Journaliste à France Culture entre 2000 et 2011, il a rejoint Mediapart en mai 2011. Joseph Confavreux est membre du comité de rédaction de la revue Vacarme, a codirigé le livre La France invisible (La Découverte, 2006) et a publié deux autres ouvrages, Egypte :histoire, société, culture (La Découverte, 2009), et Passés à l'ennemi, des rangs de l'armée française aux maquis Viet-Minh (Tallandier, 2014). Il est aussi co-rédacteur en chef de la Revue du Crieur.
Declaration of interest
In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
France's far-right Front National party won a quarter of the popular vote in May's European elections, albeit on a low turnout, as xenophobic, nationalist parties across Europe made significant gains. The result seemed to vindicate FN president Marine Le Pen's strategy of trying to change the party's image, shedding the anti-Semitism of the past and donning a cloak of respectability. But in a detailed history of the Front National published last month, researcher Valérie Igounet shows that the new image is just a veneer that cracks whenever the ghosts of the party's past rear their heads. Meanwhile the party has simply replaced Jews with Muslims as the principal target of its attacks. Igounet explains her findings to Mediapart’s Joseph Confavreux and Marine Turchi.
As of the late 18th century, artists began depicting war as a disastrous event rather than a glorious one, when the horrors of the battlefield and the destruction of environments began gradually replacing majesty and heroics. The long evolution of this trend to its dominant position in the present day is illustrated in ‘The Disasters of War, 1800-2014’, an exhibition now on at the Louvre-Lens, in north-east France, and which will last until the autumn. Joseph Confavreux takes a tour of the show.
Belgian political thinker, historian and award-winning writer David Van Reybrouck believes that France has the most ossified political system in Western Europe, a “paternalistic republic invented by Charles de Gaulle as if he were presiding over a Sunday lunch” and in conflict with major societal trends. In this interview with Joseph Confavreux, one of a series presenting foreign commentators’ views on French society, Van Reybrouck says that in France “you can vote or demonstrate, but there’s not much in between”. He says the country would do well to look with interest - “rather than condescension” - at recent democratic innovations in smaller countries like Belgium, Ireland or Iceland.
France's local elections in March were a débâcle for President François Hollande's socialist government, resulting in a reshuffle and the appointment of a new prime minister, Manuel Valls. But the current disaffection with politics runs even deeper. Both the Left and the Right are divided, high unemployment persists, the economy is flat and the far-right Front National has made electoral gains. How does all this appear from the outside? Mediapart's Joseph Confavreux interviewed American academic Todd Shepard, an expert on modern French history, who believes that France's colonial past is still shaping its present, and not for the better.
An unprecedented exhibition dedicated to the history, practices, aesthetics and influence of ‘paparazzi’ photography has opened at the Centre Pompidou annex in Metz, eastern France. It presents more than 100 years of pictures by paparazzi, their tricks of the trade and the stylistic inspiration their work has had on artists. Joseph Confavreux takes a tour of the show and hears the opinions of two paparazzi, one of whom bagged the infamous photos revealing President François Hollande’s secret meetings with the actress Julie Gayet.
Twenty years ago the Zapatista movement in Mexico symbolised a rejection of capitalism that was later to feed into the global justice movement. However the prevailing mood in the West at the time was that fundamental change to the capitalist structure of society had become unimaginable. Then came the financial crisis of 2008, which caused a major re-think among many intellectuals and activists. Now French historian Jérôme Baschet has drawn on personal knowledge of the Zapatista movement for a new book in which he describes potential routes to a post-capitalist society. Joseph Confavreux reviews 'Farewell to capitalism'.
Just as New Caledonia, the furthest-flung French territory, is about to embark on the final steps for self-determination, the Quai Branly museum in Paris has timely put together a rich and wide-ranging exhibition of the art and culture of the archipelago’s indigenous Kanak population that reveals a people debunking 160 years of colonialism and redefining themselves. Joseph Confavreux outlines the political context of the show, and calls on anthropologist Alban Bensa, an authority on Kanak culture, to decode the exhibition’s vast array of exhibits.
