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Seuil
É D I T I O N S D U S E U I L C ATA L O G U E 2 0 1 2

ENGLISH VERSION

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É DÉ IDTIITOIN
O SN D
S UD U
S E SUEI U
L IL CA
C AT
TAA LL O
OGGU
U EE 22001121
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Ta b l e o f c o n t e n t s
1
Literature
Novels • L’Olivier • Literary Essays

2
Humanities
E s s a y s , P h i l o s o p h y, P s y c h o a n a l y s i s

3
Religious Studies
1
4
Science
5
History
6
S o c i o l o l y, P o l i t i c s , E c o n o m y
7
D o c u m e n t s , Te s t i m o n i e s
8
Index
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1 Literature
Novels • L’Olivier • Literary Essays
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4
Novels

Patrick Bard • Les Brasiers

L ea, Gloria, Rebecca. The grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter: three
women of a Spanish family who cross infernos, wars, successive exiles, and failed
revolutions. These three women love, bear children, suffer and struggle in turn,
sharing at heart the illusion that they can change the world, that the hour of their
generation has come. Each time, the doors of History close upon them, leaving
in their wake deaths, bitterness and healing conversations with ghosts. Until the
threshold of the twenty-first century when a fourth woman – the great grand-
daughter – takes up the torch once again…

Publication second semester, 450 pages

Catherine Clément • Deux épées

S he died on her horse: dressed in men’s clothes, reins in her teeth, a sword in
each hand and pearls around her neck. Shot down with a bullet in her back. Her
enemies, the English, called her Jezebel or Joan of Arc. This took place in India in the
middle of the 19th century when the dark skins warred against their white masters.
Too many humiliations, too many dethroned rajahs, too much exploitation, too many
vexations, always for trade… One day everything exploded. An insurrection was
born, perhaps inevitable. It found its leaders, and among them, this woman. A thirty-
year-old widow and an outstanding warrior, she was the only war chief to die in
battle. And when she was killed, everything stopped. India ceased to be free. The
war for independence had lasted two years, two terrible years made up of victories
and massacres. Manu, nicknamed “the darling”, was queen of Jhansi, and to this day,
Indian children still learn the song that celebrates her glory.

Publication second semester, 300 pages

Richard Collasse • La Prochaine Vague

J apan, March 11, 2011. Nineteen-year-old Sosuke is at school when an earthquake
of magnitude 9 strikes the whole region of Tohoku. Less than half an hour later,
a tsunami sweeps through the small harbour where he lives. Finding refuge on the
roof of their high school, Sosuke and his friends watch the apocalypse sweep away
everything in its wake, before being rescued by Japanese army helicopters and
deposited into the gymnasium of another high school in the city. Sosuke goes in
search of his family. In vain. Fortunately, a distant cousin living in Tokyo manages to
find him. Yet these two teenagers seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum
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5
Novels

in all manners including their character and their way of life. Will they be able to
forge a lasting friendship stronger than the bonds of tragedy that the wave forced on
them?

Publication first trimester, 200 pages

Nicolas Couchepin • Un renard dans la cave

T he story takes place in a residential suburb in our time. It is summer, and the
neighbourhood empties as its inhabitants leave for their holidays. Everyone
except for the Mensch family.The father has undertaken to work in the house’s cellar.
Soon he fixes up the rooms and in the dark recreates the familiar space that exists
above. Muriel, his wife, Sandra, their daughter, as well as Simon, their young mentally
handicapped son, each eventually yield to this mad project: spending holidays in the
cellar. With topics from news items to family psychosis, writing from the point of
view of each member of this unusual family, Nicolas Couchepin reveals the role played
by shadow and imagination for a middle class family wrongly accused of leading
uneventful lives.

Publication second semester, 200 pages

Chloé Delaume • Une femme avec personne dedans

I t all begins with Isabelle’s suicide. Chloé Delaume had corresponded with Isabelle
for a while before realizing that this particular reader had taken Chloé’s books and
her life (the one in her novels) as a model. Beyond this tragic event and the narrator’s
guilt over it, the novel becomes the place where Chloé’s current readers can
experience a true awakening: the possibility of identifying with the character-narrator-
author. An identification that this time is not morbid but romantic, due to another
event just as violent: falling in love. Because this is a love story. A story that involves
Chloé, Igor and La Clef: a man and two women.Yet in spite of the irony and lightness,
there is still this tragic admission: “I ignored that by loving one could lose one’s
identity to such a degree.”

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

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6
Novels

Philippe Delerm • Je vais passer pour un vieux con

Et autres petites phrases qui en disent long

I n this new collection of short texts, Philippe Delerm describes small scenes of
our daily lives with the detail and elegance of a miniature painter. Seeking the
apparent platitudes of our daily conversations, he manages to reveal a whole world
of subtlety, frailty, smugness and laughter. For instance, when during a vivid discussion
someone says: “I’m going to appear like an old fart, but…” But what? But I’m still
going to tell you what I think, even if I seem like an over-the-hill reactionary?
Probably, and we apologize on the way. Or, when at the beginning of spring at
the seaside, the first one to rush into the frozen water defies us with a “Once you’re
in, it’s nice!” Isn’t this person praising his own courage before giving us the water’s
temperature? Philippe Delerm’s texts are perfectly concise literary origami that
richly incorporate the shape and twists of our lives.

Publication first semester, 128 pages

Charly Delwart • Citoyen Kim

Y uri lives a happy childhood in a camp in Russia in the 1940s. He becomes aware
early on of the role his father plays in Korea, a country he knows nothing about.
Yet soon he must move to Pyongyang and no longer be called Yuri but Jong-Il. What
should he make of his comrade who states that the story of his father – this hero –
is nothing but a pack of lies? And why does this comrade disappear? Charly Delwart
softens the character of Jong-Il, a child-become-man bred to be a dictator and aware
of his destiny, a man torn by events and a consummate movie fan. In fact, it is Jong-Il
who will be in charge of the regime’s film propaganda and who will control scripts.
Of course, there are also international decisions, cold wars, a weakening party, and
difficult relations with China. But what is important to Kim Jong-Il is how fiction can
always make us dream.

Publication second semester, 505 pages

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7
Novels

Maryline Desbiolles • Dans la route

A long a side street that serves as the thread of this narrative, we meet a handful
of inhabitants: Sasso, an old and unhappy widower who took care of his wife until
the very end; The Thomas, a widow born in Tunisia but of Italian origin, who is put in
a retirement home; and widow V, who has been gone for a long time already.We enter
“the street” by means of the construction taking place on it to change its appearance
and course. This road, with the people that line it, others that take it (and sometimes
die on it – in fact it is an accident that begins the narrative), and others still who know
its story and tell it, carries the reader away in a long flow of words and anecdotes that
go through the Middle Ages to cement mixers and a good fish couscous.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

Abdelkader Djemaï • La Dernière Nuit de l’Émir

T he emir Abd-El-Kader resisted the French conquest of Algeria. A man of war, he
was also a man of culture and spirituality. The author evokes this great character
from the day he left for Alexandria to surrender to the son of the king of France. He
was in fact taken to France where he remained a prisoner. In this true and colourful
story, a whole era illustrating the beginnings of colonialism is reborn.

