Lecture Series

A great way to stay connected to France, Europe, topics relating to the French speaking world as well as the relations between France and the US!

In the past we have presented several writers and journalists from world renowned newspapers to come speak to audiences in Atlanta about French media concerns and French-American relations. In the fall 2004, we presented both Claude Imbert From Le Point and Jacques Julliard from Le Nouvel Observateur.  In Winter 2007, we have also presented Dueling Cartoonist : Plantu from Le Monde and Mike Luckovich 1995 & 2006 Pulitzer Prizes winner editorial cartoonist from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Most of our lectures are available online at Atlanta Forum Network. Search word "Alliance Francaise".

UPCOMING LECTURES

May 15th at 7pm  Goethe Institute

Christopher Thompson - "Giants of the Road" or Dopers ? The Contested Heroism of Tour de France Racers

Christopher Thompson was born in Morocco in 1959 and raised in Africa, Europe and the United States.  Educated during his childhood and adolescence in French schools in Algeria and Belgium, he went on to study at Harvard University (B.A. in French Literature) and Middlebury College (M.A. in French).  After a five-year career in secondary education, he enrolled at New York University where he earned an M.A. in French Studies and a Ph.D. in French Studies and Modern European History.  His dissertation on the social, cultural, and political history of cycling under the Third Republic earned him the Outstanding Dissertation Prize in 1997.  Now in his eleventh year at Ball State University in Indiana, he is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the History M.A. Program.

Christopher Thompson’s research on the social and cultural history of French cycling seeks to integrate the history of sport into broader themes of modern French history—to use sport as a means of generating fresh insights about key moments and developments in France’s tumultuous twentieth century.  These include the World Wars, class and gender issues, public health debates, and a variety of hopes and fears sparked by modernity.  Professor Thompson’s original approach has been rewarded by prestigious grants (a Chateaubriand Scholarship from the French government and a Summer Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities).  His scholarship has been published in leading academic journals in Germany and France, as well as in English-language publications, and culminated recently in the publication of his first book, The Tour de France: A Cultural History (University of California Press, 2006), which has already attracted considerable positive attention from both academic and mainstream reviewers.

Lecture Topic: "Giants of the Road" or Dopers ? The Contested Heroism of Tour de France Racers

From the first Tour de France in 1903 the race's participants have been celebrated as heroic "giants of the road" whose exceptional courage and perseverance in the face of great suffering would inspire a nation repeatedly confronted throughout the twentieth century with challenges to its survival.  The grueling physical and psychological conditions of the Tour and the racers' status as national heroes also placed them at the center of French debates about work and class.  In the polarized politics of pre-World War II France, those debates were shaped by competing images of the racers.  Some commentators extolled Tour racers as respectable, self-disciplined "pedal workers" whose uncomplaining acceptance of arduous working conditions, if emulated by industrial workers nationwide, would defuse class conflict.  Other observers, on the contrary, pitied Tour racers as "slave laborers" whose ferocious exploitation by the Tour's organizers and commercial sponsors replicated the widespread exploitation of workers in French factories, and whose resistance against inhumane racing conditions might inspire a broader revolt by France's proletariat against industrial capitalism.

After World War II, although images of the racers as model workers and slave laborers were rarely revived, Tour racers continued to feature prominently in French debates about working conditions and workers' rights.  The central issue now was the racers' longstanding but increasingly sophisticated practice of illicit performance-enhancing doping.  This practice has had important implications for the racer's century-old image as "giants of the road."  Simply put, can racers who dope be heroic?

PREVIOUS LECTURES

April 4th, 2008 at 7pm Alliance Française d'Atlanta

ANTOINE SFEIR - Islam and Islamism

Antoine Sfeir is a journalist, managing editor of the journal Les Cahiers de l’Orient, a review of Asian politics, and he has been president of the Center on Near Eastern Studies since 1990.

He has contributed to the magazines La Croix and L’Express, as well as to several reviews such as Esprit and Etudes. He teaches at the University of Paris’s School for Advanced Studies of Information Sciences (CELSA) and lectures at the Institute for Advanced Studies of National Defense (IHEDN), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (IHESS), and the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations. (INALCO).

