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“... The Parti Socialiste, more divided than ever, came fifth in 2017, and La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, lost its initial momentum. In the run-up to the European elections in May, opinion polls showed that the French would vote on the basis of national issues, which persuaded Macron to repeat the two gambles he had taken in 2017: that the only ...”

“... of the ball, sometimes called ‘the kidney’. The game was imported via Le Havre just after the Franco-Prussian War and there were two expat clubs in Paris by the end of the decade, one of which – the Paris Football Club – played both association football and rugby. The Parisian clubs of the 188os were said to emulate the toffish ways of the English ...”

“... In​ his monumental biography of De Gaulle, Jean Lacouture describes a meeting of the Free French in London in 1941 at which several of the younger members expressed their admiration for Churchill. In response De Gaulle warned them ‘never to forget that within him breathes the soul of Pitt’. What he meant was that every true Englishman is, at least potentially, an opponent of France ...”

“... such anxieties aren’t new. Book titles such as How Democracy Ends and How Democracies Die echo Jean-François Revel’s gloomy Comment les démocraties finissent, published in 1983. Revel, a shrill conservative, thought Western democracy was doomed, its very openness, pluralism and tolerance of criticism rendering it vulnerable to a less scrupulous ...”

“... He was lucky enough to count among his most intimate friends the writer (and Protestant) Jean Schlumberger and the novelist and Nobel Prizewinner Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom were bisexual, though less conspicuously so. They accompanied him on his adventures or exchanged letters with him about his encounters with adolescents, and they almost ...”

“... films, of which only Los Olvidados (1950) got any real notice. Viridiana was made in Spain under Franco, and caused a tremendous scandal. After that Buñuel made one more film in Spain (Tristana, 1970), two more films in Mexico (The Exterminating Angel, 1962, Simon of the Desert, 1965), and six films in France (Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964, Belle de ...”

“... institutions of the Fifth Republic continued to brood over French politics. It was in Algeria that Jean-Marie Le Pen first broke the surface (he briefly served there as an intelligence officer). Although de Gaulle can’t be wholly blamed for the ructions that have repeatedly shaken the country, to claim that he bequeathed stable political institutions seems ...”

“... indirection’, Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic, it manifests a fundamental tension between Anderson’s ...”

“... its internment camp, built by the French to house fugitives from Spain after the Republic fell to Franco in 1939. A succession of internees went through the camp before it closed on New Year’s Eve 1945. With the Spanish Republicans came International Brigade volunteers who couldn’t get home – Germans, Austrians, Poles. After the Nazi invasion in May ...”

“... suspicions that a new level of intolerance has set in, we have to take up the story again after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s success in round one of the 2002 elections.Shortly after he was returned to office Chirac convened a commission on secularism. On the basis of its findings, the Islamic veil – including the traditional headscarf, which doesn’t cover the ...”

“... of the international labour movement, for struggles’, he then thought, ‘still pending’. When Franco Moretti, to whom he now dedicates A Zone of Engagement, wrote back from Italy, then in ferment, to say that the essay was in fact ‘a farewell in fitting style to the revolutionary Marxist tradition’, it was not a verdict, Anderson now concedes, ‘that ...”

“... wheat has a higher nutritional value than rice. That year, a 25-year-old French grain trader, Jean-Yves Ollivier, travelled to Hong Kong and crossed the Sham Chun River, the natural border with mainland China, to enter the town of Shenzhen, then hardly more than a fishing village. The far bank was dotted with red flags, portraits of Mao and banners of ...”

“... and the left-wing figures who went anyway were later subjected, Barthes’s biographer Louis-Jean Calvet reports, to sarcastic inquiries such as ‘So, how was the soup?’ Barthes didn’t like being sneered at for consorting with a patrician representative of the centre-right, and his friends made it known that he had, over coffee, made pointedly ...”

“... Edinburgh to the Humber. In early September, a series of mishaps led to the abandonment of the Franco-Spanish invasion, but Jones, commanding a squadron of ships (the Pallas, the Vengeance and the Alliance), remained at large. On the afternoon of Thursday, 23 September, he led his ships north from the Humber towards Flamborough Head. Sailing in the ...”

“... goldshirts in Mexico, as well as Falangist formations in South and Central America: comrades of Franco’s clerical-military fascism, but with an extra emphasis on the racial unity of white Hispanic-Americans, or la raza, a group they thought had conceded far too much ground to Indigenous peoples and to democracy.What we would now call the right-wing ...”