Publication first semester, 200 pages

Michaël Freund • Deborah Lifchitz

T he narrator of this story, whose father died in a Nazi camp, becomes interested
in a Jewish ethnologist named Deborah Lifchitz after he sees a programme about
the rites and customs of the Dogon people. Arrested in 194 2 after a mysterious
denunciation, this young woman disappears. Her name is nowhere to be found on the
lists of deported people. More perplexing, her friend Denise Paulme who went with
Deborah to the Dogon country before the war, refuses to reveal the circumstances
of her arrest. Imagining Denise’s possible complicity, the narrator becomes even more
determined to uncover the mystery of Deborah Lifchitz’ disappearance. During a
ceremony on deportation, he meets a historian who he enlists to aid his investigation.
Yet Katy Hazan’s first move is to focus on Julius Abrahamer, the narrator’s father who
died under a false identity. By going back into the past, the narrator’s questions lead
him to his personal story.

Publication first trimester, 220 pages

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Novels

Michèle Gazier • L’Homme à la canne grise

I n this autobiographical narrative, Michèle Gazier recounts the life of her father who
died in August 2010. A man of modest beginnings, French on his father’s side but
Catalan on his mother’s, he enlists with the Spanish Republicans before joining the
French Résistance in Lozère. Although courageous, he also hides another facet, that
of a more fragile man who is threatened by disease and blindness. In the continuation
of La Fille (2010), Michèle Gazier takes over the family history, a story that runs
between commitment and blindness, at once strong, subtle and modest.This narrative
is also a book about bereavement, and the way to prolong it, or to exhaust it, through
the catharsis of writing.

Publication first trimester, 150 pages

Nedim Gürsel • Ange, démon et communiste

N azim Hikmet’s biographer travels to Berlin upon the invitation of a former Stasi
agent who calls himself The Angel. There, the agent turns over reports he had
written on Hikmet, a Turkish poet who spent fourteen years in German prisons
before finding refuge in Moscow. Son of a Balkanese refugee and a French marine
officer, this mysterious agent had been an informer code-named The Devil during his
time with the Stasi, and he developed a real obsession with Nazim Hikmet. After
Germany’s reunification, this broken old man attempts to redeem himself by revealing
his activities as well as the life of the poet in Berlin. This fascinating novel, built like a
thriller, plunges us into the chaos of History with episodes of true horror and sheds
vivid light on Nazim Hikmet, his activities, his beliefs, his commitments and his intimate
life during his long years of exile.
Rights reserved for the Turkish language.

Publication second semester, 350 pages

Jean-François Haas • L’Année de l’étang

F ifty years ago in a village, a thirteen-year-old boy befriends a little girl of the same age,
Myriam, who is taken in by an orphanage. She is adopted as a maid-servant for a farm
whose owners buy her in an auction at the lowest possible price. Myriam confides in the
boy that she is sexually abused by the grandfather of her host family. She disappears. Her
body is found near a pond in a cave after a search is taken up by the entire village. During
the investigation, suspicion is brought upon two people: an Italian who arouses the
population’s animosity, and a simple-minded man. Half a century later, the truth is revealed.

Publication first trimester, 350 pages

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Novels

Catherine Lépront • Vue sur mer avec femme de dos

I n a house by the sea, sixty-year-old Émile who supports his family (his mother and
his half-sisters) is hassled on the phone by an unknown woman with a British accent,
whom everyone nicknames “The English lady”.They fantasize about this “English lady”
and assume that Émile is in love with her and she in him. Agnès, an old maid and one
of Émile’s sisters, Léonore, a young neighbour, and Esther, nicknamed “Love grief”,
keep watch on this mysterious love affair. A journalist helps the group discover the
English woman’s identity, but tragedy ensues. In some ways, this novel is reminiscent
of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or The Waves. Catherine Lépront denounces
materialism, the horrors of ‘rich’ society, and the veneration of upper-class power.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

Frank Magloire • Présent

T hirty-year-old Christophe Bedel has been in a deep coma for six weeks following
a car accident. During a single day in November, between 4. 30 am and 10 pm,
we follow six characters reunited by this tragedy.The father, stunned by the event and
refusing to accept it; the mother in total empathy with her son; the older sister, exiled
for eighteen years in Australia but now back in her home country; the young nurse
who takes care of him; a supermarket owner who used to be a model for success but
has now fallen victim to this ceaseless nightmare; and finally, the witness of the
accident, a revolting man who holds odd jobs in a theatre.The figure of the comatose
man is not what is important here. Rather, it is the shadows and light that he reveals
in these people as they experience the unfolding drama. With shows of force
and weakness implicating their own awake, groggy or comatose states, these six
characters reflect an image of what makes up our contemporary society.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

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Novels

Charif Majdalani • Nos si brèves années de gloire

A s romantic as his previous two books, here is the third volume of a Lebanese saga
that began with La Grande Maison (2005), a story that returned us to the beginning
of the twentieth century and the end of the Ottoman Empire, and was continued
with Caravansérail (2007), which led us through wars in Sudan and Arabia. We are
now in the decade that precedes the beginning of civil war in 1975. The adventurous
narrator, who is the son of ruined mill owners, wants to restore his family fortune and
win over the woman he loves whom he cannot live with because of his poverty. He
succeeds in a most fantastic manner by stealing the machines of a factory under
sequester in Alep, in Syria. Put back together in Beirut in the neglected family mill, they
soon make him a rich and courted man. But war is already there, smashing his dreams
of happiness to the ground. No matter: in the middle of the battles, the machines are
moved once again and taken to the mountains, in the hope that the time when we can
imagine “a happy lineage and future” will return.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

Georges Perec • Le Condottiere

T he hero of this novel devotes months on end to making a fake of the famous
painting Il Condottiere by Antonello da Messina in 1475, which is in the Louvre.
Gaspard Winckler is a forger. However, this master of technique, a prince among
forgers, is merely an underling to a silent partner,Anatole Madera. Like a good mystery,
Winckler murders Madera on the first page of the book. The novel investigates the
motive of this crime – one of its reasons will be the forger’s failure to rival the original
Renaissance painter. The question of forgery in painting crosses all of Perec’s work:
the fictional character Gaspard Winckler also appears in Life: A User’s Manual and in
W, or the Remembrance of Childhood. As to Perec’s last novel published during his
lifetime, A Gallery Portrait (1979), its subtitle is “Story of a Painting.” Perec said about
Le Condottiere that it was “the first novel that I managed to write.” In his preface,
Claude Burgelin reminds us that after the double refusal from Seuil and Gallimard
to publish this novel, Perec wrote to a friend on December 4, 1960: “Will leave it
where it is, for the moment at least.Will take it up again in ten years, and it will either
become a masterwork or will wait in my grave for a faithful exégète to find it in an old
trunk…”

Nearly thirty years after his death (1982), more than half a century after it was written
(1957-1960), lost then recovered “in an old trunk,” we are finally able to appreciate
this early novel of Georges Perec.

Publication second semester, 200 pages

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Novels

Bernard Quiriny • Une collection unique au monde

I n a collection of short stories, Bernard Quiriny introduces the extraordinary and
provocative Pierre Gould, a dandy book-lover, for whom the impossible becomes
possible. This time Gould lets us enter his library, which is a real treasure trove filled
with weird authors, improbable rarities and paradoxical masterpieces, all classified
thematically: books that are immediately forgotten as they are read, books that hide
others in their pages, poisoned recipe cookbooks, novels that can only be read when
the reader is dressed up, and others that continue to write themselves after the death
of their author… Two series of texts complete this collection of short stories and
are interspersed between Gould’s moments of bibliophilia: an x-ray of the madness of
our time and a travel guide of ten cities across the world, each more fascinating than
the other, for instance the city where there is no noise or the one that is built mirror-
like on the two shores of a river.

