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.
The name Timbuktu has taken on an almost mythical status in Western thought, one fuelled by the remoteness of the town in Mali. In destroying tombs recently in this “pearl of the desert” an Islamist group has both launched an attack on the holy sites of other Muslims and thrown down a challenge to the West, who recently put the famous town on the UNESCO list of endangered World Heritage sites. In an interview with Joseph Confavreux, French historian Charles Grémont gives the background to current events in Mali and the threat posed to Timbuktu.
France’s blue collar workers, junior white-collar staff, the unemployed and the retired make up a lower class that is also the majority among the country’s electorate. Hit hardest by the current economic crisis, and largely ignored by the traditional Left, there are consistent indicators that a significant proportion is being won over by the Far Right Front National party presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen. In this interview with Mediapart, social geographer Christophe Guilluy offers an insight into an economic and social groundshift in France that has produced an abandoned and despairing category of the population, what he calls “a new lower class which the Left does not really understand”.
A major work just published in France charts the rich and very diverse history of the country's black population from the late 17th century to current times. "We wanted to make this history a visible one, with all the markers of grand history", explains historian Pascal Blanchard, editor of La France noire, trois siècles de présence, (‘Black France, a presence over three centuries'). The book blows away many social myths, and fills the deafening silence of traditional teaching that ignores the place of black people in the making of the history of France. Here, Blanchard tells Joseph Confavreux how he and his team approached this ambitious project and comments for Mediapart a series of documents contained in the work.
The definition of what constitutes virility has evolved through the centuries. "Virility is not synonymous with masculinity and it is not defined only in opposition to femininity," says French historian Alain Corbin, one of the authors of a work of three volumes just published in France entitled The History of Virility, a unique, encyclopedia-like series totalling 1,500 pages. Here, he and four other contributors to this monumental study decipher for Mediapart, through nine images spanning 26 centuries, the many faces of the virile male.
The Grand Palais in Paris is hosting an exceptional exhibition of major modern artworks from the widely scattered collection of the celebrated Stein family of art patrons who settled in the French capital from the US in the early 20th century. The stunning show of works by Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse (photo), Manguin and Bonnard - to name but a few - is the fruit of five years of dogged detective work by specialists in France and from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Joseph Confavreux talks to the team behind this unprecedented worldwide treasure hunt.
Should literary plagiarism still be an issue, let alone a scandal, in our digital day and age? Back in Shakespeare's day, before the cult of individual genius and the fetishized book, authorship was a loose and often collective concept. The parallels between the literary conventions of the pre-Romantic past and writing online, ‘after the book', in an age of cut-and-paste, are the subject of two books just published in France, one by professor Roger Chartier and the other by writer François Bon, and which are set to cause a heated debate. Joseph Confavreux examines the arguments for what could be the new paradigm for the 21st-centry digital author, or which might just be much ado about nothing.
The Apostolic Vatican Library may be far from having revealed all its secrets, but two intrepid scholars have recently made an astounding find there; that of the long-lost and secretly hidden manuscript of the Ethics, the magnum opus of 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (pictured), considered to be one of the most important works of one of the most significant figures in Western philosophy. Joseph Canfavreux reports.
La soubrette is an evocative term for French maids rooted in 19th-century French bourgeois culture whereby female domestics were also, both in fantasy and reality, a wealthy household's sexual servant. Camille Favre, an expert in 19th- and 20th- century erotic literature in France, tells Joseph Confavreux how the soubrette became a figure of eroticism and pornography, and the social practices that lay behind the image.
During an appearance before New York's Supreme Court on Monday, former IMF chief and French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss-Kahn entered a plea of ‘not guilty' to charges that he sexually assaulted and attempted to rape a maid at a Manhattan hotel. Whatever the outcome of the case, for which Strauss-Kahn is next due in court on July 18th, it has already sparked a passionate national debate in France over what many see as a compliant culture towards the abusive behaviour of men in power. Here, Joseph Confavreux interviews one of France's leading specialists in moral and sexual harassment, the US-trained psychiatrist Marie-France Hirigoyen (photo), who explains why she believes there will be "a before and an after DSK" effect on French public attitudes to a problem until now taboo.
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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.
