"I’ve heard it said that for alcoholics like me, there are only four possibilities: prison, the psychiatric ward, death or sobriety. I didn't go to jail, but did end up at the police station, in a drunk tank. The psychiatric hospital? I was there for a week, it was shocking. Death? I came close to it several times. I've come a long way, a very long way. But today I've come out of it and I'm totally clean." Drowning in Alcohol is the rare story of a young woman who had everything going for ...

"Dear Mr. Müller, A friend of my sister's advised me to write to you, saying that you could help me return to France. My father took my sister and me to Algeria and left us there against our will. He left, taking our identity cards and passports with him. I cannot live in Algeria. My dearest wish is to return to France and be reunited with my mother and little sister." Thirty years later, Patricia looks back on her painful past: the kidnapping, the three years of confinement in Algeria wit...

For some, Péguy is “an anarchist who put holy water in his oil”; for others, a dangerous rebel whose “head is full of revolution”. A socialist and a Catholic, a pious poet and a raging polemicist, Péguy turns out to be a man with a sometimes chaotic, always leaping journey. Few authors have had such a controversial posterity as he. One hundred years after his death, it is time to do justice to this unclassifiable thinker, little known in his time, and who has so much to say in ours. Yves R...

1.8 million people are directly affected by psychiatry in France. 350,000 are in hospital. For every 1,000 inhabitants, there is one compulsory hospitalization. Yet this system, which generates social exclusion and stigmatization, dominates. Admitted at the age of 16, Christelle Rosar was hospitalized for twenty years. They tied her down, injected her with drugs, and kept her in a vegetative state. She saw patients who remained in hospital from adolescence until their death, and others who...

At once strange and familiar, bearer of a narrative and initiator of a relationship, the theatrical object has a status in its own right within the performance, and constantly encourages the actor to reassess the quality of his relationship with his immediate environment. This book proposes to turn our attention to a specific type of object: the “technical” object, i.e. the technological apparatus, now digital, as it is put into play on contemporary theatrical stages. More than an exhausti...

On July 13, 2001, in Hassi Messaoud, an oil-rich town in southern Algeria, following virulent preaching by the imam, about 500 men assaulted and tortured some 50 women during a raid to inflict punishment. Public humiliation, family scorn, silence from the foreign press and fear of reprisals followed this nightmarish experience, which most of the victims chose to forget. But some women refused to forget and demanded that the culprits face punishment - Rahmouna Salah and Fatiha Maamoura foug...

A student union recently estimated that “40,000 students are now prostitutes in France.” The primary cause is the growing precariousness and high cost of student life. This study, carried out in 2006-2007, is a vivid description of the novelty of this form of prostitution. It is practiced discreetly, occasionally, independently, via the Internet, mainly by young female students who call themselves “escorts.” The book’s findings are twofold. While student prostitution is first and foremost ...

Delphine was 4 years old when her hell began. "We always promised each other, my Mom and I, that we would not talk about it anymore, that it was over. Except that after this promise, which I never broke, I had many bad times to go through. I was always trying to find out why I felt so bad about myself, why the fear of dying came over me again, as in childhood. I gradually became aware that this feeling of uneasiness probably came from the drifting in and out of hospitals that I had experie...

"I am Mathilde, alias Mathilda. I am 37 years old and I prostitute myself to be a free woman. I have been an executive assistant, a sales manager in media, a communication manager for an employers' confederation and a company director in business aviation. But I was a precarious woman, being used for a low price, like a great majority of women in France. In parallel to my work activities, I became an escort to get out of my social condition and not be a free and disposable object anymore. ...

How can we interrogate Sartre's thought, which embraced philosophy, the novel, theater and the century, and tied conceptual adventure to political commitment? How can we dust off Sartre's clichés? In what way are we heirs to the new way of philosophizing that he instigated, to this new way of posing problems? In other words, in what way is Sartre our contemporary? This essay sets out to answer these questions through an original line of inquiry, confronting Sartre's philosophy of the oppos...

"We have to fight for Down's syndrome. People see people with Down's syndrome as abnormal. Those who make fun of me, I ignore. Period. That's how I feel as a Down's sufferer. You have to say to yourself: 'I've got more chromosomes than them.'" When Éléonore was born, the doctors considered her a "chromosomal aberration" and urged her parents not to get attached to her. With Down's syndrome and a heart defect, they gave her little chance of survival. Twenty-eight years later, Éléonore is mo...

This is the story of a little majorette from Vendée who, starting from nothing, juggled two sticks, then three, then seven, and became world juggling champion in Las Vegas. It's also the story of a child, then an abused woman, who clings to this art with such strength and virtuosity that she goes on to work non-stop in the world's greatest cabarets. Shy, solitary and trapped in an unbearable sense of unease, Françoise flings her sticks before the astonished eyes of the audience in order to...