Books & ideas

The Limits of Religious Freedom

Ophélie Desmons — 2025-10-16T12:00:00Z

The separation of church and state is a principle that is often difficult to apply. In some cases, a delicate balance must be struck between religious freedom and equality.

Who rules the blue planet?

Guillaume Vuillemey — 2025-01-28T06:30:00Z

Maritime spaces are the focus of the major economic, ecological, and geopolitical challenges of our time. Lest they become the site of routine legal violations (ranging from pollution to overfishing), a government of the seas is necessary.

The Departments of the French Antilles

Justin Daniel — 2024-12-17T14:13:00Z

After 1946, the process of “decolonization by assimilation” ensured that the French Antilles remained part of France. The departmental framework, seen as the source of all the rights associated with citizenship, had a profound influence on Antillean politics and society.

The Anarchism of Intellectuals

Cyril Legrand — 2024-11-21T09:00:00Z

Whether conceived as advocacy of disorder or as “the highest expression of order,” as the abolition of the state or as state-led deregulation, anarchy feeds on every ambiguity. This is the case even in contemporary philosophy.

The Police Between Violence and Literature

Christian Chevandier — 2024-11-05T08:00:00Z

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city's lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

The Paternalistic State

Cyril Hédoin — 2024-06-18T13:00:00Z

The behavioral sciences have revolutionized our understanding of individual choices and actions. These approaches are leading to new public policies, which raises important ethical and political questions.

How much should a life cost?

Éric Sangar — 2024-06-06T07:45:53Z

What if human lives actually do have a price tag? Ariel Colonomos analyses the social and political conditions of pricing practices for human lives, offering an innovative interpretation of the role of the state in modern European history.

The Prime Convict of the 5th Republic

Nicolas Roussellier — 2024-04-11T08:35:00Z

Delphine Dulong analyses the role of the French Prime Minister, who does not so much embody a clearly-defined institution as a relational structure: a diarchy with the President, incessant interministerial work, parliamentary obligations. Is the job a powerful position, or that of an underling?

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.

The World on a Plateau

Raphaël Morera — 2023-11-30T07:00:00Z

The Larzac plateau is famous and paradoxical: as the scene of an emblematic struggle against the state, but also because its economy is a model of integration within global capitalism. Philippe Artières retraces its history.