Strange the way History hesitates, stutters, takes shape, speeds up and, suddenly, crystalizes.

For the past ten years, we've put up with everything from Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

We tolerated the arrest of journalists and intellectuals, the reign of the arbitrary, and terror as an everyday occurrence.

We tolerated the closing...

If I were German, I probably wouldn't be favorably inclined towards Angela Merkel and her government.

And it is very likely that Ms Merkel, as much as Germany in general, is responsible to a scarcely negligible degree for the interminable crisis that is rocking Europe.

But there are ways of...

The honor of Muslims is the Syria that stands up, doubly insurgent, fighting on two fronts: that of a dictatorship that has become insane, killing with a vengeance (conservative estimates, at least 80,000 dead), and that of political Islamism, represented within the rebellion by the Al Nosra jihadi front, an...

To begin with, one mustn't fall into the trap of football as a generator, in and of itself, of violence and destruction, of murderous hooliganism and of bullheadedly vulgar, stupid and chauvinistic behavior. God knows it's not a religion I follow, and I have always been indifferent to these affairs...

In Mali, the French army is winning an exemplary war.

It is saving a friendly country that was about to fall under the law of those who are expert in stoning and the amputation of hands.

In so doing, it is smashing the connection they had begun to establish...

Marc Roussel is a photographer. But really a photographer. Not an image hunter, image taker, click clack, cell phone, I was there, I saw the light of something, went inside and took a shot. No, a photographer in the old sense of the word. A photographer from the days when...

In the middle of the '70s, when I was just starting out, a singular, miraculously independent magazine called Artpress first appeared in Paris.

Catherine Millet, who was not yet the internationally renowned novelist she has become, was at the helm as its director.

Jacques Henric, her companion, who...

The gay marriage debate has taken an odd and worrisome turn.

I will not waste time on the pious hypocrites who seem nostalgic for the good old days of deviant, outlawed homosexuality when gays and lesbians did not aspire to be "normal," nor on the condescension shown by those right-wing...

I like Arnaud Montebourg.

I like his Kouchnerian style of expressing himself, high-pitched, rapid-fire, that always gives one the impression he's running after the lost object of his sentence.

I like his cheeky humor, his chutzpah, and, when he decides to wax (overwax?) eloquent on protecting the nation, the...

Poor Greece!

There was a time, at the beginning of the 19th century, when all that Europe counted as artists, poets, and great thinkers, from Chateaubriand to Byron in Missolonghi, from Berlioz and Delacroix and Pushkin to the young Victor Hugo, rushed to the aid of Greece, actively campaigning...

The head of the French State took a decisive step with regard to Syria during his press conference of November 13th.

Thus, in his words, France has recognized the Syrian Coalition, the result of the meeting in Doha and the unification of various elements of the resistance to Bashar...

Co-written with Jacques Bérès, Mario Bettati, André Glucksmann and Bernard Kouchner

The barbarian Assad gang and the Islamic extremists are the enemies of Syria's democratic future. They are the enemies of peace in the Middle East. They are our enemies. When the contention began in Deraa, in March 2011,...

Can it be that, in 2012, in Paris, an important book by a very important author is passing under the radar of public opinion?

Judging by the press's reaction to Jean-Claude Milner's latest text, Malaise dans la peinture (A Malaise in Painting), published by Editions Ophrys last June, that seems...

The new antisemitism has arrived.

For a long time now, some of us have seen it coming.

But this time it's here, and in no uncertain terms, with its combat cells, its symbolic figures, its small-time hoods and its heavies who have made the easy transition from gangsterism...

I am amazed at the tone of the press in the wake of the first of the three scheduled debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Not that Romney wasn't, indeed, better than expected.

And not that Obama did not appear strangely on the defensive, ill prepared and not...

Given the current state of things, why is the matter of Qatar's investment in the French suburbs so problematic?

Not because it's Qatar, of course.

Nor, even less, because it's an Arab country, the very nature of whose funds would be less welcome than those of others.

And,...

Indeed, history has more imagination than men do.

It is Friday, September 21st.

The burning, global-wide topic of the hour is the demonstrations of hatred from one end of the Arab-Muslim world to the other, on the pretext of a despicable anti-Islamic "film."

Everywhere, talk is exclusively of...

Last week's demonstrations in the Arab Muslim world have already cost lives, many lives, beginning with that of American Ambassador Stevens, a friend of Libya and architect of its liberation.

They have made another collateral victim, and what a victim, since it's a matter of the Syrian people in...

If Europe does not become a political entity, the euro will disappear.

This disappearance can take a number of forms and go through several detours.

It may be an explosion, an implosion, slow death, a dissolution, or a division.

It may take two, three, five, ten years, preceded by...

Strangely enough, what I find most shocking in this Richard Millet affair (this editor at Editions Gallimard who caused a scandal in Paris by publishing "Eloge litteraire de Anders Breivik") is not the white trash racism he recycles, from one book to the next, in his story of the RER,...