New Books in French Studies

The French Médersa: Islamic Education and Empire in Northwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2026) explores how the French state pursued a century-long project of bicultural Franco-Muslim education in its northwest African colonies, resulting in a new type of school, the médersa, that combined French and Islamic curricula. French officials frequently described these schools and their students as "hyphens," drawing connections between larger French and Islamic forces. Samuel D. Anderson highlights this hyphenating idea, situating Franco-Muslim education between beliefs about not only France and Islam but also about tradition and modernity and about North and West Africa. The médersa project had two goals: to create an elite class of Muslims friendly to the French imperial project and, subsequently, to mold Islam into a form that could be more easily controlled. A total of ten médersas opened across Algeria, Senegal, French Soudan, and Mauritania and closed only in the 1950s. The graduates of these schools, the medérsiens, went on to shape their societies profoundly but not always in the ways the French anticipated. Drawing on archival and oral sources from Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and France, The French Médersa proposes new ways to approach trans-Saharan history. Anderson argues that across northwest Africa, and for more than a century, Franco-Muslim education was central to the history of the French empire and Islamic education alike. Samuel D. Anderson is history teacher at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, California. Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Through a postcolonial lens, Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (Liverpool, 2025) explores the various ways in which francophone writers, visual artists and activists are responding to the global climate and environmental crises threatening the Earth today.The volume covers most of the francosphere: Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, South America and Polynesia. As well as discussing a range of environmental issues, from soil erosion to nuclear testing, it also considers ways in which francophone writers have become ecological activists. The ecotexts discussed include graphic novels, visual narratives, and zines alongside more conventional literary texts such as novels, short stories and poetry. The book seeks to decentre Belgium and France in francophone ecocritical scholarship while engaging in current debates in the field of ecocriticism, including the afterlives of Belgian and French colonialism and neo-colonialism in relation to climate change and environmental degradation, Blue Humanities, waste and toxicity studies, critical animal and plant studies, Indigenous peoples and their cultures and knowledges, climate-environmental (in)justice, and writerly/textual activism for climate and environment. It aims to widen the geographical scope of francophone ecocriticism by discussing a wide range of eco-themes that go beyond the segmentation and compartmentalisation found in other books in the field. Guest Nsah Mala is a poet, writer, children’s author, consultant, editor and translator, journalist-communicator, futurist and foresight practitioner, and interdisciplinary scholar working in English, French and Mbesa. Nsah currently works for the University of Cologne, Germany, as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Hub Coordinator of the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition.His research interests include comparative literature, anglophone and francophone African literatures, public and environmental humanities, literary activism/artivism, creative writing and foresight and futures thinking. He has published widely in these areas in peer-reviewed volumes and journals, including Ecozon@, Orbis Litterarum, Electronic Green Journal, Humanities, Peripeti and ASAP/J. His ongoing projects on ‘Wetland Time’ and ‘Congo Basin Futures’ are funded by the British Academy and the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship, respectively. Among many distinctions, he has judged the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Dubai Foresight Award in the Foresight for the Planet category. Guest Richard Watts is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian Studies, co-creator of the Environments, Cultures and Values minor, and founding director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lexington Books, 2005) as well as a series of articles on the intersections of francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. He is currently completing a book project titled Reclaimed Waters that considers how the pollution, privatization and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its ostensibly stable symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production in the Francosphere. Guest Giulia Champion is a Lecturer in Critical Ocean Studies at the University of Southampton. Her main research project is being developed in a monograph entitled The Political Construction of the Seabed: A Political Ethnography of the International Seabed Authority. This project explores the diplomatic processes of the United Nations body of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and the creation of a regulatory framework it is negotiating about deep-sea mining. The work explores this through a decolonial studies lens given the ISA’s location in Jamaica and its development of regulations about a new extractive frontier on the international seabed. Her work sits across the humanities and social sciences and uses arts-based methods for participatory public and policy engagement. She also collaborates on several projects including one on decarbonisation and electrical grids in Shetland, Orkney UK and Newfoundland, Canada; on Lithium extraction in Chile, and on safe swimming and access to green and blue spaces on the Isle of Wight, UK. She is an Associated Editor for the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the co-founder of the Deep Currents Collective, a group of activists and academics which holds a United Nation observer status at the International Seabed Authority. Her work has been published in (co-)authored articles in Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Journal of Energy History, Ocean and Society, Applied Energy, The Conversation, People and Nature and Comparative Law Journal of The Pacific. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

Water Logics: Materialist Epistemologies for the Environmental Humanities (U Virginia Press, 2026) examines the epistemological adjustments that take place when we make water the source and medium for thinking about the world. Eschewing metaphorical readings of rivers, seas, and oceans, it brings together leading voices from across the social sciences and the humanities to argue rather for a distinct focus on materiality, engaging posthumanism, biotheory, and other cutting-edge theoretical approaches. From the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, this rich collection is inhabited by migrants, port cities, and coral reefs. It explores the fruitful potential of water for literary, anthropological, and ethical studies, bringing both cohesive transdisciplinarity and fresh comparative perspectives to hydro-criticism. Taken together, the wide range of critical interpretative practices constitutes a signal contribution to the blue humanities. Guest yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French Studies and Chair of the Department of French & Italian Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is affiliated with the Programs in Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of This Book Is Full of Holes: Literary Bodies & the Invention of an Idiom and Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation & the Postfrancophone Lyric. He has published dozens of essays on Arabic and French lyric, translation, and postcolonialism. Along with Water Logics, he is coeditor most recently of Literature as Sound Studies, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature & Theory, and The Postlingual Turn. Guest Edwige Tamalet Talbayev is Associate Professor of French at Tulane University where she also holds affiliations with the Environmental Studies Program and the Middle East and North African Studies program, which she founded in 2022. Talbayev recently joined the faculty advisory board for the newly established Tulane Global Humanities Center. She concurrently serves as Professor Extraordinarius at the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and as a member of the advisory board for the Center for Francophone Research at the University of Leipzig. She is the long-time Editor of Expressions maghrébines and a co-editor of the “Passagen” book series at Georg Olms Verlag (Germany). Talbayev is the author of The Transcontinental Maghreb: Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean with Fordham UP and the co-editor of several edited collections; in addition to Water Logics and Rethinking Hospitality in the Mediterranean (both with our other guest today) these include a roundtable entitled “Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Environments” published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2025. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges (Fordham, 2025) investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations. Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining. Guest Debarati Sanyal is Professor of French, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, and currently holds the Zaffaroni Family Chair of Undergraduate Education. Affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of European Studies, her teaching and research interests span 19th -21st-century French and Francophone literature, memory studies, aesthetics and bio/necropolitics, critical human rights and refugee studies. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021-2022). She is currently co-PI on the Mellon-funded A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times (2024-2027). Besides Arts of the Border, Dr. Sanyal has authored Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), translated into French as Mémoire et Complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2019); and The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006). She has guest-edited “Time and Politics in Contemporary Critique: Entanglements and Aftermaths” (Critical Times, 2018), ha also co-edited, with Éric Fassin, Demos Anxiety: Genealogies, Rhetorics, and Politics of Great Replacement (forthcoming in Patterns of Prejudice); with Damon Young and Mario Telò, Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler (Representations 2022), and, with Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman, Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies 118-119). Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. Francesca Sbardella experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman. Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) was translated from Italian by Claudio Bendazzoli, with a foreword by Simon Ditchfield and an afterword by Fabio Dei. Francesca Sbardella is an anthropologist and historian of religion and a professor at the University of Bologna. * This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton UP, 2026) follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival. Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms. Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026)illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Baudelaire's Objects (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation. Charles Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them. Baudelaire's poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial. Baudelaire's Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire's poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us. Guest Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French and Director of the School of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont. He writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with a particular focus on the intersections of literature with philosophy and music. In addition to Baudelaire's Objects, Dr. Acquisto’s books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, and Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? New findings suggest Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, right, and a reconsideration of his life and work is long overdue. Denying the agency of living beings has informed two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, allowing people to regard the living world as so much raw material to shape and exploit for economic, industrial, and imperial gain. Deeply researched, strikingly original, and beautifully written, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026) shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose radical ideas offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science. Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She is the author of The Restless Clock and Science in the Age of Sensibility and is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. She lives in Berkeley, California. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies. Comparatively analysing an original selection of texts by modern and contemporary French-Francophone and East Asian writers, each chapter focuses on a particular genre such as the novel, life-writing, poetry, and image-texts. The reimagination of risk in literature is revealed to be closely related to different forms of play such as structured games, masquerade, poetic and intermedial experimentation. Franco-East Asian literatures help us rethink risk in linguistically diverse and cross-cultural contexts, providing a new paradigm for comparative criticism and world literature. Guest Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at University College London and holds a PhD in French from Queens' College, Cambridge. Her research spans comparisons and exchanges from the 20th-21st centuries between France, China, and East Asia broadly speaking. Her first monograph Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi (Legenda, 2015) re-reads two avant-garde French writers and the imaginative classical Chinese text Zhuangzi through their intertextual, poetic, and conceptual dialogues. Besides her two monographs, she has published extensively on Surrealism, poetry, and literary translation. She is a member of the AILC/ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association) Research Committee on Literary Theory. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists. Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism and the organization of permanent collections of later nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and display of nineteenth-century art. Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s influence on French art, as well as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art at the Harnett Museum of Art. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era. Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or not, and how these distant places built the French state and used it for their own ends. Beyond the Ocean covers an impressive sweep of history, from the late eleventh century through the early nineteenth, and yet the authors manage to retain a human element. Their judicious inclusion of micro-histories and primary-source quotation, as well as their lively prose, helps the reader enter into what it may have felt like to live through these developments, to participate in the era when "France became France, and the Atlantic became a world." Crucially, their attention to the non-European actors in this story and women's worlds and work makes the book a helpful corrective to top-down approaches to imperial histories. Beyond the Ocean is a must-read for Atlantic world scholars, but has value for anyone interested in early modern Europe or cultural exchange. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Black Power! A name with a ring to it on both sides of the Atlantic, taken as a sign of Black American rage incarnated by a few names: Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis. Behind these archetypes of the 1960s and 70s stood a political movement as mutable as it was international, that of Black Power, with the goal of bringing about a global uprising. This insurrection of Black worlds has haunted the West for centuries, rumbling beneath the words of Frantz Fanon and Lorraine Hansberry, the films of Melvin Van Peebles and Sarah Maldoror, in the albums of Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, the poems of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In Fantômes de la révolution noire: Une Histoire culturelle transatlantique ([Ghosts of the Black Revolution: A Transatlantic Cultural History] Éditions Ròt-Bò-Krik, 2026), Grégory Pierrot evokes the ghosts of Black Power and shows that the arts are real laboratories where the Black Revolution is formed, reinvented, and broadcast. Guest Grégory Pierrot is Associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he studies the cultural and artistic networks of the Black Atlantic. In addition to Fantômes de la révolution noire published by Ròt-Bò-Krik earlier this year, Dr. Pierrot has translated and co-translated a series of essays and novels from and into French, and edited or co-edited several volumes concerning the literature of and about the Haitian revolution in French and English. He is also the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture and Decolonize Hipsters. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Kelly M. Duke Bryant’s Negotiating Childhood: French Colonialism and African Children in Senegal, 1848-1940 (U Mass Press, 2026)explores how colonial child protection policies and African children’s responses to them produced new ways of defining, measuring, documenting, and experiencing childhood in the French colony of Senegal from 1848 to 1940. In this groundbreaking book, Bryant takes the scholarship in new directions, offering to a literature dominated by studies of British colonies in the twentieth century a study of childhood in a French colony from the immediate post-emancipation period through the 1930s. This focus allows her to complicate the generally accepted timeline of child protection in colonial Africa and question other assumptions about children’s history on the continent. The author, Kelly M. Duke Bryant, is an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University and the current President of the French Colonial Historical Society. The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The Forger of Paris (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) presents Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography in its only authorized edition, expanded with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore. "This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." — Jewish Book Council At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world. "At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." — Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times "A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." — Foreword Review Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

What does Blackness look like? In Forms of Blackness: Race and Visibility in the French-Speaking World (Duke University Press, 2026), Cécile Bishop argues that this seemingly simple question has no straightforward answer. Instead of treating race as something immediately visible, she explores how Blackness emerges through the interplay of perception, language, and history. A central theme of the book is that visibility is never neutral. Through examples ranging from photographs of the Liberation of Paris to works of art such as Portrait of a Black Woman, Bishop shows that Blackness cannot be reduced to what is seen. Instead, she introduces the idea of Blackness as form, emphasizing the importance of representation, opacity, and aesthetic experience. Engaging with thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon, Bishop invites readers to rethink the assumption that seeing is the same as knowing. Forms of Blackness offers a thoughtful and original account of how race is shaped not simply by appearance, but by the ways we learn to see. Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton University Press, 2026) is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine’s being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain, and France were unparalleled in their time. This volume spans the years 1772 to 1782, a decade that witnessed a diverse output of writings from Paine, from editorials and magazine pieces to pamphlets and newspaper articles. The book includes the Forester Letters, the Crisis papers, the Deane Affair articles, and Common Sense, with Gregory Claeys’s general introduction and commentary by the editors providing invaluable historical context. Gregory Claeys is professor emeritus of the history of political thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The First Emancipation: The Forgotten History of Abolition in Revolutionary France (Princeton UP, 2026) is a dramatic account of how slavery and race profoundly influenced the course of the French Revolution and had a central impact on the lives of key leaders, including Mirabeau, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, and Napoleon. Acclaimed historian Jeremy D. Popkin brings this often-forgotten story to life, highlighting the arguments put forward by French abolitionists and their opponents and the profound repercussions of the first abolition of slavery in a Western empire.When the French revolutionaries passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, they immediately faced a burning question: did that document’s first article—“Men are born and remain free and equal in rights”—apply to the 800,000 enslaved Black people in the country’s colonies? Over the next dozen years, revolutionary leaders fought over this question. The First Emancipation tells how French lawmakers initially protected slavery in their constitution but reversed themselves in 1794, making France the first western country to abolish slavery throughout its empire. Yet only eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon tried to force the emancipated Black populations of the colonies back into slavery. His decision led to his first major military defeat and to the proclamation of the independence of the Black nation of Haiti, but also to the reestablishment of slavery in other French colonies, where it would not finally be abolished until 1848.The story of how France emancipated its enslaved people and declared them full citizens only to return many of them to bondage, The First Emancipation reveals that the course of abolition in the modern world was more winding and halting than is often remembered. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

From the inside flap: “A rich resource of Deleuze’s research that is unavailable in his published writing Includes summaries of 216 seminar sessions available in transcripts and recordings Summaries are based on research for the Deleuze Seminars project (co-directed by Charles J. Stivale and Daniel W. Smith), where full transcripts and translations, to which readers will have access for simultaneous or subsequent consultation, have been developed by an international team of scholar-translators Alongside summaries, an attached critical apparatus provides references to corresponding links within Deleuze’s writings, seminars, and other sources to facilitate additional research The texts in this volume - summaries of the 216 seminars taught by Gilles Deleuze - provide unique insight into the latter half of Deleuze’s teaching career. Deleuze understood his seminars as a laboratory for developing his ongoing research, and this volume is a guide to the creative becomings in the development of his philosophical works through teaching.From Anti-Oedipus (1972) to The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1987), Deleuze examined a wide range of philosophical perspectives in pursuit of successive thematic topics. These summaries and commentaries serve as incitement for further research, allowing readers familiar with Deleuze’s work to find new angles of approach and providing greater access to readers coming to his work for the first time." New Books Network: Stivale, Charles J., and Daniel W. Smith. (2025-10-21). "Gilles Deleuze, On Painting" Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour: Stivale, Charles J., Taylor Adkins, and Cooper Cherry. (2025-08-12). "Deleuze and Guattari – How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs" Stivale, Charles J., Daniel W. Smith. (2023-06-29). "Deleuze on Painting and Cinema". The Deleuze Seminars: here Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works. Stalnaker’s book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale UP, 2025) unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them. Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought’s entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve’s sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing, in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the idea of a humanity within its limits. Guest Emmanuel Buzay is currently working as an international technical expert for the Modern Language Association and the French Embassy in the US, having previously held appointments at UMass Amherst and the University of Connecticut. In addition to this monograph, he has published book chapters on topics from Frankenstein to Michel Houellebecq, and his articles have appeared in Nouvelles Études Francophones, Res Futurae, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era’. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view of the dominant structures. William Barylo is a research fellow in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Timothy Mason Roberts explores the connection between the United States and North Africa between the Barbary Wars of the early nineteenth century and the era of European decolonization after World War II. Dr. Roberts offers a new approach to the study of empires, highlighting the significance of Algeria in French-American relations from France's first occupation of the country through the first years of independence of the Republic of Algeria. As Dr. Roberts demonstrates, imperial authorities in Washington, DC; Paris; and Algiers rarely collaborated intentionally in institutional partnerships or alliances. Rather, American, French, and Algerian politicians, soldiers, writers, and revolutionaries—often acting at cross purposes and across political and cultural boundaries—sought power by imagining and constructing Algeria as a fissured, dynamic, transimperial space. Focusing on issues of settler colonialism, irregular warfare, racialized citizenship, territorial incorporation, and pan-African identity, After Barbary shows how French Algeria helped make the American and French empires. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

France is a leading intelligence power, but we know very little about its premier intelligence agency: the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE). Damien Van Puyvelde's latest book, The DGSE: A Concise History of France's Foreign Intelligence Service (Georgetown University Press, 2026), examines France's foreign intelligence service from its rebranding as the DGSE in 1982 to the present. It covers the legacies of the Second World War, how decolonization and the Cold War shaped the organization, the organization's workforce and leadership, as well as public and (pop) cultural perceptions and representations of intelligence in France. The emergence of the DGSE, following the election of socialist President Mitterrand, opened an era of change, marked by a series of reorganizations and new threats over the horizon. Some readers will recall the Rainbow Warrior fiasco, when DGSE operators sank Greenpeace's flagship, causing the death of a photographer in 1985. Others will be more familiar with the popular TV show The Bureau, which portrays the lives of non-official cover DGSE officers operating in contemporary hotspots. These vignettes, just like much of the media coverage, paint a misleading portrait of the DGSE as a group of dedicated but reckless officers. Van Puyvelde shows how France's leading intelligence agency has successfully adapted to political and security requirements from the late Cold War to today's international security threats. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Denise Z. Davidson joins Jana Byars to talk about Surviving Revolution: Bourgeois Lives and Letters (Cornell UP, 2025). The book explores how two wealthy and well-connected families with roots in Lyon responded to the French Revolution and the resulting transformations. In building a new political system based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the French Revolution encouraged both individuals and families to recognize their power to shape the world through political action, rethink their strategies in negotiating intimate relations and family life, and assess both terrifying new risks and enticing opportunities for advancement. Denise Z. Davidson traces two families' trajectories and weaves together the strategies they employed to survive and hopefully thrive in the decades that followed the Revolution. Their private correspondence shows that affect and interest, intimacy and property, are mutually constitutive, and cannot be "thought" separately. Her analysis reveals what it meant to be bourgeois, how gender played a role in the formation of class identities, and how family and emotional life overlapped with other arenas. These social and cultural themes are woven into the narrative through the stories told in the families' letters. By viewing dramatic historical events through the eyes of people who lived through them, Surviving Revolution illuminates how the practices of everyday life shaped emerging notions of bourgeois identity. