Antoine Perraud

All his articles

• The Jewish deportees of the cité Lesage-Bullourde

  France

  

  Mediapart’s Paris offices, in the capital’s 11th arrondissement, sit above the former site of the cité Lesage-Bullourde, an insalubrious cluster of inhabited buildings and industrial workshops that were demolished in the early 1960s. That prompted Antoine Perraud to delve into the history of the Cité, the foundations of which date back to the end of the 18th century, in a four-part series of articles. Here he focuses on the period of the Second World War, and the German occupation of France, when the Cité’s Jewish population, many of whom had already fled persecution, were rounded up by French police and deported to Nazi death camps.

  13 August 2023

  by Antoine Perraud

• The Russian mathematician relentlessly persecuted by Putin's henchmen

  Europe

  

  Russian mathematician Azat Miftakhov, serving a six-year sentence in a penal colony for supposed vandalism, is in principle eligible for release in September. But Russia’s security services, the FSB, are preparing a new case against him, using the false testimony of individuals under torture, this time for supposed terrorist activities. In this report by Antoine Perraud, two Russian anarchists exiled in France recount their ordeals at the hands of the Kremlin regime.

  19 March 2023

  by Antoine Perraud

• Academic warns of dangers of 'simple solutions' as Macron tacks right on law and order

  France — Interview

  

  Through his appointment of the tough-talking Gérald Darmanin as interior minister, President Emmanuel Macron has shown himself to be a conservative on law and order issues, following in the footsteps of former president Nicolas Sarkozy. The French Left, meanwhile, which is wary of once again being portrayed as “soft” on crime, is showing signs of wanting to set its own agenda on the issue ahead of the 2022 presidential election. Against this backdrop Mediapart's Antoine Perraud spoke to political scientist Jacques de Maillard, an expert on the police and on law and order issues, about the fight against crime and the effectiveness of statistics. The academic warns against the “perverse effects” of focusing too narrowly on crime figures and of the dangers of proclaiming “simple solutions” to what are complex issues.

  18 September 2020

  by Antoine Perraud

• Zeev Sternhell: the historian whose work on French fascism caused academic uproar

  France

  

  The Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, who died on June 21st, aged 85, and who spent some of his early years in France before moving to Israel, was one of the pre-eminent experts on fascism in the world of academia. His renowned 1983 work 'Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France' - published in English as 'Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France' – caused major controversy among French scholars because of his contention that French fascism was a real phenomenon with ideological roots in the society and culture of France. Antoine Perraud looks back on his extraordinary life and work.  

  24 June 2020

  by Antoine Perraud

• Georgette Elgey, historian and chronicler of French politics

  Culture et idées — Interview

  

  The French historian, writer and former journalist Georgette Elgey died in Paris this week at the age of 90. She is best known for her exhaustive, six-volume history of France’s Fourth Republic, Histoire de la IVe République, a monumental account of the system of government in France between 1946 and 1958, of which the first volume was published in 1965 and the last in 2012. In 2017, Elgey, who was close to many of those who shaped French politics over the past six decades, gave an insightful interview about her work to Mediapart, republished here.  

  11 October 2019

  by François Bonnet, Fabien Escalona and Antoine Perraud

• Life in the time of Brexit: an English village divided

  France — Report

  

  In the well-heeled village of Widdington in rural Essex in eastern England, the residents are in a state of inner turmoil. Like the rest of the country this small community is pondering the issue of Brexit – which now faces a new deadline of the end of October 2019 – with passionate, engaging and ultimately irreconcilable arguments. Antoine Perraud reports.

  26 April 2019

  by Antoine Perraud

• John Berger the writer who changed how we look at things: a view from Paris

  France — Analysis

  The celebrated British art critic and writer John Berger has died in Paris at the age of 90. Mediapart's Antoine Perraud says that his work as a thinker and writer has helped change the way we look not just at art but the whole world around us. Here is his appreciation of Berger's life and work.

  4 January 2017

  by Antoine Perraud

  Free access

• The fearless, peerless French lawyer who chronicled the Nazi Occupation

  Culture et idées

  

  Maurice Garçon was a celebrated lawyer, essayist, novelist, gifted amateur artist and historian who was ultimately elected to the illustrious Académie Française. But Garçon also kept a diary during World War II, including France's Occupation by the Nazis. This recently-published journal reveals an apolitical, solitary, contradictory man who loathed Hitler and the collaborationist Vichy regime in France, but who also disdained Charles de Gaulle and who remained fiercely independent in his views throughout the duration of the conflict. Here Mediapart's Antoine Perraud examines the revealing insights of this eccentric but perceptive character into how French society coped with one of the bleakest episodes in the country's history.

  19 June 2015

  by Antoine Perraud

• Uncovered: the neurosis of Prince Philip, made in France

  France — Analysis

  

  The British Queen Elizabeth II is in France for the D-Day commemorations, in what may prove to be her last trip to the country. At her side as usual – or rather, two paces behind – is her consort Prince Philip. Mediapart's Antoine Perraud takes a look at Philip's close connections with France as a child and comes up with a theory about why the gaffe-prone consort behaves and talks as he does. According to this theory Prince Philip has sought – not always entirely successfully – to suppress his colourful and varied family roots in order to conform to the demands of the British monarchy. And now, argues Perraud, Prince Philip has himself become a symbol of a once diverse and dynamic Europe that has lost its way.

  6 June 2014

  by Antoine Perraud

• Mandela's lesson of force and finesse

  International — Video

  

  The death of Nelson Mandela, figurehead of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and who became the country's first black president, is being mourned around the world. His disappearance on Thursday, at the age of 95, amid heightened tension over next year’s parliamentary elections, now leaves the ideals of the Rainbow Nation that succeeded the apartheid regime under threat. Here, Mediapart’s Antoine Perraud pays a personal tribute to a man whose unusual combination of force, fraternity and finesse hoisted him to a political and moral highground. But he begins by underlining the role humour also played in overturning a regime of hate.

  5 December 2013

  by Antoine Perraud

• 'Show us respect and equality': filmmaker, feminist Samia Chala on why France must look in the mirror and lift the veil ban

  International — Interview

  

  Since its introduction in April 2011, a French law banning the ‘concealment of the face’ in public has been received by a section of France’s practicing Muslims, estimated to total about two million people, as an act of discrimination and provocation, for it above all targets the wearing of the Muslim veil. Documentary-maker Samia Chala (pictured) settled in France in the 1990s after fleeing the Islamist-led civil war in her native Algeria in the 1990s. In this interview with Rachida El Azzouzi and Antoine Perraud, this self-proclaimed feminist and “mauler of Islamists” explains her outrage at a law that prohibits a basic freedom and which, she argues, does nothing but to further stigmatize an already largely alienated population of North African origin. “I am doing nothing other than sounding an alarm," says Chala. “If we don’t stop this escalation, there will be a clash. And what a clash!”

  22 November 2013

  by Rachida El Azzouzi and Antoine Perraud

• The Vichy deportation camp that is a 'permanent stain' on France

  France — Interview

  A senior figure in the Socialist Party has angrily criticised French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti for allegedly snubbing Rivesaltes, a former internment and deportation camp in southern France which is set to become a memorial in 2015, during a recent trip to the area. The culture minister has dismissed the claims as 'absurd'. To understand the importance of the memorial site behind this political squabble, Mediapart asked historian Denis Peschanski to describe the political and historical issues at stake in a camp that revives some of the worst memories of the Second World War in France. Antoine Perraud reports.

  22 September 2013

  by Antoine Perraud