debate

Discussion of literary studies and theoretical texts relevant to contemporary French literature.

War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann

This review presents Julia Weidmann's study, "Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature" (Winter, 2025), as a fundamental, comparative investigation of a central phenomenon in contemporary French literature: the intergenerational narration of the World Wars. The starting point is the observation that subsequent generations—from the "wound" generation to the "inheritance" generation—reconstruct familial wartime experiences in literary form, mediating between archival research and imagination. To this end, Weidmann develops an original model of a "war continuum" that replaces traditional numerical generational categories with a metaphorical, trauma-oriented scale. She operationalizes this concept in a four-stage analytical method, which she applies to a broad corpus of authors (including Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Ivan Jablonka, and Anne Berest). The review particularly praises the methodological clarity, the nuanced close readings, and the identification of recurring narrative structures across generations, but also highlights limited weaknesses, such as a certain schematization in the comparative analysis and the relatively marginal treatment of aesthetic details. Overall, the study appears as a substantial contribution to literary memory studies, providing a viable set of tools for analyzing transgenerational memory and simultaneously opening up new perspectives for the exploration of future narrative forms.

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Francesco Petrarch and his followers: Étienne Anheim

Étienne Anheim's "Pétrarque: portrait de famille" (Minuit, 2026) reconstructs Francesco Petrarch's literary project as the result of dense familial entanglements and understands his work as a discursive "family portrait" in which genealogical construction, social embeddedness, and poetic self-stylization are inextricably intertwined. Based on a combination of textual analysis and archival research, Anheim demonstrates how Petrarch mythologizes his origins along a patrilineal notary genealogy, while simultaneously systematically marginalizing or silencing key figures—especially his mother, daughter, and the mothers of his children. The constellations of father (as a professional model to be overcome), brother (as a spiritual alter ego), Laura (as a real void, imaginary lover, and symbolic cipher of poetry), as well as children and friends, unfold as structuring relationships within which Petrarch shapes his authorial identity. Writing thus always appears as an addressed, fragmentary practice within an extended "familia" composed of relatives, correspondents, and literary successors. Anheim does not resolve the tensions between archivally reconstructible social history and literary self-presentation, but rather understands them as a productive site where Petrarch invents his own genealogy and simultaneously establishes the model of modern authorship—a model based on selective memory, symbolic reshaping, and the transformation of familial bonds into literary transmission.

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Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

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Bridging the gap and self-correction: Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius's "The Literary Pioneers of the New France," a product of the immediate postwar period and born out of the experience of political defeat, opens up a deliberately counter-movement, a European-oriented interpretive space. By presenting key French authors (Gide, Rolland, Claudel, Suarès, Péguy) as bearers of an intellectual renewal in 1918/20, Curtius engages less in neutral literary mediation than in a cultural-political intervention against national resentments and stereotypical images of France. This review highlights that Curtius's argument rests on a twofold movement: on the one hand, the deconstruction of the German cliché of rationalist, "Latin" France through the demonstration of transnational, and especially "Germanic," influences; on the other hand, the construction of a "true France" that can serve as a pedagogical projection screen for a renewed, European-oriented Germany. The tension between documented enmity (for example, in the case of Suarès) and its programmatic overlay through the idea of ​​Europe is not leveled, but rather read as a productive contradiction. The review critically highlights the book's selective approach and its philosophical hierarchy of values, which excludes certain currents of thought while normatively elevating others. Overall, Curtius's study thus appears as a project that is both bound to its time and methodologically groundbreaking: a rhetorically driven self-correction of national perceptions that places literary studies in the service of intellectual understanding.

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All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

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Between completion and silence: Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon's "La Vie derrière soi: Fins de la littérature" (2021) brings together the expanded lectures from his final Collège de France cycle into a wide-ranging, essayistic reflection on the "ends" of literature—understood simultaneously as conclusion, goal, boundary, and dissolution. Starting from the opposing poles of Roland Barthes (non-writing) and Marcel Proust (writing until the very end), Compagnon develops a poetics of late style that intertwines literary, art-historical, and philosophical discourses. Using a European canon—from Nicolas Poussin and Rembrandt to François-René de Chateaubriand and Samuel Beckett—the book examines figures of late-life work, of silence, of swan songs, and of last words, without reducing these phenomena to a single, unified theory. His central thesis, more demonstrated than explicitly formulated, is that literature is essentially a practice of finitude: it gains its meaning precisely in dealing with its own end. With the concept of the "aevum," Compagnon describes literature as a temporal form situated between individual transience and cultural duration, in which mortality and tradition intertwine. Thus, the end of literature appears not as its disappearance, but as its privileged enactment—as an art of taking leave that finds its form in the writing itself.

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The 35 categories of the French literary landscape: Frédéric Beigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder's "Dictionnaire amoureux des écrivains français d'aujourd'hui" (Plon, 2023) is a monumental and deliberately contradictory work: a condensed inventory of living French-language contemporary literature, comprising 281 entries, which stretches the lexicographical form of the "Dictionnaires amoureux" series to its limits while simultaneously serving as a self-portrait of its author. Beigbeder defines his method as "resolutely subjective": his corpus includes only novelists living in August 2023 who write directly in French—essayists, poets, playwrights, and crime writers are excluded, while Francophone authors from Martinique, the Maghreb, Senegal, or Quebec are included, since the volume claims, in a literary-political sense, to map a literature that extends beyond France. The most conceptually bold and polemical element of the book is the taxonomy of twenty-eight “Logos des écoles et mouvements littéraires contemporains” – small symbols with which Beigbeder assigns each author to one or more schools, thus doing what literary studies have so far failed to do for the 21st century: to divide contemporary literature into binding currents, from “autoréalité” (the self as the primary raw material, with Ernaux and Angot as canonical figures) through “faction” or exofiction (Carrère, Jaenada, Aubenas) and the “glauquistes apocalyptiques” (Houellebecq, Despentes, Mathieu) to the “néo-hussards” (Tesson, Kauffmann, Parisis), the “décoloniaux voyageurs” (Chamoiseau, Condé, Daoud, Mbougar Sarr) and the “revelators of a maudlin past” (Modiano, Guez, Mukasonga, Littell). This review analyzes Beigbeder’s definition of the corpus, his implicit value criteria (style, originality of perspective, courage to provoke, existential risk), the characteristics of the individual groups based on exemplary entries, and finally the position Beigbeder occupies in his own panorama—as a novelist who has excluded himself but remains present as an authority on every page—in order to ultimately weigh both the volume’s genuine achievement (filling a real gap, the quality of the best portraits, the heuristic productivity of the taxonomy) and its structural limitations (the Parisian milieu-bound nature of the perspective, the canonization of the already established, the veiled political partisanship).

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The reparative turn: why literature today should do more than tell stories

This review presents Alexandre Gefen's essay "Réparer le monde: la littérature française face au XXIe siècle" (2017, English translation 2024) as an ambitious yet symptomatic diagnosis of contemporary literature: The aesthetic autonomy of the 20th century is replaced by a "reparative" paradigm in which literature is understood as a therapeutic, social, and ethical practice. Using a deliberately open corpus—ranging from Annie Ernaux to clinical case reports—Gefen maps a literature that forges identity, processes trauma, cultivates empathy, and safeguards collective memory; drawing on thinkers such as Paul Ricœur and care ethics, he describes storytelling as a technology of the self and an instrument of symbolic reparation. The review succinctly highlights this central thesis, acknowledging the analytical breadth and theoretical eclecticism, but simultaneously problematizing the normative narrowness: by reading literature primarily as a "cure," Gefen risks obscuring its inherent aesthetic logic in favor of an ethical utilitarianism. Thus, the book itself appears as an exemplary expression of the very tendency it describes—a committed, impact-oriented literary theory that oscillates between diagnosis and programmatic statement.