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge. Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou's philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: contextual articles, placing Charles' work within the larger Haitian literary landscape, punctual articles, addressing specific themes in a selection of Charles' books, and author testimonials, attesting to Charles' work's importance both to his contemporaries and to a new generation of writers. With the ongoing republication of Charles' work by Mémoire d'encrier in Montreal, and the increasing interest in the author, the proposed volume is timely and necessary, and is in large part a critical accompaniment to the republishing programme. Described by Dany Laferrière as "most brilliant Haitian author of his generation," Charles has until recently remained largely unread and little understood. As the various chapters in the volume show, Charles is an author for now, and the collection will accompany readers seeking strikingly original insights on issues such as race, migration, and exile, and the role of the author and literature in times of crisis. Guest Eliana Văgălău is Associate Professor and director of the French program at Loyola University Chicago. Her research on francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary philosophy focuses on the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as on questions of transnationalism, diaspora, and sexuality. In addition to co-editing this volume, she has published articles on the work of authors such as Maryse Condé, James Noël, and Jean-Claude Charles. As a founding member of the Collectif Jean-Claude Charles, she dedicates much of her work to making visible the work of this fundamental Haitian author. She has published translations of literary and philosophical texts and is currently completing an essay on contemporary French Caribbean fiction. By teaching a course on Black Paris, her extensive collaborations with contemporary Black artists and writers living in France today, as well as serving as co-organizer of the Black Europe Symposium in 2023 at Loyola University Chicago, she has developed a secondary research interest in the city of Paris as achief site of Black transnational encounters. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisians were left behind: as late as 1928, 18 percent of houses still lacked direct sewerage. Haussmannization often hid infrastructures behind walls and floors, under streets, or in peripheral districts. In the forty years after 1870, a period that Dr. Peter Soppelsa calls “secondary Haussmannization,” Parisians inverted them—revealed their hidden components to scrutinize their workings and costs for society, environment, and health—and in turn politicized them. Drawing on French government archives, engineers’ maps, the illustrated press, and a collection of over 100 photographic postcards, in Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026) Dr. Soppelsa charts the diverse embodied, emotional, and everyday experiences of living with expanding urban infrastructures—streets, housing, tramways, subways, the water supply, sewers, and rivers—in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Parisians learned that infrastructures were not simply technical solutions for the social and environmental problems of city life but could also bring about new dangers and dependencies. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l’Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national heroism during the Age of Empire – a period marked by significant external threats and internal strife – while also embodying unrestrained creativity. Ultimately, the inventor novel reflects broader French anxieties surrounding scientific progress, empire, and gender. Ana Oancea explores the transmedia and transnational legacy of the fin-de-siècle inventor novel through vignettes that highlight similarly themed narratives in contemporary popular culture. These sections engage with films, television series, graphic narratives, and video games that reinterpret key aspects of the inventor narrative, shedding light on its power structures, racial and gender politics, and colonial aspirations. Guest Ana Oancea is Associate Professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the intersections of science and literature, adaptation studies, and visual culture. She has recently published articles in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and French Screen Studies. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya.De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale. Nearly a century later, in In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025), Dr. Richard Ivan Jobs and Dr. Steven Van Wolputte have taken up this story in all its complexity, creating a graphic history from de Colmont’s narratives and images in the form of a heroic adventure comic. An essay contextualizing and historicizing the tale follows, as does an evocative, reflective poem by Tsotsil writer Manuel Bolom Pale, which offers an Indigenous perspective on the encounter. A captivating experiment in form, the book puts an immersive new spin on studying the past.In the Land of the Lacandón illuminates de Colmont’s expedition against the backdrop of late imperialism on the eve of the Second World War in Europe. It investigates the history of exploration, science, and media, revealing how these narratives represented and constructed Indigenous Peoples for the public – and how such representations continue to resonate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Written under the shadow of growing authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book is an effort to understand resistance movements of the twenty-first century. It foregrounds the Yellow Vests to present an accurate and timely picture of a protest movement that baffled analysts and blurred the boundaries of left and right. Comprehensively exploring the meaning of “les Gilets Jaunes triompheront” (the yellow vests will win), written on the Arc de Triomphe in 2018, The Yellow Vests and the Battle for Democracy details how people of all ages, many from the provinces and the urban periphery, rushed through the Paris streets, breaking windows and braving tear gas, challenging the ruling class in extraordinary and unpredictable ways. Avoiding hierarchy and stable organization, and claiming a right to a territory or space that is between the private and the public, these protests imagined a different form of collectivity that is not commodified but established by the social practice of “commoning”—of momentarily linking protests in the streets and other spaces. An essential book for activists and researchers on contemporary protest movements, this book offers crucial insight into the formation of protests and popular resistance and how social movements generate their own political and ideological character. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Mattie Fitch, Associate Professor at Marymount University and author of The People, The Workers and the Citizens: Antifascist Cultures and the Popular Front in France, 1934-1939 (Routledge, 2026). In our conversation, we discussed the way that antifascist culture undergirded the French Popular Front, the tensions between the Communists, Socialists, and Radical antifascist projects, and the ways that each Popular Front party of defined “the people.” In The People, The Workers and the Citizens, Fitch explores Popular Front antifascist programs and the cultural work that illuminated their diverse visions for a “people’s government.” The book is thematic: in her first chapter, Fitch examines the Communists’ Maison de la Culture and the Fédération musicale populaire. The communist’s efforts to produce a worker’s culture successfully mobilized French national symbols in novel ways but had difficulties navigating between high and low culture. By contrast, chapter 2 centres on Jean Zay and the Radicals. Zay’s influence abounded and he was willing to work with anyone in the Popular Front to see cultural access extended to all French citizens. Yet his vision of a civic nationhood clashed with his Communist and Socialist allies who privileged workers. The most enigmatic were the Socialists. Although they were the largest party in the French National Assembly, Leon Blum’s party struggled to articulate an antifascist program that encompassed all of their voters. Their pacifism proved a problem in the context of a rising Nazi Germany, and they were squeezed between the increasing nationalism of the French Communists and the Radicals’ appeal to the working class. Fitch’s analysis moves beyond earlier studies that focus mostly (or only) on Paris. In chapters 4 and 5, she looks at the antifascist activities of politicians in Marseille and Rouen and finds two very different Popular Fronts at work in the regions. In Marseille, working class politics dominate and an authentic endogenous Popular Front culture precedes directives from the capital. While in Rouen, extremely moderate Radicals battle working class activists on the other side of town. Fitch’s work is compelling and shines a new light on the history of the Popular Front. It will be of interest to scholars of modern France and political culture. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

After the collapse of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, France became one of four principal occupying powers in a defeated Germany. Within their zone of occupation along the Upper and Middle Rhine, French occupiers participated in the Allied project to remake German society. In the process, they confronted the long history of Franco-German rivalry in the region and their country’s diminished power in the wake of World War II.From Occupation to Integration: Recivilizing the French Zone of Post-Nazi Germany, 1945-1955 (LSU Press, 2026) by Dr. Drew Flanagan explores how French ideas about civilization and the civilizing process shaped the practice of occupation in the French Zone and the early stages of European integration. The French Zone was set apart from the other Allied zones by the occupiers’ belief that Nazi “barbarism” was deeply rooted in German culture and history. In seeking to transform the Germans along their border into acceptable partners for France within a united western Europe, the French occupiers applied aspects of France’s universal “civilizing” mission, adapting strategies and practices developed in the country’s overseas colonies to fit a European population.Whether implementing counterinsurgency methods developed in French North Africa in the pacification and control of their zone or attempting to address what they perceived as the deep-rooted flaws of German culture through reeducation and propaganda, the French applied their civilizational thinking, using that vision to justify and guide the first postwar attempts at cross-border economic integration. Through both conflicts and cooperation with the German population, the French in occupied Germany negotiated a shared vision of western European civilization that they hoped would ensure French leadership in Europe.In this engaging study, Dr. Flanagan deftly details and analyzes the entanglement between the Europeanization of the French Zone and decolonization in France’s empire, prompting readers to consider the continued impact of colonial and imperial ideas and practices on contemporary Europe and the European Union. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press. The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored. In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures. Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Huguenot Networks: Truth and Secrecy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge UP, 2025), Penny Robert's latest book, takes us into the world of secret intelligence gathering during the French Wars of Religion. Robert's discovery of the interrogation record of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Tivinat, arrested in May 1570 for attempting to secretly carry letters to England, unspools into a broader story about the intersections between confessional affiliations, international affairs, knowledge, trust, and networking in a tumultuous time. As she argues, clandestine communication was crucial to maintaining ties amongst a widely dispersed and threatened religious community. Huguenot Networks is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of espionage, Huguenots, international affairs in Elizabethan England, or the French Wars of Religion. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In 1971, the French government announced a massive extension of its military base on the Larzac plateau in southern France. Land was to be expropriated from 107 farms around the small town of La Cavalerie. Limited resistance was expected, but what happened next exceeded all expectations. Local sheep farmers set up protest camps and occupied the land. They soon attracted an astonishing level of support, pioneering a form of regional radicalism with global implications. Drawing out the international dimensions of the protest, Make cheese not war: Transnational resistance and the Larzac in modern France (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Andrew Smith explores a transnational resistance movement in the 1970s that challenged dominant visions of modernity and became a wellspring of radical alternatives. Exploring previously unconsulted archives in France and elsewhere, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the decade-long peasant movement and its aftermath. Repositioning the Larzac struggle within a wider network of French and international solidarities, from the US to the UK, Germany, Burkina Faso, New Caledonia and Japan, the book retraces political networks of pacifist activism, as well as environmental movements and anti-nuclear protest. It shows how this French peasant campaign became both a platform and a model for popular engagement. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book’s scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge. Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021). We previously chatted on New Books about her work on the great Cambodian film director Rithy Panh, so was excited to speak with her again about Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience. Guest Dr. Michaela Hulstyn is Associate Director of the Structured Liberal Education Program at Stanford University. Her research interests include philosophy and Literature; 20c and 21c French and Francophone African thought, cognitive approaches to aesthetics; global phenomenology; intermediality; decolonization; narrative. In addition to her monograph, she has published articles related to a number of these topics in forums such as Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: Sites.Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

