Bøger af Eric Hazan

Exploring Paris arm in arm with Balzac, nineteenth-century France’s most famous novelist and observer

How the French invented the barricade,and its symbolic impact on popular protests throughout historyIn the history of European revolutions, the barricade stands as a glorious emblem. Its symbolic importance arises principally from the barricades of Eric Hazan's native Paris, where they were instrumental in the revolts of the nineteenth century, helping to shape the political life of a continent. The barricade was always a makeshift construction (the word derives from barrique or barrel), and in working-class districts these ersatz fortifications could spread like wildfire. They doubled as a stage, from which insurgents could harangue soldiers and subvert their allegiance. Their symbolic power persisted into May 1968 and, more recently, the Occupy movements. Hazan traces the many stages in the barricade's evolution, from the Wars of Religion through to the Paris Commune, drawing on the work of thinkers throughout the periods examined to illustrate and bring to life the violent practicalities of revolutionary uprising.

Almost forty years after the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, scenes from everyday life in the West Bank remain rare and fragmented in the West. Despite its prominence in world news, surprisingly little is known about daily life in this troubled land. Yet with the publication of former President Jimmy Carter's controversial new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, it has become clear that an unvarnished view of Palestinian life is an essential prerequisite to peace. In Notes on the Occupation, critic and intellectual Eric Hazan provides crucial insight into life in the occupied state.The result of a monthlong visit to the region during the summer of 2006, including visits to Nablus, Qalqilyah, and Hebron, Hazan's eloquent account reveals the complex and devastating impact of the occupation.With an introduction by celebrated Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi and an epilogue by activist Michel Warschawski, Notes on the Occupation is a rare portrait of a population living with the reality of war and the dream of peace.

A bold new history of the French Revolution from the standpoint of the peasants, workers, women and sans culottesThe assault on the Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Danton mocking his executioner, Robespierre dispensing a fearful justice, and the archetypal gadfly Maratthe events and figures of the French Revolution have exercised a hold on the historical imagination for more than 200 years. It has been a template for heroic insurrection and, to more conservative minds, a cautionary tale. In the hands of Eric Hazan, author of The Invention of Paris, the revolution becomes a rational and pure struggle for emancipation. In this new history, the first significant account of the French Revolution in over twenty years, Hazan maintains that it fundamentally changed the Western worldfor the better. Looking at history from the bottom up, providing an account of working people and peasants, Hazan asks, how did they see their opportunities? What were they fighting for? What was the Terror and could it be justified? And how was the revolution stopped in its tracks? The People's History of the French Revolution is a vivid retelling of events, bringing them to life with a multitude of voices. Only in this way, by understanding the desires and demands of the lower classes, can the revolutionary bloodshed and the implacable will of a man such as Robespierre be truly understood.

The Invention of Paris is a tour through the streets and history of the French capital under the guidance of radical Parisian author and publisher Eric Hazan. Hazan reveals a city whose squares echo with the riots, rebellions and revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining the raconteur's ear for a story with a historian's command of the facts, he introduces an incomparable cast of characters: the literati, the philosophers and the artists—Balzac, Baudelaire, Blanqui, Flaubert, Hugo, Maney, and Proust, of course; but also Doisneau, Nerval and Rousseau. It is a Paris dyed a deep red in its convictions. It is haunted and vitalized by the history of the barricades, which Hazan retells in rich detail. The Invention of Paris opens a window on the forgotten byways of the capital's vibrant and bloody past, revealing the city in striking new colors.

Eric Hazan and Kamo, arguing against the political right and left, in the form of twentieth-century communism, provide a radical manual for the aftermath of a regime's demise.