'Exhilarating . . . a work of scholarship, but also inspiration. . . Go and read Jablonka and change the world' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times 'An unexpected bestseller in France. . . it has sparked conversations' Challenges A highly acclaimed, bestselling work from one of France's preeminent historians What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? In this insightful analysis, social historian Ivan Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, Jablonka uncovers the origins of our patriarchal societies. He then offers an updated model of masculinity based on a theory of gender justice which aims for a redistribution of gender, just as social justice demands the redistribution of wealth. Arguing that it is high time for men to be as involved in gender justice as women, Jablonka shows that in order to build a more equal and respectful society, we must gain a deeper understanding of the structure of patriarchy - and reframe the conversation so that men define themselves by the rights of women. Widely acclaimed in France, this is an important work from a major thinker.

'Exhilarating . . . a work of scholarship, but also inspiration. . . Go and read Jablonka and change the world' Christina Patterson, Sunday Times 'An unexpected bestseller in France. . . it has sparked conversations' Challenges A highly acclaimed, bestselling work from one of France's preeminent historians What does it mean to be a good man? To be a good father, or a good partner? A good brother, or a good friend? In this insightful analysis, social historian Ivan Jablonka offers a re-examination of the patriarchy and its impact on men. Ranging widely across cultures, from Mesopotamia to Confucianism to Christianity to the revolutions of the eighteenth century, Jablonka uncovers the origins of our patriarchal societies. He then offers an updated model of masculinity based on a theory of gender justice which aims for a redistribution of gender, just as social justice demands the redistribution of wealth. Arguing that it is high time for men to be as involved in gender justice as women, Jablonka shows that in order to build a more equal and respectful society, we must gain a deeper understanding of the structure of patriarchy - and reframe the conversation so that men define themselves by the rights of women. Widely acclaimed in France, this is an important work from a major thinker.

"I'm frightened, Mother. Last year, I was seven years old. This year, I'm eight and so many years separate these two ages. I have learned that I am Jewish, that I am a monster, and that I must hide myself. I'm frightened all the time."--Francine Christophe.
Francine Christophe's account begins in 1939, when her father was called up to fight with the French army. A year later he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Hearing of the Jewish arrests in France from his prison camp, he begged his wife and daughter to flee Paris for the unoccupied southern zone. They were arrested during the attempted escape and subsequently interned in the French camps of Poitiers, Drancy, and Beaune-la-Rolande. In 1944 they were deported to Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

In short, seemingly neutral paragraphs, Christophe relates the trials that she and her mother underwent. Writing in the present tense, she tells her story without passion, without judgment, without complaint. Yet from these unpretentious, staccato sentences surges a well of tenderness and human warmth. We live through the child's experiences, as if we had gone hand-in-hand with her through the death camps.

Nathan Bracher's Francois Mauriac on Race, War, Politics, and Religion: The Great War Through the 1960s, consists of a selection of some ninety editorials penned by the Catholic novelist and intellectual Francois Mauriac, who received the Nobel Prize for literature and who was admitted to the Academie Francaise in 1933. As is often the case for prominent writers and intellectuals in France, Mauriac became active in political punditry early in his career, at the time of the First World War. Intensifying notably in the tumultuous years of the 1930s on, this activity continues to expand over the next five decades. After 1952, Mauriac's editorials came to represent the most important dimension of his intellectual activity. He was, to cite the prominent journalist and intellectual Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur, France's most distinguished and formidable editorialist of the twentieth century. Bracher's book provides for the first time an opportunity for English speaking readers to discover the incisive power, passionate humanity, and historical perspicacity that made his voice one of the most resonant in the French press. Mauriac's public stances on events left nobody indifferent. He was the first to denounce torture in Algeria, and the most eloquent in appealing to the heritage of humanism left by Montaigne and the Sermon on the Mount. The editorials collected here moreover provide a series of striking perspectives on the most dramatic events that France had to confront over the course of the twentieth century, from World War I, to the rise of Fascism and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, to the various episodes of World War II, on to the Cold War, the strains of decolonization in the 1950s, and the reign of Charles de Gaulle that coexisted with the upheaval of the 1960s. Mauriac's gripping editorials enable the reader to revisit these historical moments from within and through the eyes of a French Catholic intellectual and writer who approaches them with passion, commitment, and remarkable lucidity.

