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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  • 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...
    Paperback

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  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
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  • 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...
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  • 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...
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  • 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...
    Paperback
  • 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...
    Hardback
  • 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...
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  • 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...
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  • 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...
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  • 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...

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