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France

There is a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail outside a castle, brimming with French men-at-arms, who taunt King Arthur and his knights remorselessly, while the Britons are convinced that the Holy Grail lies behind the drawbridge. The Grail was, of course, membership of the Common Market ...

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Published in March 2019, no. 409

A country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,’ warned French-Algerian writer Albert Camus in a January 1945 editorial. Camus’ ominous edict, issued in the weeks following the end of Germany’s occupation of France, encapsulates something of what Agnès Poirier is trying to say in this ...

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Published in December 2018, no. 407

After a succession of dramatic political events across the Western world in 2016, all eyes were on the French presidential election when it took place in the first half of 2017. Would the French resist the sirens of populism? Would the surprise campaign of the youngest candidate ever, Emmanuel Macron, offer a ...

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Published in March 2018, no. 399

Letter from Paris

Phoebe Weston-Evans
Thursday, 25 May 2017

Springtime allows Parisians to indulge their predilection for life en terrasse. Trees and gardens are blooming, neighbourhood markets and squares are coming alive, and the newly pedestrianised right bank of the Seine is busy with walkers and cyclists.

A rollerblading poet stopped to cadge some tobacco from a friend of mine as we were sitting outside a bar on ...

The eminent French historian Annette Wieviorka, in The Era of the Witness (1998, English version in 2006), analyses the difficulties arising, in writing historical narratives about recent times, from the exponential growth in the number of people wanting their stories to be heard. Wieviorka, whose field of specialisation is the Shoah, traces the trend of wh ...

Published in April 2017, no. 390

Peter Rose interviews ABR contributor Lee Christofis, who recently attended a number of exhibitions in Paris showcasing works by Léon Bakst, Cy Twombly, and Arnold Schoenberg among others. His visit coincided with the fortieth birthday of the Pompidou Centre. Lee's 'Letter from P ...

The French Revolution never ceases to fascinate. Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre, the storming of the Bastille and the 'Marseillaise', the Terror and its guillotine ...

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Charles de Gaulle remains, for many, the quintessence of Gallic defiance through the dark years of World War II. Not only did he symbolise the famed resistance, he ...

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'Letter from Paris' by Colin Nettelbeck

Colin Nettelbeck
Monday, 23 May 2016

After the horrific massacres in Paris and the ensuing ones in Belgium that were purportedly intended for France, the French were spontaneously drawn together ...

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Charles Drazin tells us that his interest in French cinema began as a student at Oxford in the early 1980s, when he attended screenings at the Maison Française, an institution established after World War II to encourage cultural exchange between Britain and France. Some of the films were obscure, some better known; the audience comprised devotees and newcomers who never quite knew what they were going to see. The free admission, the 16 mm projector, the portable screen fixed to a tripod, even the scraping of chairs on wooden floors contributed to the sense of occasion for the young cinéastes.

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