Antoine Perraud

All his articles

• The overseas artist who captured the essence of a long-vanished rural France

  Culture et idées

  

  Artist Nicolas Rubió spent his childhood and early adulthood in France when he and his family were refugees from Franco's Spain. Later he emigrated to Argentina, but the memories of his time in deepest rural France have continued to serve as an inspiration for his paintings, which bring to life an era that has now disappeared. An assuming but impressive documentary on the man and his art is now doing a tour of France. Antoine Perraud reports. 

  13 July 2013

  by Antoine Perraud

• Death of Pierre Mauroy – the conscience of French socialism

  France — Video

  

  Pierre Mauroy, who has died aged 84 after battling lung cancer, became in 1981 the first socialist prime minister under France's Fifth Republic. For many the man with working class roots from the north of the country epitomised both a deeply-felt and a pragmatic form of socialism. Mediapart's Antoine Perraud assesses the life of a politician who oversaw radical reforms in one of the most eventful periods of modern French politics.

  7 June 2013

  by Antoine Perraud

• Jérôme Savary, the man who brought joyous hullabaloo to French theatre

  France — Video

  

  The death was announced this week of celebrated French theatre director and actor Jérôme Savary (pictured), who was aged 70. One of the most influential stage directors of post-war France, Savary, who was born in Argentina, is credited with having widened the popular appeal of theatre, notably with the colourful and hilarious performances of his Grand Magic Circus company. In his latter life, he headed the prestigious Théâtre national de Chaillot and the Opéra-Comique. Here, Mediapart’s cultural affairs writer Antoine Perraud pays his own tribute to a prolific icon of French theatre.

  6 March 2013

  by Antoine Perraud

• What future for France’s House of History?

  France — Analysis

  

  Plans for a Maison d'histoire de France were unveiled by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to a storm of protests, including criticism from many historians. Opponents feared that a museum focussed squarely on France's history would become a political vehicle as Sarkozy sought to use the issue of “national identity” in France to boost his appeal with the voters. But now that the museum's chief supporter has gone, the project appears to have gained in respectability among its former detractors. Antoine Perraud wonders what lies ahead for this once deeply controversial museum.

  2 June 2012

  by Antoine Perraud

• Songtime in Paris

  France — Video

  

  Paris is arguably the most sung about city in the world and now, for the first time in its history, an exhibition in sound and picture has been dedicated to the hundreds of songs and ballads about the capital reaching all the way back to the 16th century. Illustrating the enduring crush of generations of musicians for Paname, the popular nickname for Paris recurrent in 20th-century songs, the show is mirrored on an internet site that offers a virtual singing tour of the capital. Antoine Perraud reports.

  14 April 2012

  by Antoine Perraud

• De Gaulle's vision of Europe, relayed by Fischer, lies slaughtered by sharks

  International — Opinion

  

  Amid the spectre of the euro collapsing as the debt crisis deepens, the words of General Charles de Gaulle, one of the original protagonists of pan-European cooperation, have a prophetic ring. "Do we, or do we not, want the Common Market to be supplemented by a political organisation without which economic construction will ultimately decline?" he asked in 1962. Antoine Perraud argues that it is time to rediscover de Gaulle's vision of a Europe united by political action and not finance, a vision that was paradoxically later championed not by the General's so-called political heirs in France, but by German Green Joschka Fischer.

  8 December 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

• The history of a red thread that linked blacks and Jews

  Culture et idées

  

  In her recently-published book Causes communes (Common causes), French social anthropologist Nicole Lapierre traces the extraordinary stories of 20th-century blacks and Jews who made the causes of other peoples their own. "Running through their stories is the red thread of the communist ideal of a society stripped of inequalities and racism, on which a great many Jews and many blacks had pinned their hopes," writes Lapierre. Antoine Perraud reviews the work and presents selected portraits of those who braved danger and opprobrium by fighting for the rights of others.

  3 December 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

• French writer Tereska Torrès, unlikely icon of lesbian pulp fiction, dies aged 92

  France — Video

  

  French writer Tereska Torrès (pictured), best-known in the English-speaking world for her novel Women’s Barracks, has died in Paris at the age of 92, her family and friends announced on Monday. Torrès, whose death occurred on September 20th, was the author of 14 books, the first written when she was just 17 years-old, many of them translated into English by her second husband, the late US writer and journalist Meyer Levin. Born in Paris as Tereska Szwarc to Jewish Polish artist parents, Torrès fled to London in 1940 to escape the German occupation of France, where she enrolled in the Free French Forces and married a French Resistance fighter, Georges Torrès, who was killed in battle in 1944. Perhaps the strangest chapter in her eventful life was how her book about her experiences as a woman soldier in wartime London, Women’s Barracks, became a bestseller and a pillar of lesbian pulp fiction. Last year, Torrès produced a new version in French, when Antoine Perraud interviewed her about her multiple lives and extraordinary relationships, which we republish here.

  18 August 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

  Free access

• The writing's on the wall for the election debate ahead

  France — Opinion

  

  The French presidential elections are now less than a year away, and official campaigning will begin in earnest this autumn. A slightly tongue-in-cheek Antoine Perraud, proving that a journalist is never at rest even while travelling the Paris Metro, sees a message behind the station ads that points to the tone of the political debate ahead.

  19 July 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

• Anything but civil: Vichy's servants of persecution

  France — Video

  The painful history of the Vichy administration's collaboration with the Nazi occupation continues to fascinate even the younger generation of French historians. In a recently-published book, Laurent Joly, 34, details how France's public servants became the tools of the persecution and deportation of French Jews, divided into two separate administratiive bodies that were major cogs in the process of the Holocaust. He talks here to Antoine Perraud about those who formed a monstrous machine.

  10 June 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

• Libido dominandi

  France — Opinion

  The prosecution of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, replete with a whopping litany of criminal charges, spotlights in the worst way - violence and worldwide voyeurism - what France has never been able to face squarely: the nation's connivance in what are conventionally blue-pencilled as the frasques, or ‘escapades', of its political personnel, writes Antoine Perraud.

  3 June 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

  Free access

• Racism and sport, a sorry story of modern times

  France — Opinion

  Mediapart's revelations about how officials at the French Football Federation planned to introduce an ethnic quota at its national training academies led to a huge controversy in France and abroad, the public excuses of those involved in the plan and led to two official enquiries. Above all, it sparked a wider debate about prejudice and discrimination in sport which, on an international level, only truly embraced multi-racialism in the final decade of the 20th century. Antoine Perraud charts how theories of racial supremacy have long poisoned sport which, he argues here, has become a supplementary vehicle for racist ideologies, beginning with those of the founder of the modern Olympic games, Pierre de Coubertin.

  14 May 2011

  by Antoine Perraud

  Free access