Publication first trimester, 180 pages

Chen Zhongshi • La Plaine des cerfs blancs

A true epic, La Plaine des cerfs blancs depicts a rural China torn between empire
and revolution. Taking place in a village in the Shanxi province, an area of China
that has served as the cultural and political centre for several centuries, the novel
unravels the destinies of two families, who are both friends and rivals, each led by a
formidable patriarch. Whether they religiously observe the teachings of Confucian
morals or throw themselves into nationalist or communist revolutions, the villagers
all exhibit a certain degree of fatalism. The young heroes who throw themselves into
the communist adventure thus see their ideal trapped by the merciless reality of
internecine familial struggles. Led by a prose virtuoso, this dense novel, full of life
and humour, plunges us into a stunning universe peopled with endearing characters
who get carried away by the waves of History.

The Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese language rights are reserved.

Publication first semester, 800 pages

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1991-2011
Editions de l’Olivier celebrate in 2011 their twentieth birthday.

C reated by Olivier Cohen (who owns 10% of the capital) in 1991, this Seuil imprint
has 650 titles in its catalogue today. North American literature takes up the
majority of these titles with works by authors who are already considered classics
(Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney), as
well as a large part of the “new wave” of the 1990s, from Jonathan Franzen to Jeffrey
Eugenides and Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer or Rick Moody. The catalogue
also includes British (Will Self, Adam Thirlwell), Russians (Vladimir Sorokine), Israelis
(Aharon Appelfeld), etc. But there are also a great number of French writers at l’Olivier
whose novels have been translated in many languages. Olivier Adam, Nathacha
Appanah, Florence Aubenas, Geneviève Brisac, Agnès Desarthe, Jean-Paul Dubois,
Thierry Hesse,Véronique Ovaldé, Martin Page, and many others, testify to the interest
taken abroad in contemporary French authors.

2012
I n January, En chute libre by Carl de Souza will come out: it is the story of Mauritius
since its independence as seen through the eyes of a former badminton champion.
This is a wonderful novel that reminds one of Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
or Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance). From another Mauritius author, Barlen
Pyamootoo: My Arsenal, an initiation novel in which the protagonist is a fan of
British football. At the beginning of 2012, there will be two new authors at l’Olivier:
Dominique Fabre (Ma vie d’Edgar) and Ariel Kenig (Quitter la France), as well as Florence
Aubenas’ new investigative work about life in a city from the Parisian suburbs. February
will see the launch of a series of graphic novels, with the first volume of a series,
Les quatre filles de Montparnasse, by Nadja. Finally, new books by Manuela Draeger
(Antoine Volodine), Fanny Chiarello, Sébastien Amiel, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Geneviève
Brisac,Thierry Hesse, Christian Oster, Martin Page, Patrick Bouvet and Florence Seyvos
will be arriving in spring and autumn.
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Literary Essays

Myriam Anissimov •
Vassili Grossman, un écrivain de combat
T his is the first exhaustive biography of Vassili Grossman (1905-1964) to be
published. After an in-depth investigation that took her to Russia and Israel, author
Myriam Anissimov offers us a detailed account of the career path of Life and Destiny’s
author. Anissimov reveals that it was only gradually that Grossman became aware of
the tragedy of Stalinism. Victim of a political regime that he originally supported,
Grossman discovered the profoundly destructive nature of the system by witnessing
the persecutions of opponents, particularly Jews. Thanks to heretofore unpublished
testimonies, archives that have long been kept secret, conversations with family and
friends, and numerous political and literary documents, this biography constitutes a
fundamental reference for information on Stalinism and Anti-Semitism.

Publication second semester, 800 pages, 16 page photo in-text

Gustave Flaubert • Carnets

Éditions établies par Pierre-Marc de Biasi

C onstructed from original manuscripts housed at the History Library of Paris,

established according to the principles of the genetics of texts, presented in its
literary, historical and biographical context, this edition of Carnets is enriched by an
abundant annotation and critical apparatus that enable the reader to instantly recreate
the links between the writer’s notes, his life and his work. These two volumes
constitute an indispensable reference for any in-depth approach to Gustave Flaubert’s
writing and life.

Carnets de travail
Published by Pierre-Marc de Biasini in 1988 at Editions Balland but quickly out of print
and impossible to find since 1990, the Carnets de travail by Gustave Flaubert gather
together the Albums d’idées et de lectures, the Carnets d’enquête and the Calepins de
repérages used by Flaubert for the preparation and writing of his masterworks from
1849 up to his death in 1880. This new edition is reviewed, corrected and enlarged.

Carnets de Voyage
Known up to the present through incomplete and faulty transcriptions, these Carnets
de voyage assemble the notebooks used by Flaubert in the field to daily record his
travel impressions and observations in Italy (1845), the East (Egypt, Palestine, Turkey,
Greece, Italy – 1849-1851), and Northern Africa (1858).

Publication second semester, 1,000 pages (each book)

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Literary Essays

Michel Pateau • Jean Cayrol, une vie en poésie

S couring archives, unpublished personal documents, and studying his body of work,
Michel Pateau has put together a new biography of Jean Cayrol. Praised by the
greatest as soon as he began writing and publishing, Cayrol was a leading character of
French intellectual life upon his return from the Nazi camps after the war. A poet,
novelist, essayist, script-writer, publisher, and collector, he remained a free man
throughout his career, fleeing honours and indoctrination, despite his election to the
Goncourt Academy. Impassioned, fanciful, curious about everything, and with no other
concern but truth and beauty, Cayrol remains a model that this biography enables to
unveil in his most elusive aspects.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

Jean-Pierre Sarrazac • Poétique du drame moderne

1880-2010

T his essay explores the paradigm of the dramatic form which, after appearing in the
1880s (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekov), perpetuated itself in most contemporary
dramaturgies (Heiner Müller, Jon Fosse, Valère Novarina). It sheds light upon the
rhapsodic dimension of dramatic expression: new drama offers an open form that
is deeply heterogeneous where dramatic modes – epic, lyrical, and even argumentative
– ceaselessly join each other or overlap. Far from subscribing to the idea of
“decadence” (Lukács), of obsolescence (Lehmann), or still yet the death of drama
(Adorno), the author draws the always evolving outlines of an expression that tries to
be as free as possible, without being like rhapsody is in music, an absence of form.

Publication second semester, 400 pages

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2 Humanities
E s s a y s , P h i l o s o p h y, P s y c h o a n a l y s i s
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Humanities

Patrick Avrane • Les Chagrins d’amour

G iven that he faces one of the deepest cataclysms – the loss of love – the person
who confronts his grief becomes a hero. But there is always an element of deceit
in love: we love in the other what we attribute to him. It is said that love makes us
blind. From then on, grief opens eyes, and the loss of the object of love leads to self-
knowledge.What happens to those who refuse this? And when separation is imposed
by death, the flight of the loved one, her refusal, how does the afflicted lover accept
to be reconciled to himself?

