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Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault - the currency of these names in the world of modern thought is widespread. But all too often in the English-speaking world their work and ideas are considered without reference to the context in which they were produced, and this is the gap that this new study sets out to fill. The major revaluation of what constituted the 'political', set in train by the 1968 events is a key theme here, and the work of the best-known French intellectual figures of the time both illuminates and is illuminated by it. But it is not just a new reading of already familiar figures that the reader will find in this work. Writers little-known in the English-speaking world, or hitherto not extensively treated in English, receive similar contextualising attention, so that the recent upsurge in sociology or the impact of a dissident Marxist such as Henri Lefebvre take their place alongside better-known figures in the first book-length English-language survey of one of the most exciting, and often bewildering, periods in European intellectual history

This article examines the reasons why the label of film maudit is all too applicable to Jean Eustache's nowadays little-known masterpiece La Maman et la putain, offering a succinct overview of the director's career and the film as well as situating it within the time of its making and release and analysing its subsequent distributional vicissitudes. Along with a brief scrutiny of what exactly might be meant by the term film maudit, it offers an analysis of the reasons why the film's accessibility is so restricted and a summary of available (and not-so-available) secondary sources dealing with it.

This article looks at representations of the banlieue in the cinema of the 1930s – a period before the term banlieue was synonymous with deprivation and violence as, especially since Matthieu Kassowitz's 1995 film La Haine, it has subsequently tended to become. The work of Claude Autant-Lara and Maurice Lehmann ( Fric-Frac, Circonstances atténuantes) and that of Anatole Litvak ( Cœur de Lilas) receive close attention along with two more widely known films, Marcel Carné's tragic Le Jour se lève, whose banlieue is topographically unsituated but could well be Parisian, and Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne where the countryside near Paris provides the setting for two bucolic idylls that offer a different, less grim view of the banlieue than that nowadays current.

Gabrielle Russier's persecution by the French state and its apparatuses for her love affair with a much younger male pupil, culminating in her suicide in 1969, is a now largely forgotten but still important part of the history of 1968 and its aftermath. The article retraces the affaire and its reproductions (which include a feature film starring Annie Girardot), and considers its implications for questions of power, desire, privacy, policing and the role of the educational institution. Would a new affaire Russier be possible today? How would it be differently treated in Britain or the US, and what questions does this raise about different social and institutional determinants in these countries?

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945. Entries include: * advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading. The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

The multiple impact of the May 1968 events in France is here reviewed and analysed, initially through a narrative account of the events themselves and then through a systematic survey of the various manners in which they have been interpreted and reproduced in France. This covers successively political, social/sociological, and cultural texts - first-hand accounts along with works by political activists and academic social scientists - before moving to a consideration of fictional works (novels and feature films) dealing with or set during the events