Antoine Compagnon is a professor at the Collège de France in the Chair of Modern and Contemporary French Literature: History, Criticism, Theory.
Introduction by Serge Haroche.
With contributions by: Olivier Agard, Françoise Balibar, Jacques Bouveresse, Isabelle von Buelzingsloewen, Yves Cohen, Marc Fontecave, Roland Gori, Claudine Haroche, Serge Haroche, Henry Laurens, Michelle Perrot, Roland Recht, Makis Solomos, Claudine Tiercelin, Céline Trautmann-Waller, Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Anton Zeilinger.

The Great War: ruptures and reconfigurations in society
The year of the centenary saw a multitude of works by historians on the causes and the consequences of the Great War — without of course exhausting such a vast, complex subject that has given rise to so many interpretations and reflections. One of the explanations for our fascination with the Great War is that the epoch around 1914 appears to be one of immense rupture: a break that is not only geopolitical and historic but also concerns ways of understanding the world, of seeing and thinking. This book focuses on the intellectual effervescence engendered by wartime upheavals, and their long-term consequences.

• A sweeping panorama of the changes that occurred in the wake of the First World War, from physics (Einstein) and chemistry (poison gas) to the visual arts (Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky), music, cinema, psychoanalysis and even to the topic of love, as treated is literature and philosophy.

• With an introduction by Serge Haroche, administrator of the Collège de France, Chair of quantum physics, and 2012 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics.