A Seat on the Banks of the Seine Four Centuries of French History

Amin Maalouf recounts the lives and adventures of the eighteen people who have held the twenty-ninth seat of the Académie Française since 1634, bringing to life four centuries of French history in a tangible, embodied form. It is a “myth of the ages” from a seat. The first person to occupy this seat drowned in the Seine, Montherlin committed suicide in his apartment overlooking the Seine, and the Academy itself is located in a small enclosure on the banks of the Seine, between the Louvre and the Quai de Conti: it is a unity of space from which history unfolds in its successive stages. The power of kings and cardinals, nobles and negotiators, the growing or diminishing influence of philosophers and scientists, the influence of poets, librettists, playwrights and novelists, the many faces of glory that tell us about different eras in the history of the French nation. This book sheds new light on the controversy over the play “Le Monsieur” and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Fronde and the sexual movement, the expulsion of the Jesuits and the emergence of Freemasonry, the French Revolution of 1789, the rebellion of the 12 Vendémières and the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire, the Second French Empire, the war of 1870, the Paris Commune, and the invention of anesthesia. National funerals, the Dreyfus Affair, and the great wars of the twentieth century… Starting from just a seat, from a fragile and warm place of memory overlooking the banks of the Seine, Amin Maalouf invites us to rediscover the endurance and transformations of our “national genius.”