France Archives

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

by Lauren Elkin,

From Scaffolding, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One day, with nothing else to do, I go back to my old journals, rows and rows…

The Hard Hill

by Claire Messud,

From This Strange Eventful History, which will be published this month by W. W. Norton. He could hear his wife, Barbara, now in the other room, getting ready for his father’s funeral.…

Our Pierre

by Cormac James,

From Trondheim, which was published last month by Bellevue Literary Press. On the day their son was going to die, Lil had given herself the task of carrying forty-plus sacks…

Bugging Out

From comments about the fall 2023 bedbug outbreak in Paris, as recorded in news reports. Having bedbugs is no laughing matter. No one is safe. Bedbugs do not rest. They…

The Discreet Eminence

by Robert O. Paxton,

On the enduring legacy of Marshal Pétain

French Lessons

by Rachel Kushner,

The optimists went to the gas chambers (or so it’s been said). The pessimists went to America. The collabos went to Maxim’s (for steak). The orphans went to the country…

Permanent Pandemic

by Justin E. H. Smith,

Will COVID controls keep controlling us?

Bond Market

by Lee A. (Lee Allan) Craig, Julianne Treme, Thomas Joseph Weiss,

From “License to Dine: 007 and the Real Exchange Rate,” a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which compares the evolution of James Bond’s salary with that…

Under the Surface

by Thomas Chatterton Williams,

One morning in September, a dapper Frenchman seated next to me in the garden of the Château de Tocqueville gestured solemnly at the front page of Le Monde, the house…

Flesh and Blood

by David Graeber, David Wengrow,

From The Dawn of Everything, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In the mid-twentieth century, a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchs…

Diary of a Country’s Priest

by Vincent Mongaillard,Translated by Max Norman,

From Je vous pardonne tous vos péchés, a collection of French priests’ observations about the sacrament of confession. The book was published in March by Éditions de l’Opportun. The following…

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