Publication first semester, 200 pages

Ami Bouganim • La Disparition d’Israël ?

W hat do the State of Israel and Israeli society bring to – or remove from – Jewish
identity? This book forcefully explores the difficulties or the impasses that
confront the Hebrew State: a society split between materialistic obsession – a means
of forgetting Jewish culture – and a religious and nationalist orientation; a society with
an unclear articulation of politics and theology, especially given the increasing demand
from the religious world to participate in the polis; and a society facing a vocational
crisis both political and intellectual. In favour of a cultural Zionism, Ami Bouganim
seeks to redefine religious and political Judaism by creating a new equilibrium between
Israel and its Diaspora, a relationship he believes is currently maintained in an
ambiguous position: that of being simultaneously secondary and essential. Walking
in the steps of Avraham Burg, Shlomo Sand or Amoz Oz, the author delivers a
courageous book, with prophetic accents.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Pierre Cassou-Noguès • Le Lecteur de cerveaux

Essai de philosofiction

T he idea of a mind-reader can be found in numerous science fiction novels: this

device would enable us to read a thought directly in the brain. Several recent
scientific articles have discussed such a project. Researchers dream and they know it.
But this dream brings about fascinating and fundamental questions on what we call
“thought”. How can we conceive a mind-reader? Pierre Cassou-Noguès places the
idea of a mind-reader in its philosophical and historical context. He then presents
several current results in neuroscience and attempts a practical speculative essay.
He reflects finally on the use that we would have of such a device and on the
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Humanities

transformations that it would introduce in our lives. It is here that Marcel Proust and
Alfred Hitchcock intervene, since “critical scenes” meant to measure the scope and
to specify the functions of a mind-reader can be found in their work. The last part of
this essay is a kind of dystopia, retracing the advent and possible generalization of
mind-readers in our societies.

Publication first semester, 200 pages

Michel Cazenave •
La Rupture Freud-Jung : la femme, le fou, le mystique
T he rupture between Freud and Jung is undoubtedly the most resounding and
influential in the story of psychoanalysis inasmuch as it is at the origin of two
currents of thought that seldom overlap and remain incompatible, even irreconcilable.
Leaning on texts by the two psychoanalysts and on their correspondence, while
correcting for numerous prejudices about Jung, Michel Cazenave shows precisely the
nature of the ‘divorce’ between these two major thinkers of the human psyche, who
once were frequent correspondents. If Jung is relegated to the “esoteric” corner of
bookstores, it can be precisely rooted in his thoughts on religion. But the misunder-
standing of the female world, which was structural in Freud’s thought, like that of
madness, also separated the two men.

Publication second semester, 300 pages

Marc Cerisuelo • Fondus enchaînés

C inema is an art of relations: a film is understood through its link to the narrative
of forms, to the thought in action that crosses it, or through the study of the
contact of distinct cultural fields – for instance, the presence of Europeans in
Hollywood.The historical poetic of films,“film-philosophy” and the approach of cinema
in terms of cultural transfers are as many roads to aid in the exploration of this
relational territory.Within these approaches, under the auspices of the filmic process
that mixes and links images – fade in-fade out – the Blum-Byrnes Agreements, the film
noir and American comedy, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, French cinephilia and
CinemaScope go beyond these porous frontiers.

Publication first semester, 350 pages

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Françoise Choay • Haussmann conservateur de Paris

with the collaboration of Vincent Sainte-Marie Gauthier

G eorges-Eugène Haussmann was a genius city-planner to whom we owe the

complete restructuring of Paris at the end of the 19th century, transforming the
city into a modern metropolis. Haussmann’s innovation and the breadth of his vision
are praised in numerous countries where urban planners claim to take their inspiration
from him. However, it seems that it is more difficult for him to be recognized in France
where certain criticisms are still levelled against him (some destructions for instance)
which tend to obscure the greatness of his merits. That is why Françoise Choay and
Vincent Sainte-Marie Gauthier have undertaken this book as a means of conveying
the audacious scope of the Haussmannian undertaking. Supported by a selection of
Haussmann’s texts, their analysis is a vivid and rigorous introduction to the work of
one of the greatest modern city-planners.

Publication first semester, 150 pages

Sonia Chiriaco • Le Désir foudroyé

Sortir du traumatisme par la psychanalyse

A fter experiencing trauma, desire is suspended, as if the subject herself was dead.
Nowadays, people who have experienced traumas are entrusted to victimologists
who identify the “traumatized person” and the “victim” and help the latter ask for
reparation. For psychoanalysis, a subject exists behind the victim, even if she seems to
have disappeared beneath the trauma. Psychoanalysis does not pity the subject, but
shifts the point of view: instead of the event itself, it sheds light on what the subject
has done with it. It proposes that subjectivity also plays a role in the pain linked to
trauma; in other words, it gives back to the subject her responsibility and desire in a
situation where she was nothing more that the Other’s object.Taking clinical cases as
a starting point, this book leads us through the meanderings of the analytical discourse
and enables each of us to invent a solution of our own to get out of trauma’s dead-
end.

Publication first semester, 200 pages

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Humanities

Michaël Fœssel • L’Oubli du monde

T he ethics of catastrophe, the politics of precaution and the security atmosphere
in which contemporary democracies bathe can be explained by the need to avoid
the end of the world at all cost, which has today become the horizon upon which
men think and act. The author proposes here a philosophical genealogy of this “hate
of the world” in modernity. He shows the existence of two parallel lines in modern
thought: the first – “cosmo-political” – is issued from the Enlightenment (Kant) and
associates the world and humanity.The second – “vitalist” – thinks man and his reason
are independent from his terrestrial anchoring. Initiated by Hegel, it triumphs today in
the gloom-mongering begun by Gunther Anders.This genealogy enables the author to
give an account of topical political and philosophical debates. Should we preserve life
or rediscover the path towards a world transformation?

Publication second semester, 300 pages

Michel Foucault • Le Gouvernement des vivants

Cours au collège de France (1979-1980)

“H ow is it possible that in Christian Western culture the government of man

requests, in addition to acts of obedience and submission,“acts of truth” where
the subjects are not only required to say the truth, but to say the truth about
themselves, their faults, their desires, their states of mind, etc.? How did this type of
government come about – where one is not simply asked to obey, but to manifest it
by enunciating what one is?” Michel Foucault.

Publication first semester, 380 pages

Françoise Héritier • Anthropologie symbolique du corps

Tome 1. La Génétique sauvage

T his essay in social anthropology, which uses a new structuralist method, is the first
in a series. The aim is to follow the roundabout means of concept links that are
necessarily associated through human thought with giving meaning to the world, the
body and life.The unravelled chain starts with fertility, which is the subject of this first
volume.

Publication second semester, 300 pages

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Humanities

Bernard Lahire • Monde pluriel

Unité et diversité dans les sciences sociales

I n a time of the hyper-specialization of knowledge, each researcher keeps his nose

buried in the functioning of small fragments of the world. In order to draw a more
complete picture of the social world, Bernard Lahire takes a step back from the
current state of the social sciences and humanities, as well as from the lines of division
that cross them. He allows himself to glimpse the hidden unity of a very split-up
space; to present certain neuralgic problems exhibited within these disciplines by
reformulating them in the most rigorous manner possible; and to clarify questions
that often remain implicit or confused.