How did the far right go from illegitimate fringe to contender for public office, and did Europe have anything to do with it? Europe As Ideological Resource: European Integration and Far Right Legitimation in France and Italy (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that European integration functioned as an ideological resource for far right parties looking for legitimation because it enabled them to refashion their political message in a more acceptable form, while maintaining the allegiance of their existing supporters.Drawing on the qualitative analysis of over 400 documents produced by the Movimento Sociale Italiano/Alleanza Nazionale in Italy (1978-2009) and the Rassemblement National in France (1978-2019), Lorimer identifies the core concepts and discourses the parties used to talk about Europe, and the legitimation mechanisms associated with them. The book's narrative is developed through the analysis of four key concepts: the concept of identity, which enabled the parties to transnationalise their message and create a positive association between themselves and Europe; the concept of liberty, which made it possible for them to foster an image of actors holding uncontroversial positions; the concept of threat, which helped them promote the idea that 'desperate times call for desperate measures; and the concept of national interest, which helped them stress commitment to core principles in their ideology.Ever since its re-emergence on the European political scene, scholars have sought to explain the mainstreaming of the far right. By understanding how the process of European integration facilitated its transition from the margins to the mainstream, this book adds one piece to the puzzle of far right legitimation. Marta Lorimer is a Lecturer in Politics at the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University, where she teaches on European politics and populism, and co-editor of the journal Political Research Exchange. Her research on far-right politics and European integration has been published widely, including in the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Belle Époque Paris, the Eiffel Tower was newly built, France was experiencing remarkable political stability, and American women were painting the town and gathering at a female-only Residence known as The American Girls' Club in Paris. Opened in 1893, The Club was the center of expatriate living and of dedication to a calling in the fine arts, and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women.Now in The Club: Where American Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025), curator, art historian, and podcast host Jennifer Dasal presents the untold story of the Club, the philanthropists who created it, and the artists it housed. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home for single women of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people. A Neuroscientist's Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life Our guest is: Jennifer Dasal, who is the creator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, the author of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. She holds an MA in art history, and is the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lectures frequently on art both locally and nationally Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Artisans and Designers Thanks To Life In The Garden Behind The Moon Jumping Through Hoops Your Art Will Save Your Life The Artists Joy Speaking While Female My What-if Year We Take Our Cities With Us Pursuing Life Abroad Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature and culture has explored subjects such as garden design, art and architecture; theater, ballet, and fête performances; astronomy; early modern fashion accessories; and early journalism. Claire’s current projects include Jesuit school ballets; female itinerant clothing resellers; and the innovative and enterprising publishing practices of Nicholas de Blégny, a best-selling and long forgotten multi-hyphenate physician-author. Her scholarship is motivated by her abiding interests in visual and material culture, her curiosity about how the things people see, and the objects and material practices that they engage with, create cultural meanings. She is the author of In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth Century France (Northwestern UP, 2025) and Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents That Made Modern France (U Penn Press, 2007). Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progresson posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances. The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The introduction of the principle of women's reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women's liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of 'reproductive responsibility', or the expectation that individuals perform the 'right' sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms. Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980 (Oxford UP, 2025) breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens 'worthy' of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of 'eugenic abortion', used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women's conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally. Guest Dr. Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, and is also the author of Which Socialism? Whose Detente? West European Communism and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 in 2007 and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (1968-1983) in 2014, as well as the co-editor of Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency in 2021. In addition to authoring numerous journal articles and book chapters and co-editing several special issues of academic journalsb she is also an editor at the Journal of Modern European History and sits on various other editorial boards.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean (Rutgers UP, 2025) examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments. Guest Jennifer Boum Make is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. In addition to her monograph, she has co-edited 2025’s Graphic Narratives of Resistance: Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-Language Bandes Dessinées. In addition to many journal articles and contributions to collected volumes, she serves on a number of editorial boards and is one of the founders of Kwazman vwa: New Paths in Caribbean literature, an online series hosting conversations with ultracontemporary Caribbean writers. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: How Churchill and De Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World (Simon & Schuster, 2026) shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle—tall, gauche, and incorruptible—exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill—short, charming, witty, and a bon vivant—resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other’s stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was “the great artist of a great history,” while Churchill recognized de Gaulle as “l'homme du destin.”Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, Vinen makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. He retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen anew and we gain fresh insights into their achievements and their legacy today. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

A princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by headlong change. Honored as a "mother" by subsequent Frankish kings and as a holy woman by her nuns and devotees, Radegund enjoyed a reputation for righteousness that spread throughout the whole of medieval Europe, with later queens emulating her pious achievements. For generations, she defined medieval queenship, female monastic practice, and the expectations associated with holy women. Today, she is often envisioned as a pan-European saint. Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. E. T. Dailey presents a new interpretation of this remarkable woman, examining her vibrant life and legacy. Dr. Dailey shows how she succeeded in establishing a place for herself within this difficult and dangerous world, despite the trials she faced. He also demonstrates how Radegund achieved a position of prominence as a woman in a foreign land without resorting to the violence and intrigue that characterized the lives of other prominent women during this period. Based on a wealth of English, French, and German scholarship, this book will equip experts and lay readers with a concise, authoritative, and accessible portrait of Radegund. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann (Birkhaüser, 2024) is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others. Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier. Veronique Boone is an architect from the University of Ghent, Belgium and doctor from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAPL), France and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. She lectures on architectural history and theory as well as on the conservation of 20th-century architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theory, as well as the construction history, of modern architecture. She has published extensively in academic publications on Le Corbusier and the mediation of architecture by film and television, and is a correspondant for Belgian and international architectural magazines on contemporary architecture. She has worked on several exhibitions as curator and/or contributor to catalogues – among them, Lucien Hervé, l’oeil de l’architecte, CIVA, 2005; Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, 2012; L’Architecture modern à l’écran, Cinematek, 2014; In the Studio at 35, rue de Sèvres: an Amateur cameraman’s Informal View, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2017 and Atelier Jespers, 2018. She is also Vice-President of DOCOMOMO Belgium. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell UP, 2024) gives an historical account of the evolution of the matchmaking business during the Second Empire in France. The book explores how the matchmaking industry at the Postrevolutionary France was shaped by commodified stories of hope and fantasy, including democratization of the matchmaking business, which aroused the interest of democratized French audience, including lower-middle-class individuals, through exaggerated advertisements in the media productions. The book also gives an exposition on the period of French Revolution and how it significantly altered family legislation and marriage practices, leading to increased freedom in spouse selection and the rise of professional matchmakers like Claude Viome. The book highlights how the revolutionary reforms impact on marriage of the French populace, including the age reduction policy for the majority and lifting of parental consent for marriage, as well as introducing divorce by mutual consent in 1792. According to Andrea Mansker, the changes in age and divorce policy, combined with increased mobility and changing social patterns in Paris, encouraged young people across classes to demand more freedom in spouse selection, leading Claude Viome to market his services as a way to bypass traditional family negotiations in courtship. The book relates the1804 Civil Code, explaining how it preserved revolutionary reforms like equality before the law but restored traditional family structures by treating married women and children as legal minors under their husband's authority. It exposes how divorce became less common and eventually outlawed in 1816, and detailed the French Supreme Court's 1855 ruling against matchmaker contracts, which viewed marriage as a sacred agreement distinct from commercial transactions.  Mariam Olugbodi is a university teacher and a writer, she is the author of the monograph titled: “Stylistic Features in the 2011 and 2012 Final Matches Commentaries in the UEFA Champions League”, published by Grin Verlag. Mariam’s greatest dream is seeing a world where knowledge is accessible to all. She does this through her volunteering roles on open knowledge platforms as a host and an editor. As part of her effort to maintain inclusion and diversity in knowledge transmission, she volunteers as a teacher in crises contexts. Learn more and connect with Mariam through her social links @ | LinkedIn here | ORCID here | Meta here | Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes's novels and evolution as an author. Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes, and Les Jolies choses. Michèle Schaal's Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics (Peter Lang, 2026) specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes's Grrrl writing denounces how this system engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian law and legal processes.  Sally Low’s pioneering study, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French (NUS Press, 2023), tells the story of the encounter between what she calls two different legal and social ‘cosmologies’: Cambodia’s indigenous legal tradition and modern French legal thinking. While the French claimed they were modernizing Cambodian law, in fact they imposed many elements of French law. Initially, they dispossessed the king of much of his judicial authority. But ironically, the French reform of Cambodian law retained the monarchy as the semi-divine source of law, and royal power was subsequently legally embedded into new national institutions, the law, and the constitutions. At independence in 1953, 90 years after the French began their protectorate, Cambodia’s King Sihanouk inherited this legal apparatus which had done so much to enhance the power of the executive over the judiciary. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, French colonies and trading posts sprawled across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In the first pan-imperial history of the early French Empire in the English language, Mélanie Lamotte shows how an increasingly cohesive legal culture came to govern the lives of enslaved and free people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent. She also illuminates the important role played by these populations in the development of the empire, from Louisiana to Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Madagascar, Isle Bourbon, and India. The early French Empire has often been portrayed as a fragmented conglomerate of isolated colonies or regions. Yet Lamotte shows that racial policies issued by the metropole, as well as by officials in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, significantly influenced one another. Rather than focusing on the actions of administrators, however, Lamotte also reveals the extensive influence of people on the ground—especially those of non-European descent. Through their sexuality and their labor, along with their socio-economic and political endeavors, they played a critical role in building the empire and setting its limits. As they sought justice for themselves, strove to protect their kin, and aimed to improve their social conditions, these individuals also pushed against the advancement of white dominion in unexpected ways. Archivally rich and rigorously documented, By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire (Harvard UP, 2026) illuminates the transoceanic connections that united the French colonial world—and recasts people of African, Malagasy, South Asian, and Native American descent as key actors in the story of empire-building. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Claire Nicolas, a chercheuse du Fonds National Suisse at Basel University, a holder of a prestigious Ambizione Research Grant, and the author of Une si longue course: Sport, genre, et citoyenneté au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire (années 1900-1970) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024). In our conversation, we discussed physical culture in colonial and post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, the differences and the similarities between the imperial and post-imperial biopolitical strategies in both places, and the way that sports histories benefit from sustained engagement with critical theory. In Une si longue course, Nicolas engages in a sustained comparison between the colonial and post-colonial physical cultural life of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. She organizes her work into two sections: one on colonial West Africa and another on post-colonial West Africa. Each section has three chapters covering physical education, scouting and sports. Her work addresses athletic life from the top down and the bottom up. In doing so, she shows that contrary to any simple history of teleological progress or sport as a crucible for nationalism, physical education, scouting and sport have been imperfect tools for imperial and post-imperial states. Athletes, scouts, and students found innovative ways to reshape the physical cultural priorities of the state to suit their own agendas. This deeply ambitious work significantly adds to our understanding of physical culture in colonial and post-colonial West Africa through a comparative approach. It draws upon extensive primary source research: Nicolas works in the archives of the British and French colonial states, the ministries of post-colonial Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, and the repositories of international sporting organizations in Switzerland. She also relies upon oral histories conducted with Ghanaian and Ivoirian sportsmen and women. Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Great Britain, and France: their physical cultural programmes shared continuities and ruptures. Colonial empires concerned with the mise en valeur of their subjects sought biopolitical solutions to increase the birthrate, expand agricultural and industrial production, and prepare men for the defence of the empire. They worried that physical cultural programs – if poorly managed – would become sites for resistance, but Nicolas’ work shows that sporting clubs, scouting halls, and schools could confound any simple collaboration/resistance dichotomy. Nicolas’ work also demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of both colonial and post-colonial physical culture. Newly emergent post-colonial nations sought to produce new men (and women) in ways that replicated the essentialism of their imperial predecessors. Nicolas’ engaging work, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented will be of broad interest to people invested in British, French, and West African history. It has broader conclusions for people interested in colonial and post-colonial theory. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Libraries in French colonial Vietnam functioned as symbols of Western modernity and infrastructures of colonial knowledge. Yet Vietnamese readers pursued alternative uses of the library that exceeded imperial intentions. In Bibliotactics: Libraries and the Colonial Public in Vietnam (U California Press, 2026), Cindy Any Nguyen examines the Hanoi and Saigon state libraries in colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, uncovering the emergence of a colonial public who reimagined the political meaning and social space of the library through public critique and day-to-day practice. Comprising government bureaucrats, library personnel, journalists, and everyday library readers, this colonial public debated the role of libraries as educational resource, civilizing instrument, and literary heritage.  Moving beyond procolonial or anticolonial nationalism framings, Bibliotactics advances a relational theory of power that centers public reading culture contextualized within the library infrastructure of the colonial information order. As the first comprehensive history of the colonial and national library in Asia, this book contributes new insights into publicity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the histories of Vietnam, libraries, and information. Bibliotactics is available open access from Luminosa. Visit here to download a copy for free. Cindy Anh Nguyen is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Their names are Mohamed, Samira, sometimes Matthieu or Sophie. They were born and bred in France and are highly qualified, but they have decided to go and live in London or New York, Montreal or Brussels, Geneva or Dubai. Many were discriminated against on the French job market, or stigmatized simply because of their religion or the sound of their names. Whether devout or not, they felt unloved and unwanted in France, but abroad they have found a sense of peace and fulfilment that their native country failed to give them.Based on extensive original research, France, You Love It but Leave It: The Silent Flight of French Muslims (Polity, 2025) by Dr. Olivier Esteves, Dr. Alice Picard, and Dr. Julien Talpin sheds new light on the silent and largely unacknowledged flight abroad of French Muslims. It explores their motivations, their experiences in France and abroad, and their sense of Frenchness, torn between gratitude and bitterness. This book isn't just about an unreported brain-drain - it is also about the deleterious effects of Islamophobia in a country that balks at the very mention of the concept. And it highlights a pressing issue that many nations with Muslim minorities need to confront. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

When it comes to the condition of Jews in Christian Europe, France was long known as the haven and heartland of integration and of toleration. And yet when things seemed to be going well for Jews in Western Europe and North America generally and France especially, the infamous fin de siècle Dreyfus affair brought to the surface some of the worst kinds of bigotry and animus--like contemporaneous Russian pogroms a premonition of the deadly looming revival of ethnic or religious divisions that had seemed a thing of the past. Our guest today, historian Maurice Samuels, author of many fine books on French history (Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (2010), and The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (2016))and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism has written a crackerjack new book. Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair, (Yale 2024) has written a wonderful account of Dreyfus himself and how should we understand what that turmoil has ot tell us how Jews then (and perhaps today) coexisted with a mainstream secular Christian society either by way of assimilation or (not quite the same thing) by peaceful integration that preserved cultural distinctions. The discussion ranges widely, setting the scene in the prior centuries when Jews settled all over France, and then were accorded unusual rights by the universalist vision of the French Revolution. Maurie also explains why succeeding generations in France included the ascension not only of Leon Blum the Jewish socialist (and inventor of the weekend!) who improbably led anti-fascist France during in the 1930's--but also the other Jews who followed him as political leaders in France, right up to the present-day. From Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) forward, Maurie shows, intellectuals have missed the significance of the way Dreyfus and his family integrated without assimilating. The conversation culminating in Maurie introducing John to the fascinating "Franco-French War" about what that coexistence should look like: assimilation which presumes the disappearance of a distinctive Jewish cultural identity, or integration which posits the peaceful coexistence of French citizens of various religions and cultures. Mentioned in the episode Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1844) George Eliot's (perhaps philosemitic) Daniel Deronda (1876) Why does Yale have a Hebrew motto, אורים ותומים (light and perfection)? The Haitian Revolution in its triumphs and tribulations is an analogy that helps explain jewish Emancipation--and also in some ways a tragic counterexample. The horrifying Great Replacement Theory we have heard so much about in America (eg in Charlottesville in 2017) began in France; Maurie has some thoughts about that. Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair. America's racial "one drop" rule. Pierre Birnbaum, Leon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist (Yale, 2015) Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Animal Rhetoric and Natural Science in Eighteenth-century Liberal Political Writing: Political Zoologies of the French Enlightenment (Routledge, 2024) shows how our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors—Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne—also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces. Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016’s Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters.  Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In both the United States and France, each side of the legal battle over same-sex marriage and parenthood relied heavily on experts. Despite the similarity of issues, however, lawmakers in each country turned to different sets of authorities: from economists and psychoanalysts to priests and ordinary people. They even prized different types of expertise—empirical research in the United States versus abstract theory in France.Exploring the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States and France, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer sheds new light on the power of experts to influence high-stakes democratic debates. Drawing on extensive interviews and ethnographic observation, Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer traces the divergences between the two countries, showing why some experts are ubiquitous in one but absent in the other. He argues that lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, and activists covet something only experts can provide: the credibility and aura of authority, or “expert capital,” which they deploy to advance their agendas. Expert capital is not derived from scientific or technical merit alone but is produced through cultural norms, material resources, and social relationships, which vary greatly across national contexts.Through the story of the fight over gay rights, By the Power Vested in Me: How Experts Shape Same-Sex Marriage Debates (Columbia UP, 2025) reveals how and why certain experts—but not others—obtain the authority to shape public opinion and policy. At a time of soaring public distrust in experts, this book offers new ways to understand the contested political role of expertise and its consequences. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Today we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director of FranceandUS, and she lectures on sports diplomacy at New York University Tisch Institute of Global Sport. We met to talk about her most recent book: Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of basketball in France, the differences between French and American basketball, and the way that French basketball stars such as Boris Diaw exemplify the new global “empire” of basketball that incorporates Africa, France and its overseas departments, and the USA. Krasnoff divides Basketball Empire into three parts that together investigate how French basketball developed from a low point in the middle of the 20th century to a global powerhouse contributing players to the NBA and the WNBA almost every year. Krasnoff argues that French basketball’s success hinges on their ability make use of their connections both with the United States and with their former empire. In examining the growth of basketball in France, Krasnoff traces a sporting genealogy that links together players, coaches, and even commentators from around the globe who compete together in France and help produce a distinctive French style of basketball that nevertheless has appeal outside of the hexagon. In Basketball Empire, Krasnoff’s first section takes off from her previous work on French association football, which looked at the development of Les Bleus. In the 1950s and 1960s, French basketball too was in crisis. In response, the French government, the Fédération française de basket-ball (FFBB), and even some sporting associations sought out new ways to improve the quality of play in France. Paris University Club brought in Americans who had played basketball in the NCAA but were now living in France to teach American approaches to the game. Individual players, including one of the earliest female French basketball stars Elisabeth Riffiod, watched film of American professionals like Bill Russell. The government redeveloped a national training centre: the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance (INSEP.) The French League professionalized in 1987. Since the 1990s, French basketball has enjoyed a rising number of successful EuroBasket and Olympic campaigns, including a men’s silver and a women’s bronze in 2020/21. Basketball Empire’s second section uses micro-biographies to explore the ways that contemporary French players developed their skills, how they made their moves into the NCAA, the NBA or the WNBA, and the challenges and opportunities that these moves provided them as players. In this section in particular, Krasnoff’s ability land and conduct interviews shines. She shows how diverse players, including Boris Diaw, Sandrine Gruda, Nicolas Batum, Marine Johannès, Diandra Tchatchouang, Evan Fournier, Mickaël Gelabale, and Rudy Gobert have become not only basketball stars but also informal diplomats that help build connections and translate between Africa, France and the United States. In the final section, Krasnoff considers why the French have been so successful at producing high quality men’s and women’s basketball players. She credits la formation à la française: the specific French training system that includes a national sports training center (the INSEP) as well as local and regional basketball academies (pôles espoirs). The future looks bright for French basketball and in our interview Krasnoff predicts French and US success in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympiad. