Amin Maalouf recounts the lives and adventures of the eighteen people who have held the twenty-ninth seat of the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise since 1634, bringing to life four centuries of French history in a tangible, embodied form. It is a \u201cmyth of the ages\u201d 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 \u201cLe Monsieur\u201d 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 Vend\u00e9mi\u00e8res and the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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