Publication first semester, 360 pages

Clotilde Leguil • Lacan au-delà de Sartre

Sujet, angoisse, contingence en psychanalyse

W e know how much Jacques Lacan drew from structuralism to re-found

psychoanalysis. This remarkably well-argued essay shows that Lacan’s advance
in relation to Freudian theory operates from a reference to Sartrian existential
concepts. Indeed, Lacan conceived the causality of madness in reference to the Sartrian
question of the freedom of the subject; he highlighted the subject and ego from
Sartrian philosophy but reinvested them against the psychology of self; he confronted
the definitions that Sartre gave of anguish in order to overcome them; finally, he turned
contingence – the inaugural concept of Sartrian thought – into the other side of the
unconscious. Thus the Lacanian contribution to psychoanalysis does not only consist
of an approach to the unconscious as a structure but also of the import of the notion
of subject, redeployed from existentialism.

Publication first trimester, 500 pages

Dominique Lestel •
L’Espèce qui voulait sortir de l’espèce
O ver several decades, in-depth research has been conducted on so-called superior
animals, particularly monkeys and dolphins. While this work is recognized, we
have so far not really taken in all its significance. Such research gives us a completely
novel outlook on these species, as well as on the world of animals in general. Animals
are not machines, nor failed human beings: they are our partners in the world of living
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Humanities

creatures. We thus need to profoundly redefine our relationship to them, that is,
redefine ourselves. A new philosophical anthropology is being born. The author, a
philosopher, does not hesitate to speak of a “Copernican revolution”. He attempts to
draw its main outline in this book.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Martine Menès • Savoir à prendre, savoir apprendre

W hat makes learning possible in a child? What kind of choice does a child make
who does not want to learn? Academic failure, even the very notion of
academic failure, is rarely put into question. In order to understand how knowledge
is transmitted, it is necessary to question the conditions that foster the desire to learn
– and the logic of desire has a lot to do with that of the unconscious. The analysis of
the conditions of curiosity and learning as well as the troubles that can prevent them
is supported by numerous case studies. This book also explores the position of the
transmitter of knowledge and constructs a convincing plea for an autonomous subject
who understands – who takes with him – the knowledge that is transmitted to him.

Publication second semester, 200 pages

José Morel Cinq-Mars • Territoires de l’intime

N owadays a person who keeps secrets is considered fragile and inhibited. While
those who reveal themselves without restraint appear sure of themselves and
fulfilled. How and why has the acknowledgement of spaces of intimacy given place not
only to the right but also to the duty of showing (ourselves) without restriction? Is an
excessive trust in the virtues of speech, in which psychoanalysis plays some role,
responsible for this situation? Is it necessary to denounce the illusion of a transparent
self? The person who pretends to exhibit himself “freely” probably finds a psychic gain,
but what price does he pay for his fragilities? After listening to her patients’ intimate
words in her consulting room, José Morel Cinq-Mars questions a society that pushes
people to over-value exhibition.

Publication second semester, 300 pages

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Humanities

Marc-Alain Ouaknin • L’Alphabet expliqué aux enfants

T he letters of the alphabet have a long history that goes back over five
thousand years. Several civilisations have put together this system: Egyptian and
Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan, Latin, all before the Christian West inherited
it and turned it into the main writing system of humanity. Thus, our “A” comes from
Alpha, which comes from Aleph, “bull” in Semitic languages, particularly Hebrew. In the
beginning, the letters of our modern alphabet were drawings representing objects,
animals, parts of the body and important gestures of everyday life.To tell its story, this
book begins with the shape of each letter. In a simple and colourful language, it answers
all the questions children might have, enabling them to become archaeologists
investigating the origins of these strange signs – signs that enable us to write words
and thus, with grammar, form all possible and imaginable sentences and ideas.

Publication first trimester, 150 pages

Dominique Séglard • Recueil d’articles

D ominique Séglard, who recently died at age 57, directed the series “Traces écrites”
devoted to the “transcription of events of thought of oral origin”: course notes,
duplicated lecture notes, recordings transcribed as faithfully as possible. This series
has previously included Merleau-Ponty’s courses on Nature at the Collège de France,
as well as courses by Barthes, Althusser,Voegelin, Simondon, Jankelevitch and Gadamer.
Dominique Séglard is less well known as a philosopher because of his dearth of
published works and the dispersion of his articles in journals or small-print books.
However, this posthumous collection aims to bring the philosophical aspect of his
work to public knowledge. The book’s contributions to the history of political and
social philosophy (Rousseau) as well as to its contemporary productions (Sartre,
Schmitt, Blumenberg, Arendt, Taubes, Foucault, of whom he was a remarkable
connoisseur…) also underline Séglard’s interest in the analysis of the mechanisms of
power and his attempt to conceptualise them.

Publication first semester, 300 pages

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Humanities

Jean-Michel Thurin • La Psychosomatique

“P sychosomatic” reasons are often invoked to explain certain diseases. But what
scientific reality hides behind this notion? This book attempts to examine what
we know today of this complex question and the various available explanatory models.
The author positions himself both from a doctor’s and a therapist’s points of view.
He shows with precision how important the psychosomatic description of a trouble
or a disease can be. He also mentions treatments, their efficacy and, eventually, their
limits.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

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3 Religious Studies
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Religious Studies

Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi •

Le Livre suffisant pour la connaissance de la foi
M ohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi introduces, translates and offers commentary in The
Book of Proof, an essential part of The Sufficient Book by Muhammad Ibn Ya’qûb al-
Kylaynî (who died in 940 or 941), the most important compiler of the Shi’ite Hadiths.
The Sufficient Book is the sum of more than 16,200 traditions divided into three major
parts: juridical, doctrinal and the third devoted to unclassifiable subjects. The work
proposes to answer all the needs of faithful Shiites. The Book of Proof, the most
important among the eight books that compose the doctrinal part, is the first
monograph about the role of the divine spiritual Guide, the Imam, and presents all
the aspects of this central figure (nature, function, supernatural powers).A fundamental
text of Shi’ism, magnificently introduced and annotated.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Christian Belin • La Méditation en Occident

T here exists an early tradition of meditation in Christianity, exemplified by desert
priests, that continued in a vivid manner until the end of the seventeenth century.
What are the specifics of Christian meditation? When and how is it practiced? What
place is given to the body? Is it taught? In what ways is it different from prayer? Why
has it been neglected little by little over the years to the point of being completely
unknown today? All these questions will find an answer in this book which offers a
synthetic presentation of the particularities of this practice in the West.

Publication second semester, 280 pages

Didier Davin • Qu’est-ce que le zen ?

C an Zen be reduced to simplistic and somewhat used clichés of Zazen and of the
renunciation to the use of reason? The ambition of this book aimed at a non-
specialist public is to consider Zen for what it is: a current of Buddhism that, like
all other branches of this religion, has known transformations, divisions, even
confrontations that have helped fashion its story and its doctrines. By leaning on the
most recent university studies, the author presents the theories upon which this
school of thought was founded, their evolution and consequences. The reader will
thus understand that the main theoretical stakes of this branch of Buddhism are at the
limits of our reason, but that the inaccessibility of Zen is primarily religious.