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Susannah Wilson joins Jana Byars to talk about A Most Quiet Murder: Maternity, Affliction, and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Cornell UP, 2025). The monograph examines the death of a five-year-old girl in late nineteenth-century France, unfolding the mystery through judicial investigations, psychiatric medical evaluations, and ultimately, a trial for murder. The investigators quickly learned that the child, Henriette, had been abducted by Marie-Françoise Fiquet, an employee at the city tobacco factory and known troublemaker. Fiquet had taken the child back to her home and kept her there all day. But what actually happened between the abduction at midday and the discovery of the child's body at five o'clock in the morning remained a mystery. Susannah Wilson uses archival records, press coverage, and psychiatric reports to reveal how the troubled history and reputation of Marie-Françoise Fiquet, marked by suspicions of sexual debauchery, infanticide, abortions, poisoning, theft, and extortion, was a case study in an emerging medical paradigm. Her signs of trauma, psychological disturbance, and medical morphine abuse provide insight into factitious disorders—or simulated illnesses—that would be more commonly observed in the following century. A Most Quiet Murder provides a new view of nineteenth-century France, where the law and public authorities intervened in the lives of the working classes and their children during moments of crisis to exercise the law of the land. The murder of a child reveals the connections between the psychology of female violence, the emergent understanding of factitious disorders, and the psychologically complex motives that extend beyond simple altruism. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extolling the virtues of homelands threatened by globalised elites and mass migration.  Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past (Cambridge UP, 2023) seeks to uncover the roots of historically informed ideas of Europe, while at the same time underlining the fundamental differences between the writings of the older counter-revolutionary Europeanists and their self-appointed successors and detractors in the twenty-first century. In the decades around 1800, the era of the French Revolution, counter-revolutionary authors from all over Europe defended European civilisation against the onslaught of nationalist revolutionaries, bent on the destruction of the existing order, or so they believed. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal and abstract principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and - ultimately divine - institutions that had guaranteed Europe's unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire. These counter-revolutionary Europeanists drew on the cosmopolitan Enlightenment and simultaneously criticized its alleged revolutionary legacy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today. Matthijs Lok, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Universiteit van Amsterdam Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim’s normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim’s legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks ‘was Durkheim white?’ and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a ‘political Durkheim’, The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology. Rituparna Patgiri is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. Over the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly “processed” by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century’s end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and Enlightenment specialist Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 13 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and Jefferson. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment’s ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era’s most famous luminaries. Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, 2025) analyses a neglected body of plays staged in France after the Great War, between 1918 and 1937, to reveal their profound impact on collective memory and cultural identity. In the aftermath of the Great War, a remarkable wave of collective commemoration emerged, but the aesthetic diversity of this period has often been overshadowed by a singular focus on the combatant experience, primarily conveyed through fiction and memoir. This selective historical narrative has fostered a homogenized memory of the war, neglecting the rich array of cultural productions that also emerged alongside it. Commemorative Acts challenges these prevailing assumptions about the memory of the Great War and its literary expression in interwar France by spotlighting theatrical works that have largely been forgotten. The book uncovers how the dominance of first-person accounts of soldiers’ experiences has subtly, yet powerfully, narrowed our understanding of what the memory of the Great War can encompass. It explores how drama, structurally at odds with the first-person perspective and defined by its simultaneous modes of expression and reception, has been lost to collective memory. By examining the unique capacity of the dramatic form to capture war trauma, Commemorative Acts offers insights that differ from those of other literary genres, highlighting the theatre’s potential to provide a more expansive and nuanced understanding of interwar memorial culture. Author Susan McCready is Professor of French at the University of South Alabama and the co-director for the Center for the Study of War and Memory at South Alabama; she is also the author of 2016’s Staging France between the World Wars: Performance, Politics, and the Transformation of the Theatrical Canon and 2007’s The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre, as well as the co-editor of Novel Stages: Drama and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France in 2007. She has also co-edited a volume of Lingua Romana on France and Memory in the Great War, and has authored many academic articles and chapters on French theater and related topics, as well as a number of public humanities projects on war and memory.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan  France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.  The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025) Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow. Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Hannah Frydman reveals a space, hidden in plain sight in Third Republican Paris, where deviant sexualities and lives could be experimented with and financed, despite republican attempts at growing and norming the population through the heterosexual family. That space was the newspaper, which was not simply a tool of normalization and a site of "dominant discourse," as it has frequently been imagined. Reading between the lines, Dr. Frydman shows how, through the Belle Époque classifieds, the newspaper became a tool for living lives otherwise as information flowed from it not just vertically but also laterally, facilitating person-to-person communication. The sexual relationships, exchanges, and services enabled by this communication were far from utopian: Surviving and thriving outside of social norms often required exploiting others. Yet by attending to the lives and livelihoods enabled by the classifieds, ethical or otherwise, Between the Sheets demonstrates that, thanks to new innovations in media technologies, queer and nonnormative lives in this period were lived in the center as well as on the margins. It was this centrality, however, that inspired efforts to place new (moral) controls on mass cultural forms and technologies. After World War I, in an interwar moment often characterized as one of sexual liberation, the press's queerness was subjected to ever-increasing surveillance and control, with repercussions for press freedom writ large. These repercussions echo into our age of social media, with its promise of unfettered connection, which inspires repressive legislation to keep sexuality (and with it, freedom) in its crosshairs. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Showing the political importance of play in postwar French literature In postwar France, authors approached writing ludically, placing rules and conditions on language and on the context of composition itself. They eliminated "e's" and feminized texts; they traveled according to strict rules and invented outright silly public personas. The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (2025, Northwestern University Press) is a comprehensive examination of how and why French authors turned to these ludic methods to grapple with their political moment. These writers were responding to a range of historical upheavals, from the rise and fall of French feminist and Third-Worldist groups to the aftermath of international socialism both at home, in the former Parisian Belt and in France more broadly, and abroad, in post-Yugoslavia Balkan states and elsewhere. Juxtaposing an array of case studies and drawing on cross-disciplinary methodologies, Aubrey Gabel reads three generations of the formalist literary group Oulipo, including Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, alongside writers not traditionally deemed ludic--or sometimes not even conventionally known as novelists--such as the lesbian activist-writer Monique Wittig and the editor François Maspero. Gabel argues that literary ludics serve as both an authorial strategy and a political form: playful methods allow writers not only to represent history in code but also to intervene creatively--as political actors--in the fraught social fields of postwar France. Author Aubrey Gabel is Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University, as well as an affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and currently a fellow with the Institute for Ideas & Imagination. She has also published a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes on literary play and constraints, but also on bande dessinée and other comic genres. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research  concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

“A lot of things become possible when [the nation state] is not the only framework,” Melissa Byrnes reminds us in this deeply intimate local history of North African migrants in France. In this conversation about her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon (U Nebraska Press, 2024) we learn about how questions Byrnes had about how we live with difference in our own communities brought her to this research on the suburbs of French cities in the dwindling decades of French imperialism. Focusing on four French suburbs from the 1950s to the 1970s, Byrnes examines how local officials – from mayors and city councilors to religious leaders to those operating public housing units – talked about North African migrants and the problems and opportunities of migration. In tracing the motivations of these French officials and local leaders, Byrnes examines what she calls “locally lived migration policies” to see how communities tried to make space for their neighbors against the backdrop of a national housing crisis, divergent political ideologies, and decolonization. Melissa K. Byrnes is professor of modern European and world history at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Her research focuses on migration and activism in the context of French imperialism and decolonization and she previously coedited a volume on the colonial politics of population. Her new book, Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon, is available now from Nebraska University Press, 2023. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.' Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, in Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge UP, 2023) Dr. Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centres claims by métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice. In this original history of race-making, belonging, and rights, Dr. Jean-Baptiste demonstrates the diverse ways in which métis individuals and collectives carved out visions of racial belonging as children and citizens in Africa, Europe, and internationally. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France (Northwestern UP, 2025) shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever. Author Chad Córdova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University where he is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. In addition to this new book, he is the author of many articles on figures and concepts that appear in this book, such as Montaigne, Kant, and Heidegger—most recently in Essais: Revue interdisciplinaire d’humanités and The Comparitist. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities. Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism’s Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Law in a Culture of Theology: The Use of Canon Law by Parisian Theologians, ca. 1120-ca. 1220 (Routledge, 2025) considers the study of law within its intellectual environment. It demonstrates that theologians associated with the schools of Paris in the twelfth century, particularly Peter the Chanter and his circle, had a working knowledge of Romano-canonical tradition and thought about the human context of the law, which, in turn, reflected the environment in which each master worked. It begins by showing the extent to which law was woven into the fabric of the schools of Paris, and follows with individual case studies. These case studies--marriage in Hugh of St. Victor's De Sacramentis and Peter Lombard's Sententiae, excommunication in Peter the Chanter's Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, crusade activity and heresy in Robert of Couçon's Summa penitentiae, homicide in Robert of Flamborough's Liber poenitentialis, and the faces of greed in Thomas of Chobham's Summa confessorum--demonstrate how each theologian drew upon legal thought, for what end he was using it, and how his use of law fit into contemporary legal thinking. A competency in law proved valuable to, and was tailored for, different types of ecclesiastical roles: teachers showing students how to analytically navigate complex questions of pastoral care, papal judge-delegate on the cusp of full-time administration on behalf of the papacy, penitentiarius of St. Victor and the students at the University of Paris, or diocesan management. This book will be a useful resource for all students and researchers interested in medieval canon law, medieval theology and pre-modern law. