Dominique Desanti is a journalist, a historian and a novelist. Jean-Toussaint Desanti is a philosopher and a mathematician. They have lived together as a couple for more than sixty years, and they have tried to respect the principle of freedom.

Their journey through the twentieth century took them from the French Resistance to the Communist Party, from their support for the FLN during the Algerian War of Independence to their participation in the events of May 1968, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the terrorist attacks of September 2001. During those years, they met Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, Jacques Lacan and many others.

In this book of memoirs, written with Roger-Pol Droit, they relate their lives of active political and intellectual commitment, without succumbing to nostalgia. They try to understand why, despite the errors, illusions and blind spots that characterise each historical epoch, rebellion is always the right decision.

“The couple formed by Dominique and Jean-Toussaint has often been in the news, not because of any scandal, but because their long shared life has been so strongly informed by the century's upheavals that their lives offer a chronicle of the century.” Libération

Dominique Desanti is a writer and the author of numerous literary biographies including Vladimir Nabokov: Essais et rêves (Julliard, 1994); Elsa-Aragon: Le couple ambigu (Belfond, 1997); and Flora Tristan (Hachette Literature, 2000).

Jean-Toussaint Desanti, a former professor emeritus at the University of Paris-I, is the author of La philosophie silencieuse (Le Seuil, 1994) and Philosophie: Un rêve de flambeur (Grasset, 1999).

Roger-Pol Droit is a research fellow in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a columnist for the French daily newspaper Le Monde. He is the author of La Compagnie des philosophes (1998), 101 Expériences de philosophie quotidienne (2001), La Compagnie des contemporains (2002), and Dernières nouvelles des choses (2003), all published by Editions Odile Jacob.