Publication first semester, 300 pages

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Religious Studies

Laurent Deshayes • Paroles de bouddha

T exts on Buddhism are the transcription of very rich oral teachings – whether they
are the Buddha’s sutras, texts belonging to the numerous branches of Buddhism
that developed one after the other in Asia, or Zen koans. By commenting on these
“words” taken from such a large and diversified body of literature instead of once
again presenting the common canon of different schools of Buddhism that are the
Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, this book immerses us in the spirit of Buddhism,
its representations, its sensitivity and its ethics. It also shows the evolution of the
Buddhist canon in time and space through its different forms (vehicles) and their
recent evolution in the West.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Éric Mangin •
Maître Eckhart et la profondeur de l’intime
B y focusing on the intimate, which is a privileged experience of detachment,
Éric Mangin sheds light upon the core of Master Eckhart’s thoughts in their most
complex and deepest aspect, and in a way that resonates with today’s reader.The intimate
is not what is private or isolated: it is an essential distance that enables man to be united
with God and present in the world. It is also in its core the means by which the
inalienable freedom of man is expressed, a major element of Eckartian anthropology.As
a mystical experience open to action, intimacy enables us to revisit the theologian’s
beliefs in a novel and organic manner. A major study with contemporary resonance.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Pauline de Préval • Jeanne d’Arc, la sainteté casquée

F irst considered a prophet then burnt as a witch in Rouen on May 30, 1431, Joan of
Arc was largely forgotten after her mission was accomplished. Since the Romantics
rediscovered her, all parties now fight over her standard, incapable of seeing the truly
transcendent aspect it once referred to.This is precisely the subject of this short essay,
constructed around the words that Joan of Arc pronounced during her trial. Each
reply bursts with the insolence of sanctity in all its youth. Joan is the surge of mystery
in full light, the genius of common sense; she is passion for the earth, irreverence
before established greatness; and her whole existence is a yes to Love stronger than
Death; Ultimately, she is helmeted sanctity where loving and acting are one.

Publication first trimester, 128 pages

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4 Science
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Science

Jean Deutsch • Histoire de la génétique

N owadays genetics is everywhere. This trend has perverse effects: a bad popu-
larisation leads to misinterpretation. For instance, the “genetic code” is not the
sequence of a genome, or even a gene, and does not in any way make up the genetic
identity of a person. In order to dissipate these misunderstandings, the author tells the
story of genetics as one of concepts – particularly the story of its founding and central
concept: the gene. By showing how the theory of genes was born, the questions and
reworking that it was subject to over the years, and the way it is still put into question
today, the aim of this book is to make genetics more accessible and better understood.
Beyond this, the book also sheds light on the process of scientific reasoning itself.

Publication second semester, 300 pages, 20 black and white in-text illustrations

Chris Herzfeld • Petite Histoire des grands singes

T his book lays out a philosophical view on the history of the relationship between
men and anthropoid primates: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans.
From a cultural history perspective, the author explores scholarly ideas, collective
representations and the diversity of discourses produced on primates, revealing the
manner in which Man has defined himself in relation to periods of time (from the
Greek philosophers to the Encyclopaedists and the Renaissance scholars, colonial
history, experimental psychology, feminist research). Between “man and animal”,
“nature and culture”, “wild and domestic”, the anthropoid primates enable us to
question the boundary erected between the poles of these structuring dichotomies
of Western dualist thought.

Publication first semester, 200 pages

Bertrand Jordan •
Le Gène introuvable Autisme et business
T his books presents the new approaches of medical genetics and genomic research
from a concrete example: the search for the determining genetics of autism. This
serious affliction has given rise to media events to which the author was personally
involved. Alternating the narrative between recent events and scientific development,
this book allows us to discover the problematic relationship between research in
medical genetics and the biotechnology industry with their particular imperatives, as
well as the interferences between knowledge, business and juridical institutions.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

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Science

Roland Lehoucq •
Les Extraterrestres expliqués à mes enfants
D o extra-terrestrials really exist? Where do they live when more than four
hundred planets have now been discovered around other stars, billions of stars
in a single galaxy? And why not closer, on Mars or Titan? By examining extra-terrestrial
beings described in science-fiction and graphic novels as well as in films (E.T., Alien,
Avatar, and many others), in the light of contemporary scientific knowledge, the author
explains what they could really look like. Primitive creatures or more advanced
civilisations than ours? And in this case, how would we communicate with them?

Publication first trimester, 100 pages

Caroline de Mulder • Libido sciendi

I f the link between the desire to know (libido sciendi) and erotic desire (libido sentiendi)
is already suggested in the Scriptures, it becomes explicit starting in the Renaissance
and plays a crucial role in the configuration of modern science. Here, the author
explores the story of this link using two points of view – that of the scholar’s as a
desiring being and that of the woman, an image of Nature. She does this by following
their evolution and their interactions in art, literature and cinema. This essay retraces
the origins of the current relationship between Nature and science, and enables us to
contemplate it not only as a story of rationality but also as one of desire, feeling and
curiosity.

Publication first trimester, 200 pages, ten black and white in-text illustrations

Alain Prochiantz • Évolution et Individuation

Qu’est-ce que le vivant ?

T he author’s intent here is to place the biological sciences within the larger
framework of Science and to explain where we stand in our understanding of
living. Biology, even if it must resort to other scientific disciplines – chemistry, physics
and mathematics, even the humanities – has its own specificities that make it a
legitimate science in its own right. There exists thus an evolutionary theory of living
organisms, built around the notions of reproduction, individuation and evolution. In
order to question the unique character of our species and its place in evolution, the
author summons upon sociology, anthropology, law, literature and art, as well as
philosophy, with their own theories and practices.

Publication first trimester, 400 pages

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Science

Simon Schaffer • Les Sciences modernes au travail

T his book covers twenty-five years of research and two and a half centuries of
history. The frame of the “stories of science” studied here is Western Europe,
mainly Great-Britain and France, from the political-religious crises of the 17th century
up to the economic and industrial mutations of the 19th century. Classes and
academies, observatories and laboratories, theatres and manufactures constitute what
goes on behind the scenes of scientific work. The narrative moves from overseas
colonies to the immensity of interstellar space, from the universe of dented wheels
to electromagnetic devices, atoms and molecules. All the stories gathered in this book
are situated at the pivotal moment when the advent of capitalism and its worldwide
development played a fundamental role in the making of modern science.An important
book about the new history of science.

Publication second semester, 350 pages

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5 History
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History

Jean-Pierre Azéma •
L’Occupation expliquée à mon petit-fils
I n this short and abundantly documented book, the author recounts France at war
– from the Vichy period until the fall of the regime and the liberation of Paris and
the rest of the country. No episode is left obscured, not the first hours of collaboration
and exodus, nor the purge scenes and sabotages, nor the convoys to Drancy towards
the Nazi death camps.Additionally, all aspects of the Résistance, its actions and the men
who animated it, are presented and analysed: the relationship between Free France and
the Resistance fighters, between the latter and the British and American allies, the
means of struggle at their disposal, as well as their underground work and the
organization of their networks.

Publication first trimester, 100 pages

Florent Brayard • Auschwitz comme secret

Une enquête sur un complot nazi

W as the “final solution of the Jewish question” a State secret? Since the
Nuremberg trials, we agree to believe that the highest-ranking Nazi elites had
been informed that the Jews deported “towards the East” were killed in gas chambers.
At the end of a long investigation, however, Florent Brayard shows that this thesis
does not hold: even after the Wannsee conference in January 1942, high executives
continued to think of the “final solution” as a transplantation, not murder. For the
author, the murder of the Jews constitutes a highly contravening act that Hitler and
Himmler, by anticipation, preferred to obscure as completely as possible. This essay
radically shatters the way we think about Auschwitz.

