian seeks to remedy. This is an important book on mass violence.

Political Psychiatry in the Twentieth Century

Hervé Guillemain — 2023-12-07T09:00:00Z

Soviet psychiatry and American psychiatry have different histories. Yet, both were conceived, each in their own way, as instruments of control aimed at repressing deviant behavior.

Snapshots of colonial violence

Frédéric Rousseau — 2023-05-11T06:47:00Z

Like machine guns, Kodak cameras make it possible to celebrate Western “modernity”. But to what extent do the photographs show European violence in Africa and Asia?

Liberal Democratic Killing

Emil Archambault — 2022-01-05T08:26:00Z

Targeted assassination campaigns seem increasingly well established as a newly prevalent way of war. Through a comparison between the United States and Israel's practices of assassination, Amélie Férey analyses the discourses which legitimise this practice despite its apparent incompatibility with political liberalism.

On the Inquisition in America

Christian Ingrao — 2020-01-06T08:00:00Z

How does a democratic state manage to impose surveillance on its own population? Studying the case of the United States in the early 20^th century, the historian A. Rios-Bordes uses social science tools to deconstruct the mechanisms of control and mistrust.

White Collars, Dirty Hands and Clean Records

Jean Bérard — 2015-06-25T05:30:00Z

How do the elites manage to commit crimes without being seen, or seeing themselves, as criminals? This overview by P. Lascoumes and C. Nagels shows the means deployed by the powerful to define, use, sidestep, or avoid criminal law according to their interests.