Should the French anti-tax protesters known as the Bonnets Rouges be considered members of the right or the left?

Are they just mad as hell, or have they been co-opted?

And if they are being manipulated, then by whom? Have they been Le Penned from the right? Mélenchonized from the...

It's a very edifying story.

For months, if not years, people in France and abroad have been trying to prove that Marine Le Pen has not changed as much as she would have us believe.

Her platform and her positions have been decoded.

Her friendships, her bonds, with far-right parties...

The most striking and, in a sense, the most terrible aspect of the interminable tragedy of which Lampedusa has become the symbol is the indifference with which we, the citizens of affluent Europe, are handling it.

Yes, our heads of state last week put it on the agenda of...

Sarajevo. The tenth anniversary of the death of Alija Izetbegovic. As was the case 10 years ago, when President Jacques Chirac asked me to head the French delegation at the former Bosnian president's funeral, I delivered the commemorative address.

Before the assembled audience, before the friends and family of...

If France's journalists are to follow the advice of the National Front and give up the disagreeable habit of describing the party and its leader, Marine Le Pen, as belonging to the "extreme right" (imagine!), it would be helpful if:

• Said leader, when deciding in the midst of a...

The scene is Zola's house in Médan.

Forty kilometers from Paris, on the pretty grounds that he called his "desert," the big house, flanked by two towers, where he wrote much of his cycle of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart.

There, as every year on the first Sunday in October, the "friends...

It was the black hole of the second half of the 20th century. The most forgotten of its forgotten wars.

It was one act in a three-act tragedy that, from Bosnia to Kosovo, and from Libya and Syria, unfolded according to the same invariable scenario.

And it was a...

Benny Lévy was my friend.

A friend whom I first met in the late 1960s in the shadow of Louis Althusser.

A friend with whom I reconnected 30 years later, when I published Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, a book that ended with a restaging of the last...

Fino a lunedì, quando ho scritto questo articolo, non c'era alcun dubbio sulle provenienza dei colpi sparati nelle periferie di Damasco lo scorso mercoledì, colpi che hanno segnato il primo massacro di civili mediante armi chimiche, in una guerra che va avanti da due anni e mezzo. A parte la...

As of Monday, when I wrote this column, there was no real doubt about the provenance of the shots fired last Wednesday in the suburbs of Damascus, shots that marked the first massacre of civilians by chemical weapons in a war that has raged for two and a half years....

Last Tuesday (August 20) in Ankara, Turkey's prime minister, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made a startling statement. He claimed to have "proof" that "Israel and a Jewish intellectual" were responsible for the Egyptian military's removal from power of President Mohamed Morsi. When asked about the identity of the intellectual in...

Over the summer I had a chance to reread Picasso's Mask by Malraux ("La Tête d'obsidienne," 1974).

And in this late text, in those pages that one feels are haunted, like Hôtes de Passage and Lazarus, by approaching death, I read the last four chapters, in which he discusses his...

In Egypt, one thing is certain: radical Islam has been discredited. It has proven its inability to begin to build a state and to set the groundwork for economic and social development. What about the plan for a moderate Islamist government, the idea of an Islamist succession that would not...

A month back, I devoted a column to the defense of the "cultural exception" that France has mounted against the steamroller of the anarcho-capitalist concept of culture practiced by the United States.

Today, it is the same cultural exception that I wish to discuss, the same obligation to...

Bashing may be the latest form of politics in France, as it has been for some time in the United States. Yesterday, François Hollande. The day before yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy. Today, Aurélie Filippetti, who, in a few short weeks has somehow become "one-of-the-worst-culture-ministers-of-recent-decades." Coming from predecessors who themselves are facing...

Truth. It's the only thing that really counts for philosophers, of course, but also for painters and other artists. For the two and a half millennia that the issue of truth has been around, three major hypotheses -- or rather three plus one more, a newer arrival -- have vied...

I love America.

And I detest anti-Americanism, that latter-day form of socialism for imbeciles (the original having centered on anti-Semitism) against which I have been fighting for 30 years. I am one of the many Europeans who know that, without American culture, there would be no great literature of the...

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...