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France’s Philosopher-Presidents  

Emmanuel Macron’s recent eight-hour debate with dozens of academics follows a long line of French leaders who champion intellectual discourse. But you can’t read your way out of a crisis.



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Duck Unchained  

Equal parts muckraking journalism and biting satire, the print-only, century-old French newspaper Le Canard enchaîné represents one of the most remarkable stories in modern journalism.



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France: Seeds of a New Green Left?  

Amid disenchantment with mainstream politics, tensions between Socialists and Greens, and a string of disappointments from outgoing president François Hollande, activists known as zadistes have taken the defense of the environment into their own hands—and met formidable police repression.



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The French Left Divided  

This summer, France’s Socialist government quashed the country’s largest wave of strikes of protests in a generation to impose a drastic overhaul of French labor law, revealing deeper fault lines in the process.