Europe’s wealthiest individual, Bernard Arnault, is head of luxury goods empire LVMH — and has a lot to lose from a spiraling global trade war. His reported direct line to the Trump administration shows how the superrich are working to defend their billions.
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
Removing border checks between many European states, the Schengen Area is often hailed as an internationalist triumph. Yet its creation went hand in hand with the tightening of Europe’s external borders — a contradiction that is hardening today.
After 1945, France produced an extraordinary wave of social theorists whose influence is still felt today. In his final work, Fredric Jameson discussed the excitement of watching this wave rise and fall and the conditions that made it possible.
In the 1980s, François Mitterrand brought the French Socialists to power. A generation later, they’re in danger of extinction — and they brought it upon themselves.
For years, Emmanuel Macron has worked to get rid of the 35-hour workweek and worker protections from unfair dismissal. Today, his government is using the coronavirus lockdown as a pretext to push ahead with this agenda — and allow bosses to unilaterally undermine labor conditions.
Rising inflation doesn’t affect everyone equally. The way this current bout of inflation is playing out isn’t a law of nature but a result of political decisions to protect investors while hanging workers out to dry.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon has long sought to rally blue-collar voters he labels “fed up, not fascists.” Yet his movement has faced an uphill battle countering disaffection with politics — and the growing media dominance of far-right talking points.
150 years since the Paris Commune, the militants who built the world's first working-class government are often commemorated as martyrs rather than taken seriously as revolutionaries. Yet in the years after 1871, socialists sought to draw practical lessons from this experience — and build the organizations that could turn the Commune's promise into lasting social change.
Many thought the Parti de gauche would reinvigorate the French left. Why has the effort failed?
Emmanuel Macron says it’s time to “pacify” tensions over his pension reform — yet today’s mobilization looks to be the biggest yet. France Insoumise’s Manon Aubry told Jacobin how the movement is challenging Macron’s antidemocratic way of governing.
This winter France has seen the biggest strike wave in decades, as workers resist planned pension reforms. As Communist MP André Chassaigne told us, the strikers aren’t just opposing Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal policies — they’re fighting to save the French social model itself.
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
The establishment’s panicked reaction to Mélenchon should convince us that he stands a real chance of winning.
Right-wingers often hail Edmund Burke as a founding father of modern conservatism. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is based on fear of the mob — and a racialized worldview that blames Jews for upsetting the “natural” social order.
At his funeral last week, former European Union chief Jacques Delors was hailed as a left-wing architect of the EU. But far from realizing the Left’s hopes for a “social Europe,” in the 1990s Delors built a new European order in thrall to free-market dogmas.
Don’t count right-wing populism out. While technocrats have seen their fortunes rise under lockdown, the sense of national decline and disarray that first brought leaders like Donald Trump to power still has a bright future.
It’s 2017. Time to stop worrying about the questions of 1917.
Annie Ernaux’s recently translated book, Getting Lost, chronicles her passionate love affair with a married man. What makes Ernaux’s reflections so refreshing is her rejection of the idea that literature’s job is to provide readers with moral instruction.
France’s Socialist Party has announced Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo as its candidate to take back the presidency. Yet far from reconnecting with working-class voters, her candidacy illustrates how France’s established parties have lost their roots.