Publication first trimester, 380 pages

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz • L’Apocalypse joyeuse

Une histoire du risque technologique

H ere, the author explores the political history of technological risk and its long-
term regulation by examining the entry of France and Great-Britain into industrial
modernity (end of the 18th century-19th century): it is the time of the development
of vaccines, machines, chemical factories and locomotives. This book plunges us into
the heart of controversies that surged around the risks and nuisances of these
innovations. It shows how criticism and contestations were reduced or overcome
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History

so that an industrial society could come about. The history of risk told here is
not that of an awareness but that of the construction of a certain modernizing
unconsciousness.

Publication first semester, 450 pages, twenty black and white in-text illustrations

Benoît Grévin • Le Parchemin des cieux

Essai sur les cultures linguistiques de l’Islam et de la Chrétienté latine
à l’époque médiévale

W hat did speaking and writing mean in the Middle Ages? This book sheds light on
medieval linguistic cultures by exploring the circulation and dynamics of
languages, their contacts, and their thought and usage in the lands of Latin Christianity
and Islam from the 6th to the 15th centuries. The author contemplates a “linguistic
economy of medieval societies” in anthropological and comparativist lens by going to
and fro between Western Christianity and classical Islam. Beyond their inevitable
differences, the weight of social practices linked to the mastery of writing as well as
to the centrality of sacred textual corpuses suggests common characteristics between
these two medieval Babels, half way between the oral character of non-written
societies and our modern ones.

Publication first trimester, 350 pages

Ivan Jablonka • Le Droit de vivre nulle part

Matès et Idesa, deux Juifs au temps de Staline et de Hitler

“I left as a historian on the traces of grandparents I never had. […] To write this
book, both a historical work and a family biography, I explored twenty archive
depots and met numerous witnesses in France, Poland and Israel, in Argentina and in
the United States. I strove not to be objective – it doesn’t mean anything because we
are glued to the present, closed in upon ourselves – but radically honest. This
transparency towards the self implies both rigorously maintaining a certain distance
and being the most completely invested.The double necessity to say “I” and to flee the
emphatic tone that such circumstances could justify, the duty to give word to my
certainties as well as to my doubts, my intuitions as well as my renouncement, makes,
I hope, my work more solid.”

Publication first trimester, 380 pages

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History

André Vauchez (editor) • Prophètes et prophéties

Une histoire du prophétisme des temps bibliques à nos jours

T his brilliant work tracks down prophets and prophecies from all continents
through the course of History in an attempt to put forth the most accurate
definition possible. It shows that the prophet is a man of waiting. From Europe to the
Middle-East, from Africa to the Americas, leaning on religious and biblical sources, but
also more contemporary analyses such as Max Weber’s, André Vauchez and his team
undertake to define the figure of the prophet through the ages.They draw the portrait
of a charismatic figure, invested with divine power, capable of moving crowds by giving
an inspired speech that is properly apocalyptic, one that “raises the veil” on the future.
Far from giving in to the temptation of gloom-mongering, so commonly bandied about
today, the prophet is on the contrary a man of hope, whose presence and charisma
cross periods of time and oceans.

Publication first trimester, 500 pages

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6 S o c i o l o g y,
Politics, Economy
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Sociology, Politics, Economy

André Cicollela •
La Santé, quatrième crise écologique
T he global ecological crisis is usually summarized by three major problems: global
warming, exhaustion of natural resources, and the lowering of biodiversity. But it
needs to be understood through a fourth stake: the health crisis. Diseases like respiratory,
cardiovascular, cancer, diabetes or obesity, have currently supplanted infectious diseases
which dominated until the middle of the 20th century and represented 63% of world
mortality. These chronic diseases are caused mostly by modern environmental factors
(food and pollution), which are the consequence of human activity and therefore call for
a radical change in our ways of producing and consuming.The health crisis also constitutes
a threat to the economy and to social interaction.The author, who is an expert in questions
of environmental health, takes us deep into the roots of this crisis and proposes ways out.

Publication second semester, 150 pages

Nicolas Duvoux • Assistance ou solidarité ?

Pauvreté, précarité et politiques publiques

H ow can we reestablish a social contract that reconciles solidarity with individuals’

autonomy? Measures to combat poverty are often accused of entertaining the
idleness of the “privileged” that benefit from them. The development of economic
assistance, amplified by the crisis, is a social choice that caters to a progressive crumbling
of solidarity, indifference towards poverty, but also to a double movement that encourages
individuals to assume more responsibility and justifies inequalities. This book explores
paths in favour of a new articulation between collective and individual responsibility.

Publication first trimester, 100 pages

Éric Maurin (editor) • Les Classes moyennes

O ften perceived – and coveted – as the stable kernel of society, the middle class is
in reality the place where the most intense aspirations towards social ascent and
the most acute fears in face of decline are expressed. Leaning on unpublished studies,
this book demonstrates how middle class families have maintained their position during
the last thirty years, after a merciless social struggle for more protected professional
statuses, more secure places of residence and more sought after diplomas. Social
separatism, downgrading, school competition, voting of social groups are as many crucial
questions explored in this book.

Publication first trimester, 100 pages

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Sociology, Politics, Economy

Jacques Sapir • L’Euro : le changer ou en sortir ?

T he Euro zone is not just in crisis. Now, its very survival is questioned. Can we save
this unique currency by deeply reforming its rules? Must we get out of the Euro
and institute a new European monetary system? The author shows that the original
defaults of the Euro inevitably lead to the present crisis and have hindered Europeans’
capacity to overcome it. By refusing to ask whether to keep or reform the Euro,
governments have let the crisis worsen to the point where the most touched
countries probably won’t have any other option but to abandon the currency. This
book presents a plan of action for a program that would better manage the probable
bursting of the Euro zone.

Publication first trimester, 140 pages

Sezin Topçu • La France nucléaire

L’art de gouverner une technologie contestée

T he importance played by nuclear power in the French economy and in the energy
field constitutes a French exception. However, in the 1970s, French citizens were
very sceptical about the atom, and the contestation of this industry has not ceased
since then.The author explains the strange success of nuclearization in France despite
strong citizen resistance. She sheds light on the efficient strategies of politicians and
industrials to contain, bypass, anticipate, canalise, and “scientificise” criticism.The new
practices of “transparency” and “public participation” are only one way of recuperating
criticism, to steer it away from a more radical democratic demand.

Publication second semester, 300 pages

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7 Documents,
Te s t i m o n i e s
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44
Documents, Testimonies

Annie François • Mine de rien

“A fter a session of radiation treatment, I jump onto the 27 bus and reach the
office where I am acclaimed as if I were a heroine: people who are sick for a
short or long period of time should be advised to maintain their professional activity
if their physical strength permits. It’s wonderful for the morale. Yet, some who have
already buried me in their minds look at me with scepticism as if they had viewed
Lazarus’ resurrection in person; others, who are the type to prolong their conva-
lescence for a regular cold, surreptitiously signify that I sabotage the workplace with my
zeal.All congratulate me for looking good, which gives me the opportunity to quote my
maternal grandfather who, in the same circumstances, replied: “Looking good never
hurts.” It is important to pretend that everything is fine and to continue to live as if
nothing had happened when a cancer is diagnosed.” With her biting humour and her
fun play on words, Annie François gives us a life lesson before the final full-stop.

