France - Quillette

Detail from Ignatius Loyola, by Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera. Oil painting. A man in bed with a book and cast on leg.

Return of the Jesuits

In the 22nd instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu used their nascent Quebec colony as a means to promote French global power and spread Christianity.

Greg Koabel

5 Sep 2024 · 20 min read

Marine Le Pen with a concerned look on her face surrounded by a crowd of press in Paris.

A Question of Legitimacy

The Rassemblement National was thwarted by a coalition of convenience, but it remains the party with the largest grip on French voters.

John Lloyd

12 Jul 2024 · 10 min read

Raymond Aron and the Art of Politics

For Aron, politics is the art of living together, the art of the possible, and requires an “acute awareness” of the limitations of our power to influence reality.

Alan S. Rome

8 Mar 2024 · 13 min read

Champlain Gives It Another Go

In the twelfth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes France’s halting efforts to create a permanent Canadian settlement in the early 1600s.

Greg Koabel

27 Sep 2023 · 30 min read

The Threat of Decivilisation

During a recent dinner at the Élysée Palace, the French president was confronted with the possibility that France is slipping into murderous anarchy.

John Lloyd

10 Jun 2023 · 9 min read

Up the St. Lawrence

In the fifth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes Jacques Cartier’s first encounters with the Mi’kmaq and Iroquois.

Greg Koabel

6 Jun 2023 · 23 min read

The Battle of Sainte-Soline

The events at Sainte-Soline have received less attention from the international media than the pension-reform protests, but they are arguably more consequential.

Robert Zaretsky

12 Apr 2023 · 6 min read

A Fracture Revealed, Not Healed

As the scale of her defeat in the Presidential election was announced, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), was quick to gloss it. “Millions of our compatriots,” she declared (in a speech that must have been prepared for weeks), “have chosen the national camp and change,” and

John Lloyd

26 Apr 2022 · 8 min read

Macron Will Have to Do

A decent and competent Left might point out that France stands to gain exactly nothing from an “alliance” with Putin’s dictatorship proposed by the likes of Le Pen.

Brian Stewart

24 Apr 2022 · 7 min read

At 400, Molière Still Matters

Over the years, Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur has been one my favorite Molière plays to study and direct with my undergraduate students at Princeton University. I find it to be the best point of origin from which to discover his body of work. As often with Molière, the plot

Florent Masse

19 Apr 2022 · 12 min read

Zemmour’s Final Word

The danger—or opportunity, depending on your view—is that two radical candidates like Mélenchon and Zemmour win the first round.

RJ Smith

25 Nov 2021 · 10 min read

Europe's New Beggars

An elite discourse condones destructive behavior and reinterprets a denigrating hand-to-mouth existence as an alternative lifestyle

Johan Wennström

10 Apr 2019 · 9 min read

The French Genocide That Has Been Air-Brushed From History

For the most influential historians who held positions of power in major French institutions, the French Revolution was not a research topic but an origin myth—the heart of their secular faith’s cosmology.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

10 Mar 2019 · 18 min read

Against the Militancy of the French 'Decolonial' Movement

We call on public authorities, heads of cultural, academic, scientific, and research institutions, but also the judiciary, to pull themselves together.

Quillette

28 Jan 2019 · 6 min read

A Tale of Two Cities: The Modern Soothsayers

How much longer people are going to listen to these modern soothsayers. At this point, they are naked lobbyists for entrenched special interests.

Neema Parvini

22 Dec 2018 · 5 min read