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Alain Finkielkraut between cultural criticism and political reflection

Alain Finkielkraut's "Le cœur lourd" (Gallimard, 2026) is a personal and diagnostic portrait of the intellectual, born in 1949, who experiences himself as an "orphan" in a world in upheaval. The review highlights that the book, based on conversations with Vincent Trémolet de Villers, not only reflects Finkielkraut's postwar biography and his belonging to the "post-Shoah" generation, but also critically analyzes the threats to language, culture, and identity in the present. Central themes include responsibility towards one's own historical and Jewish identity, concern for France and Israel, the loss of high culture and education, and nostalgia for a past, harmonious world. Finkielkraut presents himself as a melancholic chronicler who simultaneously makes concrete political, ethical and ecological proposals – from saving language to integral ecology to a model of conservative-liberal-socialist values ​​– thus showing how personal experience, philosophical reflection and concern for the future are inextricably linked.

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Writing against the border: Utopia Babel by Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani's essay "Assaut contre la frontière" (Gallimard, 2026) is a dense self-positioning situated between languages, cultures, and political discourses. Starting with a nightmarish courtroom scenario in which the wrong language becomes an existential guilt, the text unfolds an autobiographically grounded reflection on multilingualism as a space of identity and its loss as a genealogical wound—from her multilingual childhood and her father's colonial-influenced education to her own alienation from Arabic, which lives on as a "phantom language" in her writing. Slimani connects this personal linguistic history with a sharp analysis of global power relations: the hierarchization of languages ​​in the postcolonial space, the exoticization of "Maghrebi" literature, the political instrumentalization of Arabic after 9/11, and the illusion of a "pure" language, which she exposes as an ideological construct. She counters this with a poetics of the novel that understands literature as a radical practice of empathy and a diversity of perspectives—as a movement across borders that finds its continuation precisely in the act of translation. Slimani's argument is not linear, but rather essayistically condensed: she interweaves autobiographical scenes with intertextual references (from Canetti to Barthes to Camus) and cultural-political diagnoses to show that writing itself is an act of transgression. By reinterpreting Babel from a biblical place of punishment to a utopian cipher for a pluralistic world, literature appears here as a counterforce to linguistic and political isolation—as an "attack on the border" that does not consist of a return to a lost unity, but rather in the productive recognition of difference.

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Autofictional testimony, therapeutic writing, and self-empowerment: Gisèle Pelicot

This article reads Gisèle Pelicot's "Et la joie de vivre" (2026, cited as EJV) not merely as an account of a spectacular criminal trial, but as a literary reflection on self-constitution through language: The text tells the story of a woman who, after the shocking revelation of systematic violence—mediated through the fragmentary, dissociative structure of memory, through flashbacks to a childhood marked by loss, and through the gradual escalation of her husband's crimes—must recreate her own self by narrating it. Central to this is the shift in shame and interpretive authority: Starting from an internalized shame, articulated in the inability to acknowledge what happened as one's own experience ("Non, ce n'est pas moi"), the book develops a poetics of reappropriation in which naming, the choice of name, and the narrative voice become acts of self-empowerment. The narrative organization does not follow the chronology of events, but rather the logic of trauma—in layers, ruptures, and repetitions—while recurring motifs such as the ritual of the set breakfast table or the symbolism of light in the landscapes open up counter-spaces to the violence. In the final part, this movement culminates in the public court trial, which is staged as a platform for a social discourse on patriarchal violence and finds its political climax in Pelicot's decision to be transparent: "La honte doit changer de camp" functions as an ethical and structural peripeteia. The reading analyzes this development as a consistently autofictional project that mediates between therapeutic writing and literary creation: it shows how Pelicot's text implicitly designs a poetics in which writing is neither documentation nor fiction, but an existential practice that brings the subject into being in the first place. At the same time, the article interprets the life-affirming tone—which has often been received as a "hymn to resilience"—not as an affirmative glossing over of the issues, but as a hard-won counter-reading to violence, which manifests itself in unspectacular gestures of autonomy (living alone, choosing one's own name, being able to love). The argument thus aims to liberate the book from the sphere of mere testimony and to understand it as a literarily sophisticated, formally reflective, and politically effective work, whose true radicalism lies in the assertion that rediscovering one's own words is identical to rediscovering one's own life.