Publication first semester, 100 pages

Yang Jisheng • Stèle

A n exceptional document, this thick volume is the first historical account of the
Great Famine that took place in China between 1958 and 1961 on the heels of
the economic disaster of Mao’s “Great Leap forward”. The product of fifteen years of
detailed field research focused on reconstructing and establishing the historical truth
of the period, this book represents, in the words of the author: “A stele for my father,
who died of hunger in 1959, a stele for the 36 million Chinese people who were
victims of famine, a stele for the system responsible.” This is a narrative from the
inside: not the work of a foreigner or a dissident, but that of a man convinced that
“a country that can’t look at its past has no future.” An invaluable reference of a period
in Chinese history that has up to now remained rather obscure, this document marks
a turning point for the Chinese intelligentsia and opens the way to an historical
approach capable of critically revisiting the darkest moments of recent history by
detaching itself from the entirely made up official historiography.

Chinese and Japanese language rights are reserved.

Italian, English and German languages rights have been sold.

Publication second semester, 900 pages

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45
Documents, Testimonies

Danièle Kriegel • La Moustache de Staline

T his autobiographical essay humorously retraces Danièle Kriegel’s journey from
her childhood in Paris where she grew up in an intellectual and privileged milieu
to her arrival in Israel.The daughter of Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, an important figure
of the Resistance and of the French communist party, the author moves to Israel.
She offers here a contemporary painting of this new country, between violence and
religious drifting (she describes in particular the young Israeli girls who hide every
part of their bodies under long and dark tunics), tragedies (she comes back on the
Rose Pizem affair), and hope for peace.

Publication second semester, 250 pages

Virgine Linhart • La Vie après

E xtending the documentary she made about the return to France of Jewish
survivors of extermination camps – 2,500 Jewish survivors out of nearly 76,000
deported people – the author breaks the silence of the years “after.” How have these
survivors succeeded in once again taking up the thread of an existence interrupted by
such violence? How have they been able to reconstruct themselves? In this work,
Virginie Linhart delivers the testimonies of these men and women who have – or have
not – caught up with their studies, found a job, loved, built a family and a future within
a society that several years before had banished them, this in spite of the trauma of
the camps and the sometimes complete disappearance of their families. She recounts
her investigation, her meetings and the context of each conversation. She also explains
what pushed her to do this research and places her personal and familial story within
the framework of this analysis: through its making and the tone employed, La Vie après
should be placed next to her book, Le Jour où mon père s’est tu.

Publication first semester, 250 pages

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46
Documents, Testimonies

Jean-Jacques Marie • Le Fils oublié de Trotski

L eon Trotsky had four children: Nina who died of tuberculosis in 1928, Zina who
committed suicide in 1933 in Berlin, Leon Sedov assassinated by the NKVD
(People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 1938, and finally Serge, the forgotten
son. Born in 1908, Serge was not interested in politics. Instead, he was fascinated by
technology and became an engineer.When Stalin expelled his father in 1929, Serge did
not believe he himself would be threatened and remained in the Soviet Union. But in
1936 when the great purges began, he was arrested. Following a series of subsequent
interrogations and arrests, Serge Trotsky went into exile. But Stalin still did not leave
the matter alone and organized a political plot against him that led to the proclamation
of a death sentence in 1937. In addition to a minute description of the Stalin machine
of destruction, this book draws the portrait of a tender and witty man whose only
crime was to carry too heavy a name.

Publication first trimester, 250 pages

Sygmunt Stein • Ma guerre d’Espagne

A t the onset of the Spanish civil war, Sygmunt Stein, a young Jewish communist
activist, disembarks in Albacete, fief of the legendary International Brigades.
There, he finds in his own camp everything he thought he would fight in fascism,
starting with anti-Semitism and the violence of the Stalinists led by André Marty.
A member of the Komintern, a commissioner of propaganda against his will, the
author delivers a view without compromise on the hierarchy of fear that made the
International Brigades work. Organised lies, series of murders, and internecine
struggles constituted an everyday life that he had not only to endure but had also to
transform and smooth over in order to maintain the troops’ morale. Disgusted, he left
Spain and communism to find refuge in Paris in 1938. Written and published fifty-five
years ago in Yiddish, this testimony appears for the first time in France.

Publication first semester, 280 pages

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8 Index
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49
Index

AMIR-MOEZZI Mohammad Ali, 28 HERZFELD Chris, 32

ANISSIMOV Myriam, 13 JABLONKA Ivan, 37
AVRANE Patrick, 18 JISHENG Yang, 44
AZÉMA Jean-Pierre, 36 JORDAN Bernard, 32
BARD Patrick, 4 KRIEGEL Danièle, 45
BELIN Christian, 28 LAHIRE Bernard, 22
BIASI Pierre-Marc de, 13 LEGUIL Clotilde, 22
BOUGANIM Ami, 18 LEHOUCQ Roland, 33
BRAYARD Florent, 36 LÉPRONT Catherine, 9
CASSOU-NOGUÈS Pierre, 18 LÉSTEL Dominique, 22
CAZENAVE Michel, 19 LINHART Virginie, 45
CERISUELO Marc, 19 L’OLIVIER, 12
CHIRIACO Sonia, 20 MAGLOIRE Frank, 9
CHOAY Françoise (en collab), 20 MAJDALANI Charif, 10
CICOLLELA André, 40 MANGIN Éric, 29
CLÉMENT Catherine, 4
MARIE Jean-Jacques, 46
COLLASSE Richard, 4
MAURIN Éric, 40
COUCHEPIN Nicolas, 5
MENÈS Martine, 23
DAVIN Didier, 28
MOREL CINQ-MARS José, 23
DELAUME Chloé, 5
MULDER Caroline de, 33
DELERM Philippe, 6
OUAKNIN Marc-Alain, 24
DELWART Charly, 6
PATEAU Michel, 14
DES BIOLLES Maryline, 7
DESHAYES Laurent, 29 PEREC Georges, 10
DEUTSCH Jean, 32 PRÉVAL Pauline de, 29
DJEMAÏ Abdelkader, 7 PROCHIANTZ Alain, 33
DUVOUX Nicolas, 40 QUIRINY Bernard, 11
FLAU BERT Gustave, 13 SAINTE-MARIE GAUTHIER Vincent
FŒSSEL Michaël, 21 (en collab.), 20
FOUCAULT Michel, 21 SAPIR Jacques, 41
FRANÇOIS Annie, 44 SARRAZAC Jean-Pierre, 14
FRESSOZ Jean-Baptiste, 36 SCHAFFER Simon, 34
FREUND Michaël, 7 SÉGLARD Dominique, 24
GAZIER Michèle, 8 STEIN Sygmunt, 46
GRÉVIN Benoît, 37 THURIN Jean-Michel, 25
GÜRSEL Nedim, 8 TOPÇU Sezin, 41
HAAS Jean-François, 8 VAUCHEZ André, 38
HÉRITIER Françoise, 21 ZHONGSHI Chen, 11
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