Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

The leftist philosopher-orator Mélenchon is famous for his firebrand speeches

Mélenchon has a knack for improvisation on the campaign trail and appears at ease when he veers into unchartered territory. Even his fiercest critics acknowledge he’s an excellent orator: Mélenchon has a booming voice, an excellent sense of pace, a depth of historical and literary references at his disposal, and a masterful command of language – including an ability to deliver pithy one-liners against his foes

This is not a book by a politician like the others (neither the politician nor the book). It is not just another 'what I believe', nor a programme, but a compilation of concrete and theoretical reflections on the world as it is and as it should be. In many ways, Now, the People! is a little treatise for the new revolutionary.

It is as a "people's tribune" that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is proposing "a global deciphering", in order to understand why and how, now that the world has become "unsustainable", we need to move towards a "change of civilisation".

His pages on the importance of cities and networks in raising political awareness, on the eruption of the gilets jaunes, the movement against pension reform and the revolt in the neighbourhoods that would herald the "citizens' revolution", or his plea for "alterglobalist diplomacy", will inevitably generate controversy. We hope that they will rise to the level of the arguments presented here.

Jean Luc Mélenchon is not just a great politician who has reinvented the French left and given it incredible strength. He is also an original and visionary theorist who, like Jean Jaurès, thinks politics through as much as he engages in it.

Mélenchon, a leader of the French radical left once described by the Washington Post as “France’s Bernie Sanders,” proposes a new kind of revolution against capitalism suited for our present moment—what he calls “a citizen’s revolution.

A paean to people power, carrying its readers from the earliest human societies to the fractured, anxious France of the 21st century.

As its French title (“faites mieux,” or “do better”) makes clear, this is the work of someone reflecting on his legacy. Mélenchon isn’t just taking stock of his accomplishments and outlining his vision of the world. He is thinking about how to pass the baton to younger generations.

A philosophical treatise crossed with a manual on how to trigger a revolution.