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A Montaigne for now

Starting from the premise of the "textual mobility" of classical works, this review first outlines the extraordinary adaptability of Michel de Montaigne's Essays in modernity and the present day, drawing on interpretations by Michel Foucault, Antoine Compagnon, Tiphaine Samoyault, and current political appropriations. Against this backdrop, the edited volume "The International Reception of Michel de Montaigne's Essays: Forms, Interpretations, Conjunctures" (De Gruyter, 2026), edited by Olav Krämer, Andrea Grewe, and Susanne Schlünder, is presented, as it systematically documents this responsiveness for the first time from an international perspective. The review focuses particularly on those contributions that examine the reception of Montaigne in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as in contemporary philosophical and political discourses—for example, the studies on Flaubert, Nietzsche, Derrida, and the political instrumentalization of the skeptic. Thus, the volume appears less as a comprehensive overview than as a rich source of material for a history of modern appropriations of Montaigne, which confirms the thesis developed at the outset: The authority of the Essays does not rest on a fixed original text, but on its continuous variation, translation and ideological reinterpretation.

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Textual Mobility: Tiphaine Samoyault and her plea for an agonistic philology

The double review of Tiphaine Samoyault's books "Toutes sortes de Misérables" (2026, cited as TSM) and "Traduction et violence" (2020, cited as TEV) presents two different yet complementary approaches to the transformation of literary texts and uses their juxtaposition to discuss a fundamental shift in the understanding of literary works in academic studies: While TSM, based on the global reception and adaptation history of Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables," develops a theory of the classic as the result of incessant variation—the classic thus exists not despite, but because of its rewritings, abridgments, translations, and adaptations—TEV analyzes translation as a conflict-ridden act of cultural transformation that not only enables understanding but also reveals appropriation, the reduction of otherness, and political power relations; together, both studies lead to a consistently processual understanding of the literary text. The double review makes it clear that in both books, Samoyault undermines the notion of a stable, sovereign original and instead formulates a poetics of "textual mobility." In her analysis of the countless versions of characters like Cosette, she demonstrates that it is precisely the proliferation of variants that guarantees a work's cultural memorability, while her theory of translation replaces the seemingly harmonious discourse of cultural mediation with the concept of an "agonistic" translation that consciously preserves difference and friction. Taken together, variation thus appears as a twofold movement—on the one hand, as a survival strategy of the classic in cultural memory, and on the other, as a conflictual practice of linguistic and political negotiation. The double review therefore reads both books as theoretically intertwined interventions against a static concept of the work: literature does not arise from the immutability of an origin, but from the ongoing transformation through reading, adaptation, and translation. In doing so, Samoyault shifts the focus of literary studies from the authority of the original to the dynamics of its circulation in space and time, and calls for a philology that no longer attempts to fix "the one" text, but examines the processes by which texts change, multiply, and become effective in new historical and political constellations.

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Pascal Bruckner: the philosopher as son

In "Un bon fils" (2014, cited as BF) and his most recent book, "De mère inconnue" (2026, cited as MI), the nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner undertakes a twofold familial self-examination that can also be read as an intellectual biography. While BF portrays the violent and ideologically rigid father figure—an antisemitic and authoritarian man whose worldview both shaped the young Bruckner and forced him to distance himself—MI reconstructs the long-neglected story of his mother. The two books thus form a complementary diptych: on the one hand, the father as a symbol of a repressive, resentment-laden mindset; on the other, the enigmatic, sometimes absent mother, whose biography raises questions about origin, identity, and emotional heritage. Together, these autobiographical texts sketch a genealogy of Bruckner's intellectual self-positioning. The review demonstrates how central themes in Bruckner's essayistic publications can be explained by this familial constellation. His critique of Western ideology of guilt (in works such as "La tyrannie de la pénitence," "Le sanglot de l'homme blanc," and "Je souffre donc je suis") appears newly legible against the backdrop of his personal experience of guilt, authority, and moral self-examination. Similarly, his analysis of modern discourses on victimhood can be linked to his exploration of familial power dynamics and roles of victim. The review therefore argues that BF and MI are not merely autobiographical documents, but key texts for understanding Bruckner's work of ideological critique: in them, family history, moral reflection, and political essay writing intertwine to form an intellectual self-interpretation.

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Historical truth in the age of AI and identity politics: Jean-Frédéric Schaub

Jean-Frédéric Schaub's polemical essay, "Le passé ne s'invente pas" (The Past Does Not Invent Itself), positions historical scholarship as the last bastion against disinformation, digital manipulation, and identity politics of history. Against the backdrop of generative AI, political propaganda, and an anti-scientific relativism, Schaub develops a defense of historical truth that is both methodological and political: history, he argues, is not a literary genre but a science grounded in material traces, the core of which lies in the recognition of the "unavailability" of the past. This review traces how Schaub distinguishes himself from uchronic models such as Binet's "Civilizations," from narrative theories in the wake of Hayden White, and from "reparative" imaginaries—for example, those of Saidiya Hartman—while acknowledging authors like Patrick Modiano and his "Dora Bruder" as examples of a literary ethic of renunciation. At the heart of this discussion lies the question of whether enduring the gaps – rather than poetically filling them – truly represents the only legitimate form of epistemic justice. The review elucidates the internal logic of Schaub's argument, illuminates his critique of relativism and "ventriloquism," and discusses the extent to which his strict demarcation between science and literature is convincing in the age of hybrid forms – or whether it generates new tensions between factual accuracy and moral imagination.

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The cold language of files: How France managed its homosexuals: David Alliot

In "Les secrets de Sodome: un siècle et demi d'homosexualité clandestine" (Plon, 2025), David Alliot reconstructs the clandestine everyday life of homosexual men between 1830 and 1981, based on the archives of the Paris police prefecture. His approach is explicitly not apologetic, but analytical: from the "administrative coldness" of registers, surveillance reports, and raid protocols, he elucidates how the state and society monitored, classified, and morally pathologized a minority that, while formally no longer a crime since 1791, was culturally ostracized. Meeting places such as hôtels garnis, balls at the Magic City, or the Vespasiennes emerge as social micro-spaces where desire, fear, and control intersected. At the same time, individual biographies—from aristocrats to male prostitutes, from singers to activists—are freed from the anonymity of files. The result is a sweeping social history that traces the evolution of repression from monarchical ostracism through the biopolitical morality of the Third Republic and the discriminatory legislation of 1942, continuing under De Gaulle, to the watershed of 1981. Alliot shows that the abolition of the criminalization of "sodomy" by no means signified social acceptance, but rather gave way to an era of subtle surveillance in which identities were cataloged instead of acts being prosecuted. Only with the political upheaval under François Mitterrand did systematic police recording end; legal equality followed in 1982. But the book concludes with a sobering insight: rights are historically contingent—every crisis can reactivate the old reflexes of moral exclusion.

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1966 or the Birth of Our Present: Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon's "1966, année mirifique" (Gallimard, 2026) reconstructs the year 1966 not merely as a historical point in time, but as an epistemological turning point in French modernity. Drawing on the press, literature, theory, film, everyday objects, and political debates, Compagnon demonstrates how long-term trends converged in this year: the massification of universities, the rise of youth to the economic class, the breakthrough of consumer society, the canonization of theory and structuralism, and the entry of the Holocaust into the French collective memory. Figures such as Foucault, Barthes, Aragon, Malraux, and Sartre are presented less as isolated geniuses and more as symptomatic representatives of a profound transformation in which 19th-century humanism and the existentialist concept of meaning were replaced by systems thinking, semiotic logic, and technocratic rationality. 1966 thus appears as the true turning point between the old order and the new world: youth is integrated through consumption, culture becomes a commodity, theory the new currency of intellectuals, while the political explosions of 1968 are already structurally prepared. The review reads Compagnon's book as a genealogy of our present. It highlights his skeptical tone by interpreting the mass expansion of education described by Compagnon as the origin of today's "Potemkin universities," interpreting structuralism as an ideological precursor to an algorithmically managed world, and unmasking the youth culture of 1966 as the birth of the perfect consumer. 1966 is not only explained but also morally questioned. In doing so, it elucidates the book's internal logic—the replacement of meaning with system, of experience with sign, with an emphasis on loss, alienation, and long-term damage. The review also critically reflects on the book's blind spots, such as the male-dominated perspective and the marginal treatment of feminism, colonialism, and the gay rights movement. The review makes it clear that while the “epistemological revolution” of 1966 is brilliantly analyzed, its social and political scope is narrowed more than the complexity of the era would allow. Overall, the review reads Compagnon less as a chronicler of a miracle year than as an unintentional witness to a fateful turning point.

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Between armor and rift: Virility as myth, masculinity as experience

The volume "Masculinité" (Grasset, 2025) brings together literary texts, essays, and reflections that reveal masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as a historically fraught and currently fragile field. The starting point is the distinction between virilité and masculinité: while virility denotes the narrow, normative ideal of the tough, dominant, invulnerable man, the contributions show the contradictory experiences of real men who suffer under these expectations or fail to meet them. The texts tell of boys forced into rituals of toughness at an early age, of fathers who want to pass on strength and in doing so reproduce violence, of bodies shaped and marked by work, sports, circumcision, or migration, and of men who are crushed between cultural models of masculinity. In the introduction, Dantzig diagnoses masculinity as a historically overloaded power construct that simultaneously privileges and deforms, and whose dark sides—dominance, violence, destruction—must not be ignored. Habib-Rubinstein's presentation shifts this finding into literary practice, interpreting the volume as a laboratory of plural voices in which no new norm is established, but rather fragility, doubt, and exploratory movements are made visible. This creates a multi-voiced panorama of masculinity in transition: exhausted by the myth of virility, open to new, uncertain, and narratable forms of manhood.

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Loneliness of the Freelance Employee: Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun's "Pigiste au Monde" (Gallimard, 2026) reads like a walk through the corridors of a powerful newspaper—and simultaneously like the chronicle of a long, never entirely secure sense of belonging. From almost four decades of freelance work at Le Monde, Ben Jelloun doesn't craft a heroic narrative, but rather a portrait of a life "à la pige," characterized by both recognition and interchangeability. The pigist becomes an emblematic figure of structural precarity: present at the center of cultural power, yet without a fixed place within it. Le Monde appears as an ambivalent entity—both a democratic institution and a social microsystem—permeated by rituals, rivalries, and unspoken hierarchies. Ben Jelloun vividly depicts editorial scenes, literary lunches, power struggles, and loyalties as he traces his own path from literacy teacher to publishing intellectual, a journey always accompanied by physical tension and existential uncertainty. His reportage takes him to borderlands: to North African workers in the banlieues, to Mecca, to the Middle East on the brink of political turmoil. There, he writes not as a detached observer, but as a participant and witness – with a stance that understands objectivity as accuracy and honesty, not as neutralization. In the final third, the book condenses into a reflection on belonging and betrayal: Ben Jelloun's Arab-Muslim background opens doors for him, but also makes him vulnerable. Defamation following his Mecca report, political interventions, internal editorial resistance, and competition among Maghrebi authors demonstrate how fragile his position remains. He is constantly needed, but rarely fully acknowledged. From this tension, Ben Jelloun develops his central argument: for him, writing is the only reliable place of belonging – a space between journalism and literature where experience, empathy, and critique converge. “Pigiste au Monde” is such a powerful portrait of intellectual loneliness and a plea for a journalism that is aware of its power and does not deny it.

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Global Places, Shared Meanings: Olivier Wieviorka and Michel Winock

This review focuses on the edited volume "Les lieux mondiaux de l'Histoire de France" (Perrin, 2025), which explores how certain places become global points of reference and what cultural, literary, historical, and political meanings are concentrated in them. The volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions that analyze "places in the world" not only as geographical fixed points but also as dynamic spaces of memory, power, migration, and imagination. The review elucidates the volume's central theoretical premises, particularly the tension between local rootedness and the global circulation of meanings. It also discusses the methodological diversity of the contributions and their relevance to current debates in spatial theory and cultural studies. Special attention is paid to the extent to which "Les lieux mondiaux" opens up new perspectives on the symbolic construction of cosmopolitanism and what impulses the volume provides for literary studies' engagement with space, globalization, and cultural translation.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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