Irene Nemirovsky's war narrative, Suite francaise, was discovered and published posthumously in 2004, over sixty years after it was written. A Jewish Russian immigrant who had achieved literary stardom during the twenty years she lived in France, Nemirovsky wrote her novel during the first years of the Occupation, before she was deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942. When published, the book produced an immediate international sensation and has since been translated into more than twenty-five languages. While giving rise to a certain amount of controversy, the novel has been widely acclaimed as a literary masterpiece providing a devastating portrayal of France's defeat and occupation. In this work, the first critical monograph on Suite francaise, Nathan Bracher shows how, first amid the chaos and panic of the May-June 1940 debacle, and then within the unsettling new order of the German occupation, Nemirovsky's novel casts a particularly revealing light on the behavior and attitudes of the French as well as on the highly problematic interaction of France's social classes. It offers valuable insights on a number of subjects (in particular, the civilian exodus, the relations of French women with German soldiers, and socio-economic conflicts under the Occupation) that, until now, have been too often neglected or misunderstood, while at the same time displaying a striking originality when compared to other discourses and narratives dating from the same period. Bracher dispels a number of misconceptions that have arisen when Suite francaise has been assessed on the basis of biographical presumptions or with respect to current imperatives of the "duty to remember." Instead of viewing Suite francaise as a source of information about the author or as a simple instrument of memory, we can best understand the novel, Bracher argues, as a specifically configured literary text whose voice can engage its readers in a critical dialogue with the dramatic era of the catastrophic fall of France and the ensuing Occupation. Contrary to certain polemical interpretations, Bracher shows that Nemirovsky's searing novel not only makes a mockery of Vichy ideology but even adumbrates an ethic of resistance. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nathan Bracher is professor of French at Texas A&M University and author of Through the Past Darkly: History and Memory in Francois Mauriac's Bloc-notes. FROM THE BOOK: "It is well known that human beings are complex, multi-faceted, contradictory, and full of surprises, but it takes a time of war or great upheaval in order to see it. That is the most fascinating and the most terrible spectacle, she thought. The most terrible because it it the most real: you cannot take it for granted that you know the sea without having seen it during a storm as well as during calm weather. The person who knows men and women is somebody who has observed them during an era such as this one, she thought. Only such people know themselves." -- From Irene Nemirovsky, Suite francaise PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "A timely exploration of Nemirovsky's literary contribution in Suite francaise. Nathan Bracher shows how Nemirovsky's fictional narrative intersects with existing historical research and makes insightful comparisons with the texts of other contemporary writers. Bracher convincingly takes on Nemirovsky's critics as well as providing an engaging discussion of her narrative techniques and influences. The book will be of interest to all Nemirovsky scholars." --Hanna Diamond, Reader in French History, University of Bath "After the Fall returns us to the panic and anxieties of 1940 and the months that followed when it was not apparent that Germany would lose the war or that the harsh conditions of life would soon end. Bracher is sensitive to gender showing how as a woman Nemirovsky u

Widely renowned as the 1952 Nobel Prize winning author of novels depicting stark yet searing clashes of passion, possession, society, and spirituality within the Catholic bourgeoisie of the Bordeaux region, Francois Mauriac is now gaining long overdue recognition as France's premier editorialist of the 1950s and 1960s. This book, the first English-language study of Mauriac's Bloc-notes, presents these poignant, incisive editorials on social justice, war, and human rights in postwar France as both symptomatic of a culture imbued with the past and emblematic of a Christian humanist's ethical approach to history and memory. Francois Mauriac lived history past and present most intensely. Filtering his perception of decolonization in general and the Algerian war in particular through the tumultuous episodes of the Crusades, the religious wars, the French Revolution, the Dreyfus affair, and the German Occupation, he delivered the earliest and most stinging indictments of torture and oppression in the Algerian war. Through the Past Darkly explains how Mauriac returns to the momentous figures and events of history neither to sacralize France's past nor to justify its present but rather to narrate the ongoing story of history as the universal human drama engaging the political integrity of the French Republic as well as the moral responsibility of each person. At the same time, the Bloc-notes constitutes a ""place of memory,"" a deliberate crystallization of the past aimed at rescuing the pathos of public and private experience from oblivion. Mauriac, argues Nathan Bracher, articulated a distinctive approach to history: in contrast to de Gaulle's nationalist epic and Sartre's commitment to the dialectics of class struggle, its lucid, uncompromising assessments of French society and politics have withstood the test of time.