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“... A chance encounter​ on Christmas Eve ends with Edouard Louis, a student at the École Normale Supérieure, taking a stranger back to his apartment. Louis has struggled with the decision to invite the man to share his home and his body, and now, poised on the brink of terrible physical and emotional violence that will have long-standing consequences for both of them, the young men have choices to make ...”

“... have earned praise and prizes in recent decades. The jacket copy invites comparisons to Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt and Hanya Yanagihara. (Alan Hollinghurst is also present, but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl Ove Knausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has ...”

“... there’s a hell​ below Shuggie Bain’s, it must be the Picardy village where Édouard Louis (born 1992) grew up, as he recounts in The End of Eddy, published in French in 2014. Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s birth name) had a high-pitched voice and gestures that were deemed effeminate. He didn’t walk as boys are ...”

“... The politics is in the attention she pays to ordinary things, linking her work to that of Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon as well as Flaubert and Maupassant (who wrote about the part of Normandy she is from), and also to all those, the Gilets Jaunes among them, who are fed up of hearing about the Left Bank as if it were the centre of the country, if not the ...”

“... these puzzles were eventually solved by the generation of scientists who succeeded the perfumers. Louis Pasteur began his career peering through Laurent’s microscope at geometrical crystals, and subsequently spent years trying and failing to create a synthetic chemical that was optically active. Along the way, he resolved the problem of fermentation by ...”

“... dubious logic that both laws attempted to mandate an ‘official history’). In his foreword to Edouard Glissant’s Mémoires des esclavages, the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin writes that ‘today France wants to look into the face of this tragedy that has left so many open wounds across the world and in her own flesh,’ but is unable to ...”

“... on school trips. The amendment is unlikely to pass the lower house. During the debate, Jean-Louis Masson, an independent senator from Moselle, likened veiled women to ‘witches’. ‘If they’re not happy, they can go back to where they came from,’ he said.On the same day, two hundred Malian migrants were evicted from the Foyer Bara hostel in the ...”

“... 1839 to 1865. The first date marks not the beginning of photographic experiments, but the year Louis Daguerre announced his ability to ‘seize the light’, a claim soon rephrased by William Henry Fox Talbot as the art of ‘fixing a shadow’. As for 1865, it’s the year that marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of ...”

“... that the violent political upheavals of 1789-99 masked a deeper continuity between the France of Louis XIV and post-revolutionary France raised issues about the relationship between pluralism and social stability that have been debated ever since; his claim that Britain preserved its aristocratic form of government because the English aristocracy was both a ...”

“... Day. Yet at the end there was a tremendous cheer for the symbolic handshake between Liebknecht and Edouard Vaillant, representing the unity of the French and German proletariats against militarism and war. Lafargue was one of the first socialist deputies elected to the French Assembly. His maiden speech was heckled from all sides. Engels wrote comfortingly ...”

“... was finally completed in 1815, the heroic feat of map-making launched seventy years earlier under Louis XV, and masterminded by four generations of the Cassini family, recorded for the first time the names of half a million obscure hamlets (three thousand in the Aveyron alone). In 1792, not long before his execution, ...”

“... new government embodied a conservative brand of republicanism. He had been prime minister under Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy in 1836, 1840 and 1848, and was later a fierce opponent of Napoleon III. He was far from being the kind of leader the Parisian militants wanted in power. Thiers had promised the conservative députés in the National Assembly that ...”

“... new death rituals. This magnificently domed Neoclassical building was designed, in the reign of Louis XVI, by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot. (It sits at the head of the eponymous rue Soufflot, which runs from the Place du Panthéon to the Luxembourg Gardens.) It was intended to be a church dedicated to Ste Geneviève, but it wasn’t consecrated as ...”

“... varied, dramatic, ironically layered photographic portraits of herself (taken by Pierre-Louis Pierson), but had to wait until our time to be fully appreciated.Montesquiou was elegantly evasive about his homosexuality, though in the context of the time he could be quite effusively homoerotic without raising many more eyebrows than he did with his ...”

“... except in the vaguest way what the desirable stuff was. We gather that quite a lot is French – Louis Quinze and Louis Seize are mentioned once each (‘the sweetest Louis Seize’) – but we also hear of Venetian velvet and of ‘a great Italian cabinet’ in the red room, though with ...”