Reading list

A Radical in Paris

These books will help you engage with all that Paris embodies this summer! 

1 August 2024

A Radical in Paris

Paris is constantly changing as a living organism, both for better and for worse. Its radical history, from the French Revolution and Paris Commune to the continual fight against the pension reform law today, has much to teach us. As does the nation’s relationship to colonialism, empire, and islamophobia, where the country’s leaders and local oligarchs are attempting to raise a neoliberal revolution from above. 

Justinien Tribillon gives as outsider's guide to modern Paris in his latest work!

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Not Your Average Tour Guide:

Eric Hazan was a true parigot. As well as guiding us through the city as it is, he is full of ideas for what it could be. Tariq Ali reflects here on his lifetime of political commitment and intellectual creativity.

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French Revolution:

For over two hundred years the French Revolution has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale.

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The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own ‘working existence.’ 

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Philosophy, Literature, and Theory

The most celebrated French thinkers!

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Empire and Islamophobia

Books that interrogate France’s relationship with Islamophobia, and the fight for independence in the former colonies.

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Balzac's Paris
In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a lovin...
A History of the Barricade
In the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan's native Paris, where they were instr...
The Invention of Paris
The Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan.Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo...
Paris in Turmoil
Since the disastrous Pompidou years, working-class Paris has been steadily nibbled away, either by destruction or more insidiously by a kind of internal colonization. Take for example a small outl...
A Walk Through Paris
Eric Hazan, author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris, leads us by the hand in this walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Cent...
Paperback
The French Revolution 1789-1799, Vol 1
A modern and comprehensive history of the French Revolution, integrating the major advances of recent research, has been much needed. Albert Soboul’s work has established itself as the new standard...
The French Revolution 1789-1799, Vol 2
A modern and comprehensive history of the French Revolution, integrating the major advances of recent research, has been much needed. Albert Soboul's work has established itself as the new standard...
War and Revolution
War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians. It is a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces th...
Paperback
A People's History of the French Revolution
The assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Marat – the events and figures of the French Re...
Communal Luxury
Kristin Ross’s new work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression...
Future Histories
The key to understanding technology lies not in the future--but in the past. That's the contention of Lizzie O'Shea's Future Histories, a grand tour through past and present to explore the practica...
Revolution
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexua...
The History of the Paris Commune of 1871
In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, theh...
The Last Communard
The Last Communard offers a brilliant, striking portrait of revolutionary Europe through a remarkable personal story.In 1871, Adrien Lejeune fought on the barricades of the Paris Commune. He was im...
The Emergence of Social Space
The 1870s in France – Rimbaud’s moment, and the subject of this book – is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: F...
The Word From Paris
An elegant guide to twentieth-century French literature and thought. The Word from Paris is a lucid and accessible guide to the literature and thought of twentieth-century France. John Sturrock ran...
From Prague to Paris
From Prague to Paris is above all a critique of French structuralism. But it is also an exercise in the wider history of ideas, showing that structuralism had already matured significantly prior to...
Transclasses
One is not born a worker or a boss, one becomes one from father to son... or almost. Social reproduction is not an iron law; it admits of exceptions that must be accounted for in order to measure i...
On Ideology

On Ideology

The publication of For Marx and Reading Capital established Louis Althusser as one of the most influential figures in the Western Marxist tradition. On Ideology charts Althusser’s critique of the t...
The Adventure of French Philosophy
The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the “French moment” in contemporary thought.Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied worl...
An Event, Perhaps
Who was Jacques Derrida? For some, he is responsible, at least in part, for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic cri...
For the Muslims
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming “There is a problem with Islam in France,” thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims...
Paperback
Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us
A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have...
Algiers, Third World Capital
Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...
Paperback
The Zone
In The Zone, Justinien Tribillon takes the reader on a tour of an eponymous Parisian hinterland. The site of dreams and nightmares, from Van Gogh’s paintings to the cinematic violence of La Haine,...
Hardback

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