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