French President François Hollande has seen his popularity plummet over recent months, and not only because of the enduring economic and social hardships of the financial crisis; his government’s policies have come under attack as muddled and ill-thought out, and its recent U-turns highlight a perceived lack of clear and coherent political vision. For some of his critics, Hollande is paying the price of his longstanding reticence to develop policies in close consultation with expert academic researchers and thinkers. “Hollande as president reaps what he did not sow when he was First Secretary of the Socialist Party,” commented one academic. Lénaïg Bredoux and Joseph Confavreux report on how Hollande's approach to policy making, in stark contrast to some of his allies, has favoured pragmatism over intellectual theorizing.
In a bid to regain its lost competitive advantage on the world stage, France has just set out an ambitious plan for revitalising its industrial base. Coincidentally a recently-published book takes a critical look at the real costs of the country's last drive to modernise, during the so-called 'Thirty Glorious Years' of the post-war period. Its authors argue that, contrary to received wisdom, human and environmental concerns were sacrificed on the altar of an all-out quest for productivity during that period, while dissenting voices were silenced. Joseph Confavreux reviews the book.
The French cinema industry has some of the world’s highest-paid stars and largest film budgets, but is losing money hand over fist. The paradox is explained by a system of public subsidies paid to make films whatever their box office appeal. Even for those which prove a popular success, the enormous production costs are hardly ever recovered. The subsidies paid to the French film industry are part of a complex system that its supporters say has allowed it, over many decades, to maintain a rich production while other national cinema industries in Europe have faded. Its critics argue it is a perverse and outdated economic model. In this interview with Joseph Confavreux, the sociologist Olivier Alexandre, a specialist in the history of modern French cinema, analyses how the system works and weighs up the arguments for and against.
A remarkable book written by four young men has highlighted the reality of life on one of France's many impoverished and neglected housing estates. The work, which began as a writing project with their community worker, and which combines tragic insight with flashes of great humour, tackles issues of education, the police, drugs, prison and even the role of history among the writers and their friends. But, as Joseph Confavreux reports, perhaps the major achievement of 'Nous...La cité' ('We...the estate') is that it has taught four young men from a run-down area the power of the written word.
Following the creation of an independent Greece in 1830, the country’s administration has been significantly shaped by European models, while its cultural, religious and historical heritage, along with its geographical situation, have given the country, the first European state to have emerged from the Ottoman Empire, an exceptional political and economic destiny. In this interview with Joseph Confavreux, Geneva-based historian Dimitri Skopelitis offers a historical insight into the nature of the current turmoil in Greece, tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, its future within the European Union still uncertain, and the complex relationship between the population and the State.
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Marine Vlahovic, retrouvée morte lundi dernier, avait 39 ans. Voix talentueuse d’Arte Radio et de France Culture, elle avait aussi signé plusieurs papiers pour Mediapart, notamment sur la Palestine. Son énergie manquera à Gaza et son rire à ses ami·es.
Jeudi 14 novembre, la Revue du Crieur, publie son 25ème et dernier numéro, après presque dix années d'existence consacrées à enquêter sur les idées et la culture. Le moment de compléter votre collection en lisant notamment un dossier exceptionnel consacré à la « Solitude de Gaza ».
Le podcast culturel de critique hebdomadaire de Mediapart reprend ses émissions ce dimanche 25 septembre, parce que le service public se désintéresse toujours plus des voix critiques et que la concentration des industries culturelles continue de vouloir les étouffer.
Le n° 19 de la « Revue du crieur » sort ce jeudi 14 octobre en librairies et Relay, et tente, à l’amorce d’une campagne présidentielle inquiétante, de déverrouiller un imaginaire national fossilisé. Il explore aussi les dérives du CNRS, la planète E-Girl, l’itinéraire du chercheur Bernard Rougier ou encore l’héritage de Simone de Beauvoir.
