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“... for the monarchy. The son, Jacques, married into another upper-middle-class French family, the Georges-Picots; in 1920, his journalistic activities brought him into close touch with the heavy industry employers’ association (the Comité des Forges), and with the iron and steel-making lineage of the de Wendels. In 1922, the granddaughter, May ...”

“... a dance favoured by the Peruvian working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics. It isn’t hard to see why it appealed to her, musically and thematically. She had always been good at milking nostalgia – ‘chanson’ itself is a wistful genre – and the plaintive, rhythmic accordion and ...”

“... has Louis-Napoleon as a key player in a necessary process of ‘modernisation’ (roughly where Michel Carmona stands) or as a star figure in the creation of ‘the city as a work of art’ (the title of Donald Olsen’s book on the subject, published in 1988). Aesthetics were not Louis-Napoleon’s strong point. In the eclectic medley of Second Empire ...”

“... new attention to Surrealists who rebelled against their controlling impresario, André Breton: Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in ...”

“... one’s reverence, as one goes, to Verlaine, to Sainte-Beuve, to Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Georges Sand, all sitting there on pedestals as if the purpose of literature were to look down upon the world. My favourite statuary in the Luxembourg is dedicated to Frédéric Chopin. Whoever designed it was a miracle of discretion, because the artist himself ...”

“... In​ L’Age d’homme, his early excursion into autobiography, Michel Leiris recalls his mother warning him to beware of ‘bad people’ in the Bois de Boulogne. He imagined the predators in the woods to be ‘satyrs’, and later, cannibals: he had been struck by an exotic colour illustration in Le Pêle-Mêle, a humorous weekly, of ‘savages’ eating an explorer ...”

“... in favour of the integration of France and Algeria. Most important of all, the Prime Minister, Michel Debré, and his entourage, were prodigal with their assurances that the President would never even contemplate abandoning Algeria. After the anti-de Gaulle rising of 1960, known as the affaire des barricades, the General decided to change the minister in ...”

“... credits: a device, as André Bazin noted, that Robert Bresson borrowed for his 1951 adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Melville’s early films were bookish, and rather talky. But in the early 1960s he began to hone back his dialogue. The first seven minutes of Le Samouraï (1967), in which Alain Delon plays the hitman Jef ...”

“... letters pile up, so do the bodies. At one point or another he deems such critics and artists as Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu, Yves Klein and Simon Hantaï, not to mention all the Angry Young Men, ‘apolitical and fascistic’, and even the once-recruited Spur artists are soon dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. Sentiments ...”

“... or playing with them?Pan-Africanists, like the negrophiliac Surrealists and sousréalistes (Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and the Documents group), deployed Africa against the imperial metropole, but Baker was being put to the opposite use. She was picked as queen of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, whose display of ...”

“... tainted by its compromise with the Stalinists, has never attracted even such radical thinkers as Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, who are consistent in their democratic views. There was a similar reaction from many journalists, who, despite their left-wing opinions, were profoundly hostile to the PCF: they included those working for the daily ...”

“... supporters of Giscard d’Estaing were panic-stricken and rumours spread rapidly across France. Michel Poniatowski, a former interior minister, warned that within days Russian tanks would be rolling through the streets of Paris. Pundits predicted that the stock exchange would collapse and leaders of the right lamented the impending collectivisation of the ...”

“... to his favourite place in Paris, the Bibliothèque nationale. When he got there he gave them to Georges Bataille, a head librarian there, for safekeeping. Hours before the German army entered Paris with an order to arrest him, Benjamin left the city with ‘nothing but a gas mask and my toiletries’. What happened next – the attempted escape by way of ...”

“... The historian of madness Michel Foucault found and published in 1974 an upbeat first-person account of his crime written by a 19th-century French murderer: Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et monfrère ..., a statement precious, in Foucauldian terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness ...”

“... votes in the 1956 elections and by 1958 weren’t even in a position to contest the elections. Michel Rocard became prime minister after Mitterrand had been elected President. He formed a government and sent a letter to each of his ministers setting out their tasks and their methods of work. It was said that this recalled Mendès France, and the manner in ...”