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Articles on French literature

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Dans cette édition illustrée de La cousine Bette (1948), l'héroïne célibataire a les traits durs, la mine sévère et triste. Editions Albert Guillot, Paris 1948.

How Balzac created the myth of the spinster

In his collection of stories, “The Human Comedy”, the French 19th-century writer Honoré de Balzac turned the shaming of single women into an art.
‘Lamartine rejects the red flag in front of the town hall,’ a painting by Henri Félix Philippoteaux (1815–1884), captures a seminal moment in the second French Revolution in Paris in 1848, when revolutionaries demanded human and civil rights. (Les Musées de la ville de Paris)

Note to Québec’s premier: French is the language of human rights, not xenophobia

French has historically been a language of human rights. That’s why the Québec government should promote it as a tool of a human rights-based civic education, not force it on newcomers.
Marcel Proust on a French postage stamp. Shutterstock

When Marcel Proust talks physics

From electricity to X-rays, the Doppler Effect and even quantum theory, Proust’s writing is littered with physics references.
‘I want to produce such an impression of utter weariness and ennui that my readers will imagine the book could only have been written by a cretin,’ Flaubert wrote. Photo by Nadar / ullstein bild via Getty Images

We’re living in the bizarre world that Flaubert envisioned

Is a 19th-century French author’s cosmic joke turning into a real-life global nightmare?

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