He is also the author of a series of studies on the Arab region which were created for the French government (Defense Ministry and Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

He is the author of a number of books on different religions (God, Yahweh, Allah, Important Questions on the Three Religions, 100 Answers to Children’s Real Questions, Bayard Children 2004), on Islam and Islamism (notably, the Paths of Allah, Plon 2001); on communitarianism and secularism (with René Andrau, Freedom, Equality, Islam, published by Tallandier 2005); as well as books on the Middle East (with Nicole Bacharan, Americans, Arabs: the Confrontation, published by Seuil, 2006, and Toward a Complicated Orient, Grasset 2006).

LECTURE TOPIC: Islam and Islamisms

All over the world Islam is the subject of tensions that the media brings to light daily. Islamic terrorism, Iraqi guerrillas, demands for the charia to be applied, etc. At the same time, certain commentators explain that this religion is more problematic than any other because it is less reconcilable with modernity. So, one question remains for us: Are these judgments well founded?

The number of Muslims is estimated at more than one billion, with Arabs making up less than 20 percent. They have in common the belief in just one god (Allah), a prophet (Muhammad) and a holy book (the Koran). Born in the seventh century, this religion includes one powerful concept, that of the “oumma” (the community of believers), which is essential for better understanding and defining the current situation.

Antoine Sfeir then proposes to deflate these concepts and to return to the sources, to the Koran and to history in order to understand to what extent Islamism is not Islam, far from the confusion too often bandied about. What’s more, he will show by studying various existing currents, that there isn’t one Islamism but, rather, there are many.

This lecture is organized with the support of the Délégation générale de l’Alliance Francaise  aux Etats-Unis

April 11, 2008 at 7pm Alliance Française d'Atlanta

Jean-Louis Chiflet - Thirty Years of Humor and Peadagogy in the Life of a Happy French Publisher

Jean-Louis Chiflet was born in Lyon in 1942. Following law school and a year spent in New Orleans to perfect his English, he joined the Hachette publishing group in 1967 as head of the foreign rights department before being named director of the international encyclopedia department.

In 1981, he started a publishing consulting firm, and in 1982 he became director of the international division of the Larousse publishing group. In 1985 he founded an editorial packaging company, Bookmaker, which he ran till 1995. After having done concept work and management of humor books for such publishers as Laffont, Payot, and Mango, he founded his own publishing house in 2005, Chiflet and Co.

But Jean-Loup Chiflet is not only a publisher, he is also the author of over fifty humorous books on language, the most famous of which is Sky My Husband! (Ciel mon mari!), published in 1985. After this book, which sold over 300,000 copies and pilloried the amusing literal differences between the French and English languages, Jean-Loup Chiflet devoted himself to tracking down, whether in his own books or in the ones he was publishing, the strangeness and eccentricities of the French language. With his playful yet donnish denouncements of the difficulties of language, he has made for himself a solid reputation as a “rogue grammarian.” Jean-Loup Chiflet has also adapted and translated into French cartoons from The New Yorker. He has also been a reporter for France Inter and regularly publishes editorials in Figaro Madame.
Lectures

LECTURE TOPIC: Thirty Years of Humor and Pedagogy in the Life of a Happy French Publisher

Everything started in 1985, when, as director of the international division of a large French publisher, I published a little book to amuse my friends Sky my Husband/Ciel mon mari. This was a small tome with two hundred phrases playing with the ambiguities between French and English; immediate success, 300,000 copies sold. It had behind it the simple principle that “les carottes sont cuites” is not translated by “the carrots are cooked,” but by “the die is cast.” With the great reactions from teachers of English who thereby discovered that you can laugh and teach at the same time, I gained acceptance, little by little, as a fun-loving cultural commentator. As author or publisher, I perpetuated the dissemination of some sixty of these kinds of books: an impertinent French grammar, having fun with arithmetic, English grammar (“I’m Learning English with the Queen,” modern latin: Ad aeroportum! in which one discovers that at the Vatican there’s this surreal dictionary of contemporary words like jazz (nigritarum musica) or McDonald’s (Filius Donaldi), etc.

Other interesting subjects would include how to teach literature by imagining sequels to the classics. I’ll talk as well about the famous French exception, or, rather, about certain exceptions which make our language one of the most difficult ones in the world. We will also skim through such insolent French books as the famous works from the early 20th century having to do with good manners.

This lecture is organized with the support of the Délégation générale de l’Alliance Francaise  aux Etats-Unis