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes led more than 200,000 Huguenots to flee France after 1685. Many settled close to the country's frontiers, where their leaders published apologetic texts arguing for their right to return to France and be recognized as French citizens. By framing their refugee experiences intentionally, even using the term "refugee" to describe their diaspora, Huguenots profoundly influenced Enlightenment debates on citizenship and religious tolerance.  Write to Return: Huguenot Refugees on the Frontiers of the French Enlightenment (McGill-Queen's, 2024) is a cultural history of these Huguenot apologetics in which Bryan Banks examines the work of four authors: Pierre Jurieu, Pierre Bayle, Antoine Court, and Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne. Each author advanced his arguments using key ideas of the Enlightenment, appealing to reason to argue for freedom of conscience all while appealing to emotion in his descriptions of Huguenot victimhood. The authors' campaign succeeded. In 1789, France's revolutionary National Assembly granted repatriation to all expelled Huguenots, offering them citizenship regardless of place of birth or baptism, and even permitting them to reclaim ancestral lands.  International refugees played an overlooked role in shaping discourse around the nation and nationalism in the eighteenth century. Write to Return shows how early modern refugees could advocate for their interests, build international networks, and even craft a new collective identity. By presenting themselves as loyal citizens of France, Huguenots were at the forefront of constructing a French national identity. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children’s right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children. Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.  Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Resurrecting the Past: France's Forgotten Heritage Mandate (Cornell UP, 2025), Dr. Sarah Griswold shows how the Levant became a crucial front in a post-1918 fight over the French past—a contingent and contradictory but always hard-charging struggle over a forgotten "heritage mandate." Many scholars, clergy, pundits, politicians, and investors perceived the moment Allied forces entered Jerusalem in December 1917 to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expand French influence, evoking the vision of a new colony in the territory: a French Levant. But what transpired for the French state in the Levant after World War I, and why does that ill-conceived venture still matter today? Resurrecting the Past investigates how heritage politics led to a new form of empire—a French mandate for Syria and Lebanon—and with it a tide of regional and international critique. Against such opposition, the heritage mandate leaned heavily on spectacle and science, generating a sprawling set of sites and objects—Ottoman mansions, crusader castles, Umayyad mosques, Roman arches, buried synagogues, and Sumerian ziggurats. As Dr. Griswold traces how French heritage efforts cycled through multiple ideal pasts in the Levant from 1918 to 1946, she reveals how each one, though grounded in realities, also complicated those constructs and the work of French heritage-makers. Resurrecting the Past offers a parable of how efforts in heritage politics aimed to construct a union of ideologies and objects deemed the best past for France's uncertain future but struggled as much as they succeeded. Eventually those same heritage politics ironically helped officials justify the end of the "French Levant." This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In Kathryn Robson's Beyond the Happy Ending: Imagining Happiness in Contemporary French Women's Writing and Film (Liverpool UP, 2025), happiness (and the question of how to define, measure and facilitate it) has become a key theme in political, economic and social discourses in recent decades in France and elsewhere, yet research on happiness in French culture and film has been limited. Given that happiness is clearly gendered, this book looks critically at the ways in which contemporary French women's writing and film give voice to and critique conceptions of happiness. Analysing French and francophone women's writing (including Nina Bouraoui, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Camille Laurens, Leïla Slimani, Delphine de Vigan) and film (including Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma and Agnès Varda), I focus on five main areas: images of happiness in consumer and Internet culture; happiness and intimacy in the family and the home; queering happiness; migrated happiness, and happiness and ageing. Whilst the 'happiness turn' is problematic, the desire for happiness, however fraught, matters and I show how representations of happiness in contemporary French women's writing and film offer alternative conceptions of happiness that enable us to rethink happiness in more critical, diverse and inclusive terms. Author Dr. Kathryn Robson is a reader in French at Newcastle University and the author in 2019 of I Suffer Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women’s Writing and in 2004 Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women's Life-writing. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s cries of innocence were drowned out by a mob shouting “Death to Judas!” In Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Center of the Affair (Yale UP, 2024), Maurice Samuels gives readers new insight into Dreyfus himself—the man at the center of the affair. He tells the story of Dreyfus’s early life in Paris, his promising career as a French officer, the false accusation leading to his imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the fight to prove his innocence that divided the French nation, and his life of quiet obscurity after World War I.Samuels’s striking perspective is enriched by a newly available archive of more than three thousand documents and objects donated by the Dreyfus family. Unlike many historians, Samuels argues that Dreyfus was not an “assimilated” Jew. Rather, he epitomized a new model of Jewish identity made possible by the French Revolution, when France became the first European nation to grant Jews full legal equality. This book analyzes Dreyfus’s complex relationship to Judaism and to antisemitism over the course of his life—a story that, as global antisemitism rises, echoes still. It also shows the profound effect of the Dreyfus Affair on the lives of Jews around the world. Maurice Samuels is the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University. He is the author most recently of The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern. He lives in Branford, CT. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Mentioned in the podcast: Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l'Affaire (1935; Gallimard, 1981). Michael Burns, Dreyfus: A Family Affair, 1789-1945 (HarperCollins, 1991). Alfred Dreyfus, Cinq années de ma vie (1894-1899) (Maspero, 1982). Vincent Duclert, Alfred Dreyfus: l'honneur d'un patriote (Fayard, 2016). Marcel Thomas, L'Affaire sans Dreyfus (Fayard, 1961). Hannah Arendt, “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today.” Jewish Social Studies 4, no. 3 (1942): 195–240. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4615201. Exhibition « Alfred Dreyfus. Truth and justice » at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris American Israelite newspaper Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale UP, 2022) explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. In this interview, Allison Leigh talks to Dr. Galvez about why he felt we needed another book on Courbet, how he tackled the voluminous scholarship on this artist, and how to make claims about an artist’s intentions from a historical standpoint. Their conversation ranges from how to best use comparisons in art historical argumentation to the difficulties of reproducing some art works—even with high resolution digital photography. Allison Leigh is Associate Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The French Revolution facilitated the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, but after gaining power he knew that his first task was to end it. In this book William Doyle describes how he did so, beginning with the three large issues that had destabilized revolutionary France: war, religion, and monarchy. Doyle shows how, as First Consul of the Republic, Napoleon resolved these issues: first by winning the war, then by forging peace with the Church, and finally by making himself a monarch. Napoleon at Peace: How to End a Revolution (Reaktion Books, 2022) ends by discussing Napoleon's one great failure--his attempt to restore the colonial empire destroyed by war and slave rebellion. By the time this endeavor was abandoned, the fragile peace with Great Britain had broken down, and the Napoleonic wars had begun. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against democracy" and fears about the rise of populism, there is growing scepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive together. Some even question whether democracy is worth saving. In Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage (Oxford UP, 2024), Gianna Englert argues that the dilemmas facing liberal democracy are not unique to our present moment, but have existed since the birth of liberal political thought in nineteenth-century France. Combining political theory and intellectual history, Englert shows how nineteenth-century French liberals championed the idea of "political capacity" as an alternative to democratic political rights and argued that voting rights should be limited to capable citizens who would preserve free, stable institutions against revolutionary passions and democratic demands. Liberals also redefined democracy itself, from its ancient meaning as political rule by the people to something that, counterintuitively, demanded the guidance of a capable few rather than the rule of all.Understandably, scholarly treatments of political capacity have criticized the idea as exclusionary and potentially dangerous. Englert argues instead that political capacity was a flexible standard that developed alongside a changing society and economy, allowing liberals to embrace democracy without abandoning their first principles. She reveals a forgotten, uncharted path of liberalism in France that remained open to political democracy while aiming to foster citizen capacity. Overall, Democracy Tamed tells the story of how the earliest liberals deployed their notion of the "new democracy" to resist universal suffrage. But it also reveals how later liberals would appropriate their predecessors' antidemocratic arguments to safeguard liberal democracies as we have come to know them. Gianna Englert is Associate Professor of Humanities in The Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

French Technological Thought and the Nonhuman Turn  (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) traces a genealogy of thinking and writing about technology, which takes us from the French avant-gardes to the contemporary 'nonhuman turn' in Anglo-American theory via the Surrealists, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze.Tracking the unruly transition from Catholic vocabularies of grace, potentiality, and actuality to the modern and contemporary secular lexicon of agency, virtuality, and affect, this book explores technology as a source of subject matter and conceptual metaphors, but also probes how ideas and words are modes of technicity through which we shape and reshape the world. Fusing literature, philosophy, and theology, it offers readers new contexts - and questions - for the egalitarian ontological commitments of contemporary post- and nonhuman thinking. Guest Dr. Madeleine Chalmers  is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, and holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Dr. Chalmers is the recipient of or shortlisted for a number of prestigious essay prizes, and has written numerous articles as well on topics ranging from modernist authors  to automation and the idea of “bricolage,” as well as editing a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies on “French Perspectives on Conflict” in 2022. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama with research focusing on speculative literatures of metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean, from surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, as well as the translator of the novels Mevlido's Dreams and The Inner Harbour. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940 (U Chicago Press, 2025). Sensations is a history of the early years of professional archaeology in France through two controversies – the first in Carthage in what the French protectorate of Tunisia and the second in the small rural community of Glozel in central France. The book shows how “archaeology as we know it today grew out of a fundamental tension between archaeologist’s scientific ambitions and their continuing need for media attention.” (1) Timely without being presentist, funny without being unserious, the book explores questions of embodiment, performance, photography, fake news, professional quarrels, and the mediatization of scandal. The conversation explores the two sites of controversy as well as the network of professional archaeologists, amateur “collectors”, journalists, and others who shaped how the public understood and engaged with the ancient past. In addition to discussing the major themes of the book, our conversation delves into considerations of historical empathy, archaeological performance and “the dig”, and the story of a technical report that sparked Sherman’s interest in the relationship between media and archaeology. Daniel J. Sherman is Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of museums, monuments, and commemorative practice in modern Europe, Dan has also researched the history of primitivism in the French visual arts as well as memory culture in late 19th and early 20th century France. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports. The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, in Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Harvard University Press, 2025), Dr. Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom. Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Dr. Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Using artworks by Berthe Morisot, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and others, The Art of Parisian Chic: Modern Women and Modern Artists in Impressionist Paris (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Justine De Young explores how women and artists in Impressionist Paris (1855-1885) crafted their public images to exploit and resist stereotypes.French societal expectations and beauty ideals shaped how women were seen and how they chose to present themselves in public – whether on the street, in a photograph, or in a portrait on the walls of the annual Paris Salon. On Paris's broad new boulevards and in its public parks and theaters, women dressed to impress anonymous strangers as well as their friends. They even circulated aspirational photographs of themselves. Looking at a rich array of visual sources – from portraits to modern-life paintings, and from photographs to fashion plates – Dr. De Young reveals how women were seen, how they aspired to be seen, and how they navigated public life in Second Empire and Belle Époque Paris.This book considers how fashionable feminine “types” made famous in books, caricatures, and paintings created a visual lexicon and stylistic guide for women. Men and women alike relied on these types – cocotte (mistress), jeune veuve (young widow), amazone (independent equestrienne), demoiselle de magasin (shopgirl), and Parisienne (chic Parisian woman) – to judge the class, character, morality, and worth of strangers. With a rich set of illustrations from the Impressionist canon and beyond, The Art of Parisian Chic shows how modern women used fashion and these stereotypes to construct and reinvent their identities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (The Ohio State UP, 2025) is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Author Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances. Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. In Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025) Dr. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape. In tracing vanilla’s rise, Dr. Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle—an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Dr. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla—the world’s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance—came to mean “bland.” This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers' movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left's forward march halt so abruptly?  The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford UP, 2025)shows how the left's defeats after the mid-1970s were not the inevitable result of de-industrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor. Choices that were made during a concentrated but decisive moment contributed to the left's lost battles. The British, French, and Italian left managed the shift to a new era by marginalising those groups of workers who had invested it with hopes of social and political transformation. Communist, socialist, and social democratic parties helped disempower the new components of the working class in workplaces, in society, in the political system, and successfully disciplined their traditional working-class supporters. The left encountered a crisis of purpose and identity, a sense of both defeat and lost opportunities, and the dissolution of the idea of a community of fate amongst workers. This book provides a comparative analysis of the left's fragmenting relationship with the working class and a 'feel' for the culture of three leading industrial countries during a traumatic transition of late twentieth-century history. It concludes that decisions taken by the left during the 1970s contributed to the tragic inversion of the expected outcome of that hopeful decade. Matt Myers is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Oxford Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The difficulty of Jacques Lacan's thought is notorious. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan cuts through this difficulty to provide a clear, jargon-free approach to understanding it. The book describes Lacan's life, the context from which he emerged, and the reception of his theory. Readers will come away with an understanding of concepts such as jouissance, the objet a, and the big Other. The book frames Lacan's thought in the history of philosophy and explains it through jokes, films, and popular culture. In this light, Lacan becomes a thinker of philosophical importance in his own right, on a par with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Lacan's great contribution is the introduction of the unconscious into subjectivity, which results in a challenge to both the psychoanalytic establishment and to philosophers. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan provides readers with a way of understanding the nature of Lacan's contribution. Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Embracing Alienation, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, and Only a Joke Can Save Us, among other books. He is also the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

How is it possible to be a subject when faced with oppression? The revolutionary thought and work of French novelist and lesbian thinker Monique Wittig are today in dialogue with feminist and LGBTQIA+ analyses and politics. Her materialist theorization of lesbianism subfuses contemporary feminism and queer political and social movements. By proposing a detailed analysis of heterosexuality as a total political regime, Wittig as a theorist, writer, and activist opens up the possibility of a world beyond the categories of sex and gender, founded on a new definition of the human. This book acts as a roadmap to help us reach such a horizon. Sara Garbagnoli and her co-author Natacha Chetcuti-Osorovitz situate Wittig within array of feminist movements of the 20th century and explain why her theories are so pertinent in today's political landscape. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies. Fighting under the slogan “Liberty or Death,” his army forced the French to evacuate in late 1803. At the start of the new year, Dessalines declared independence from France and became the leader of a free Haiti.A hero to Haitians for centuries, Dessalines is portrayed abroad as barbarous and violent. Yet this caricature derives not from facts—as Dr. Julia Gaffield demonstrates with extensive new research—but from the fears of contemporary enslavers. Showcasing the man behind the myths, Dr. Gaffield reveals Dessalines’s deep suffering, warm friendships, and unwavering commitment to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism, and his bold insistence on his people’s right to liberty and equality. Our guest is: Dr. Julia Gaffield, who is associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution; and of I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom (Yale UP, 2025). She lives in Williamsburg, VA. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and a developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter here  Playlist for listeners: The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance The Social Constructions of Race Never Caught Living Resistance We Take Our Cities With Us Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) tracks a notion of civilization that developed in early nineteenth-century France. Dr. Alex Tipei explores the constellation of ideas, beliefs, and practices this concept invoked – what she calls civilization-speak – and charts the cross-continental networks that employed it as an organizing principle. Drawing on archival and printed primary sources in six languages, Dr. Tipei maps out the uses of this civilization-speak on both sides of the continent, focusing on France and the lands that make up significant parts of present-day Greece and Romania. She shows how and why French liberals mobilized civilization-speak to, offering an innovative analysis of liberalism and capitalism’s relationship to informal empire. Calling into question long-standing assumptions about the rise of nationalism in southeast Europe, Unintended Nations explores how Franco-Balkan exchanges helped define political, civilizational, and biopolitical boundaries in the post-Napoleonic era. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The Maginot Line was a marvel of 1930s engineering. The huge forts, up to eighty meters underground, contained hospitals, modern kitchens, telephone exchanges, and even electric trains. Kilometres of underground galleries led to casements hidden in the terrain, and turrets that rose from the ground to fire upon the enemy. The fortifications were invulnerable to the heaviest artillery and to chemical warfare. Despite this extensive preparation, France fell to Germany in a little under six weeks. Eight decades on, the Maginot Line is still remembered as an expensively misguided response to obvious danger. In The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Kevin Passmore presents a groundbreaking account reevaluating the Maginot Line. He traces the controversies surrounding construction, the lives of the men who manned the forts, the impact on German-speaking inhabitants of the frontier, and the fight against espionage from within. Far from a backward step, the Maginot Line was an ambitious project of modernisation—one that was let down by strategic error and growing dissatisfaction with fortification. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The first account of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France—and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap.For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies as well as children’s diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust (Yale UP, 2025) re-creates their complex journeys, including how some of them eventually found safety in America.Hobson Faure paints a moving portrait of these children and their escape, uncovering their agency in the flight from Nazism—and knits together the network of the many who aided them along the way. Laura Hobson Faure is professor of modern history and chair of Modern Jewish History at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. She’s an expert on French-American Jewish history and the author of The “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. Find Geraldine here Mentioned in the podcast: Rebecca Clifford, Survivors, Children’s Lives after the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2020). Rebecca Clifford, “Who is a Survivor? Child Holocaust Survivors and the Development of a Generational Identity,” Oral History Forum. Forum d’Histoire Orale 37 (2017). Beth B. Cohen, Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience (Rutgers University Press, 2018). Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (Yale University Press, 1991). Katy Hazan, “Le sauvetage des enfants juifs de France vers les Amériques, 1933-1947,” in Hélène Harter and André Kaspi, Terres promises: mélanges offerts à André Kaspi, 2008, p. 481-93. Katy Hazan, Rire le jour, pleurer la nuit: les enfants juifs cachés dans la Creuse pendant la guerre, 1939-1944 (Calman-Levy, 2014). Laura Hobson Faure, Manon Pignot, and Antoine Rivière, eds., Enfants en guerre. “Sans famille” dans les conflits du XXe siècle (CNRS, 2023). Sarah L. Holloway, Louise Holt, and Sarah Mills, “Questions of Agency: Capacity, Subjectivity, Spatiality and Temporality,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 3 (2019): 458–477. Laurent Joly, L'État contre les Juifs: Vichy, les nazis et la persécution antisémite 1940–1944 (Grasset, 2018). Célia Keren, “Autobiographies of Spanish Refugee Children at the Quaker Home in La Rouvière (France, 1940): Humanitarian Communication and Children’s Writings,” Les Cahiers de FRAMESPA 5 (2010). Lisa Moses Leff, The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2015). Joanna B. Michlic, “Missed Lessons from the Holocaust: Avoiding Complexities and Darker Aspects of Jewish Child Survivors’ Life Experiences,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 17, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 272–286. See also her forthcoming book. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. By defiantly remaining, Matisse was a source of inspiration for his nation. While enemy agents and Resistance fighters played cat-and-mouse in the alleyways of Nice, Matisse’s son, Jean, engaged in sabotage efforts with the Allies. In Paris, under the swastika, Matisse’s estranged wife, Amélie, worked for the Communist underground. His beloved daughter, Marguerite, active in the French Resistance, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, sentenced to Ravensbruck concentration camp—and miraculously escaped when her train was halted by Allied bombs. His younger, son, Pierre helped Jewish artists escape to New York; even his teenaged grandson risked his life by defying the Germans and their Vichy collaborators. Amidst this chaos, Matisse responded to the dark days of war by inventing a dazzling new paper technique that led to some of his most iconic pieces, including The Fall of Icarus, his profile of Charles De Gaulle, Monsieur Loyal, and his groundbreaking cut-out book, Jazz. His wartime works were acts of resistance, subtly patriotic and daringly new.Drawing on intimate letters and a multitude of other sources, Christopher C. Gorham illuminates this momentous stage of Matisse’s life as never before in Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi Occupied France (Citadel Press, 2025), revealing an artist on a journey of reinvention, wrenching meaning from the suffering of war, and holding up the light of human imagination against the torch of fascism to create some of the most exciting work of his career, of the 20th century, and in the history of art. Guest: Christopher C. Gorham (he/him) is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. He lives in Boston, and can be found at ChristopherCGorham.com and on social media @christophercgorham. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke Profile here Linktree here Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

This is a powerful new account of a chapter in history that is crucial to understand, yet often overlooked. For 150 years, from the reign of Louis XIV to the downfall of Napoleon, France was an aggressive imperial power in South Asia, driven by the pursuit of greatness and riches. Through their East India company and state, the French established a far-reaching empire in India, only to see their dominant position undermined by conflict with Indian rulers, competition from other European nations, and a series of fatal strategic errors. Exploding the myth of a benign French presence on the subcontinent, Robert Ivermee's extensive research reveals how France's Indian empire relied on war-making, conquest, opportunistic alliances, regime change and slavery to pursue its ambitions. He considers influential French figures' reactions to the collapse of the imperial project, not least their deployment of new ideas, like freedom and the rights of man, to justify fresh ventures of domination--even as colonial authorities failed to acknowledge the equality of French India's diverse indigenous peoples, both before and after the French Revolution. From great power rivalry to informal empire and entrenched inequalities, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Oxford UP, 2025) tackles topics that remain vital and urgent in today's world. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies