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. 

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

Until July 14th you can get up to 50% off ALL our books. See ALL our Summer Reading here.

Not Your Average Tour Guide:

Eric Hazan is a true parigot. As well as guiding us through the city as it is, he is full of ideas for what it could be. What if we transformed the deserted Bourse into a large public library? Or blew up the Hôtel-Dieu and the police headquarters, that ‘ugly building full of bad memories’, and built a new district in its place.

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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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A History of the Barricade

by Eric Hazan

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...

A Walk Through Paris

by Eric Hazan

Translated by David Fernbach

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...

Paris in Turmoil

by Eric Hazan

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...

The Invention of Paris

by Eric Hazan

Translated by David Fernbach

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...

A People's History of the French Revolution

by Eric Hazan

Translated by David Fernbach

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...

War and Revolution

by Domenico Losurdo

Translated by Gregory Elliott

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...

The French Revolution 1789-1799, Vol 1

by Albert Soboul

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

by Albert Soboul

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...

Rethinking the French Revolution

by George C. Comninel

Foreword by George Rudé

Historians generally—and Marxists in particular—have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal ...

Madness and Revolution

by Élisabeth Roudinesco

Translated by Martin Thom

‘An impure Joan of Arc’ or ‘a radiant Penthesilea’—Theroigne de Mericourt remains one of the most misrepresented figures of the French revolution. Theroigne loved the Revolution; she refused the ro...

The History of the Paris Commune of 1871

by Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray

Preface by Eric Hazan

Translated by Eleanor Marx

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...

Communal Luxury

by Kristin Ross

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...

The Last Communard

by Gavin Bowd

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

by Kristin Ross

Foreword by Terry Eagleton

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...

Revolution

by Enzo Traverso

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...

Future Histories

by Lizzie O'Shea

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...

The Word From Paris

by John Sturrock

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

by José Guilherme Merquior

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

by Chantal Jaquet

Translated by Gregory Elliott

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...

An Event, Perhaps

by Peter Salmon

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...

The Adventure of French Philosophy

by Alain Badiou

Edited by Bruno Bosteels

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...

On Ideology

by Louis Althusser

Translated by Ben Brewster

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...

For the Muslims

by Edwy Plenel

Translated by David Fernbach

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...

Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us

by Joseph Andras

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

by Elaine Mokhtefi

Introduction by Jeremy Harding

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...

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