Institut français

For the first time, the Pléiade collection is publishing the work of a contemporary historian. This event celebrates the centennial of the birth of this great mediaevalist, a historian of mentalities who found a way to make historical knowledge accessible to a wider audience. Felipe Brandi, an expert on Duby, edited and annotated the book.

Media, publishing, photography, theatre and political discourse are now shifting their attention to the lives of ordinary people. Does this move serve the need to better understand contemporary society? Sylvain Bourmeau, an actor and observer of these changes, offers some explanations.

At a time when the refugee issue is highly topical, a collection of essays offers a history of asylum administration and its actors and practices. A first step towards a European history of asylum in the twentieth century.

By tracing the history of surveillance in Europe and the Soviet bloc, the historian Sophie Cœuré explains the differences between democracies and dictatorships in this area. She also urges us to put things in perspective: We do not (yet) live in a “surveillance society.”

Jocelyne Dakhlia has addressed clichés about oriental despotism and Islam’s incompatibility with democracy through an historical examination of the form and logic of power in Muslim societies. Her prolific oeuvre, which spans Islamic history from the sultanate courts of the Middle Ages to contemporary Tunisia, redefines the boundaries of the Mediterranean and challenges us to think of European history in different terms.

Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people’s suffering, but also by our own.

Is there not a contradiction between the aims of sustainable urban development, which inflates the cost of housing, and the requirements of fairness in access to housing? Analysing the situation in France and comparing it to neighbouring European countries, Vincent Renard provides answers to this question.

2012, Terminator, Blade Runner, Melancholia. There is no shortage of films portraying the end of the world; in fact, they are becoming ever more successful. But what is their real meaning? Are they pure entertainment, allowing us to play with the idea that everything could stop from one day to the next? Peter Szendy believes that we should be taking them very seriously, because they express the fundamental nature of cinema itself – and because they tell us, in their own way, what a world is.

Creating connections has been the aim of Jean Starobinski’s work for more than half a century. His body of work is large and shifting, created in response to life, lying somewhere between the critical and the clinical. Books & Ideas met this citizen of the world at his house in Geneva, following the recent publication of three important books.

There is a long-standing tradition of contrasting the French and American models of philanthropy. According to four scholars invited to discuss the matter for Books and Ideas, this contrast, which is too quickly reduced to a difference between market and the state-based approaches, is no longer valid.

Sociologist Luc Boltanski situates his most recent publications and their main concepts within his broader intellectual trajectory, examining critical sociology and the sociology of critique, and what they can tell us about today’s social situation.

What sums of money are hidden in tax havens? By whom? And how? Using original methodology and data that has not yet been fully utilized, Gabriel Zucman sheds new light on these questions, in the hope that it might boost the fight against tax havens.

François Godement reminds us that the process of economic and cultural integration that is currently taking place in Asia is undermined by the heavy militarization of the countries in that region, by their competing visions of history and by diverse political factors of instability.