Monday, October 25, 7:00 p.m. Florence Gould Event
French Literature in the Making
Novelist; author of Insecte; Dessous c’est l’enfer; Les Cris.
Claire Castillon dropped out of the university to pursue her dream of writing. At age 25, she published her first novel, Le grenier (2000), and has since published almost a novel a year. In 2004, she won the Grand Prix Thyde Monnier for Vous parler d'elle. Her other works include: La reine Claude (2002); InsecteMy Mother Never Dies (2006)--which was translated into over 12 languages and published in English as (2009); On n'empêche pas un petit coeur d'aimerDessous, c'est l'enfer (2008); and, most recently, Les cris (2010). In 2005, she took part in the "litté-réalité" experiment, 48h au Lutetia, in which she and seven writers were locked in the Hôtel Lutetia for 48 hours in order to produce a short story on the theme of sleep. in conversation with OLIVIER BARROT
Writer, journalist, Un Livre un jour (France 3)
In French. Presented with the additional support of Sofitel, Open Skies,CulturesFrance, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy
Tuesday, October 26, 7:00 p.m. A Florence Gould Event
Alan Riding was for twelve years the European cultural correspondent for The New York Times. He was previously bureau chief for the Times in Paris, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City.
And the Show Went On: The Cultural Life of Nazi Occupied Paris
In the weeks after the Germans captured Paris, theaters, opera houses, and nightclubs reopened to occupiers and French citizens alike, and they remained open for the duration of the war. Alan Riding introduces a pageant of twentieth-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist. We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf
singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies in Paris studios (more than two hundred were produced during this time). We see that pro-Fascist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Robert Brasillach flourished, but also that Camus’s The Stranger was published and Sartre’s play No Exit was first performed ten days before the Normandy landings. Based on exhaustive research and extensive interviews, And the Show Went On sheds a clarifying light on a protean and problematic era in twentieth-century European cultural history.
Co-sponsored by the Overseas Press Club of America
Wednesday, October 27, 7:00 p.m. Institute of French Studies Colloquium RUTH HARRIS
Oxford University; author of Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (Metropolitan Books, 2010)
The Dreyfus Affair: Beyond the Orthodoxy
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island. Over the following years, attempts to correct this injustice tore France apart. But how did a fairly obscure miscarriage
of justice come to break up families in bitterness, set off
anti-Semitic riots across the French empire, and nearly trigger a coup d'état? How did a violently reactionary, obscurantist attitude become so powerful in a country that saw itself as the home of enlightenment? Why did the battle over a junior army officer occupy the foremost writers and philosophers of the age? What drove the anti-Dreyfusards to persist in their efforts even after it became clear that much of the prosecution's evidence was faked?
Drawing upon thousands of previously unread and unconsidered sources, Ruth Harris offers the first in-depth history of both sides in the Affair, showing how complex interlocking influences—tensions within the military, the clashing demands of justice and nationalism, and a tangled web of friendships and family connections—shaped both the coalition working to free Dreyfus and the formidable alliances seeking to protect the reputation of the army that had convicted him.