History All books
Jean-Pierre Rioux
A Short History of France
Who are the French and what are their goals? A French historian provides the answer as he revisits his country’s history.
Alexandre Stern
Monkeys in the Kitchen How Cooking Made Us Human
How the invention of culinary and agricultural practices, the discovery and exchange of products, through the millennia have contributed to civilizing the human being.
Michel Cartier
China and the West A Five-Hundred-Year History
The history of Chinese-Western relations — a tale of fascination and fear — recounted by a historian specialising in the Far East
François Hourmant
The Mao Years in France: Before, During, and After May ‘68
The mechanisms of this “indoctrination,” personalities, organizations, journals, newspapers, authorities, and men in power who nourished and defended the Maoist ideology; what still remains of it today.
Vincent Lanata
The Days in May that Made History in Fran
The history of France is presented here in an amusing and unexpected way. The final chapter offers a consideration of themes that remain decisive in the life of France: war, Europe, geopolitics, and others.
Marie-Jo Bonnet
What Does a Woman Desire when She Desires a Woman?
The desire of women for their own sex is a subject that has been concealed and heavily censored since Antiquity. Yet it has constantly resurfaced throughout history - despite repression, denial and today's feigned indifference - and its existence is a historical and anthropological fact, whatever the dominant opinion may say. Marie-Jo Bonnet argues that lesbianism transgresses social norms and female stereotypes, and breaks with the phallic model and the restricted social role that is assigned to women even today. She sees lesbian desire as a radical instrument of emancipation and offers an original analysis of the women's liberation movement, of recent discussions about homosexuality and, finally, of the persistence of lesbophobia. Desire, regardless of its subject, is always a unique and complex experience, and Bonnet does not ignore this fact. In an original, wide-ranging study of lesbian love through literature, she delves into the work of such major writers of the past as Marguerite Yourcenar, Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Djuna Barnes and, surprisingly, Madame de Sévigné, as well as of more recent writers such as Monique Wittig, Anne Garreta and Christine Angot. The author's thesis is that women's desire for their own sex can serve as a tool to empower them to conquer their own space of creativity and liberation. Marie-Jo Bonnet, a writer and historian, is the author of Les Relations Amoureuses Entre Femmes (XVIe-XXe siècle).
Anne-Marie Lugan Dardigna
Women of Literary Salon Feminism and the Literary Salon: Women in 18th-Century France
In France, the struggle for women’s rights is a very ancient one. In the 17th and 18th centuries it found expression in literary salons led by such famous figures as Madame de Tencin, Madame du Deffant, Madame Geoffrin and later by Madame du Châtelet and Madame d’Epinay.
Louis Crocq
The Psychic Injuries of Great War
After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, France honoured its dead and celebrated the survivors. The victims of physical injuries, including the ‘broken gargoyles’ who had suffered terrible facial disfigurement, were recognised, given medical treatment and pensions — but what happened to those who had suffered mental trauma?