Animal Farm is an allegorical novella by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. The book tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, however, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.
Christine de Pizan or Pisan, born Cristina da Pizzano, was a poet and author at the court of King Charles VI of France. She is best remembered for defending women in The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies. Venetian by birth, Christine was a prominent moralist and political thinker in medieval France. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold, and John the Fearless. Her books of advice to princesses, princes, and knights remained in print until the 16th century.
Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, and dramas in verse and prose.
Gabriel Naudé was a French librarian and scholar. He was a prolific writer who produced works on many subjects including politics, religion, history and the supernatural. An influential work on library science was the 1627 book Advice on Establishing a Library. Naudé was later able to put into practice all the ideas he put forth in Advice, when he was given the opportunity to build and maintain the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin.
Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.
Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin was a French politician, a champion of the working classes who was forced into exile after the failure of the French Revolution of 1848.
Supremacism is an ideology which holds that a certain class of people is superior to others, and that it should be or is entitled to dominate, control, subjugate, and/or eliminate others. The supposed superior people can be of a certain age, belong to a particular race, species, or ethnicity, practice a particular religion, be of a particular gender, be of a particular sexuality, speak, read, and/or write a particular language, belong to a particular social class, believe in a particular ideology, live in a particular nation, practice a particular culture, or belong to any other part of a particular population.
The historiography of the French Revolution stretches back over two hundred years, as commentators and historians have sought to answer questions regarding the origins of the Revolution, and its meaning and effects. By the year 2000, many historians were saying that the field of the French Revolution was in intellectual disarray. The old model or paradigm focusing on class conflict has been challenged but no new explanatory model had gained widespread support. Nevertheless, there persists a very widespread agreement to the effect that the French Revolution was the watershed between the premodern and modern eras of Western history.
Joan of Arc (1412–1431) was formally canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church on 16 May 1920 by Pope Benedict XV in his bull Divina disponente, which concluded the canonization process that the Sacred Congregation of Rites instigated after a petition of 1869 of the French Catholic hierarchy. Although pro-English clergy had Joan burnt at the stake for heresy in 1431, she was rehabilitated in 1456 after a posthumous retrial. Subsequently, she became a folk saint among French Catholics and soldiers inspired by her story of being commanded by God to fight for France against England. Many French regimes encouraged her cult, and the Third Republic was sympathetic to the canonization petition prior to the 1905 separation of church and state.
The Tuileries Palace was a royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine. It was the usual Parisian residence of most French monarchs, from Henry IV to Napoleon III, until it was burned by the Paris Commune in 1871.
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Arthur Buchwald was an American humorist best known for his column in The Washington Post. At the height of his popularity, it was published nationwide as a syndicated column in more than 500 newspapers. His column focused on political satire and commentary.
Andrew Roberts is a British historian and journalist. He is a Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New York Historical Society. Roberts was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he earned a first-class degree in Modern History.
Louis-Henri Murger, also known as Henri Murger and Henry Murger, was a French novelist and poet.
Roland John Perry OAM is an Australian author best known for his books on history, especially Australia in the two world wars. His Monash: The Outsider Who Won The War, won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' 'Melbourne University Publishing Award' in 2004. The judges described it as 'a model of the biographer's art.' In the Queen's Birthday Honours of 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia 'for services to literature as an author.' In October 2011, Monash University awarded Perry a Fellowship for 'high achievement as a writer, author, film producer and journalist.' His sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller and Shane Warne. Perry has written on espionage, specialising in the British Cambridge Five ring of Russian agents. He has also published three works of fiction and produced more than 20 documentary films. Perry has been a member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council since 2006. In late 2012 Perry accepted an adjunct appointment at Monash University as a Professor, with the title ‘Writer-in-Residence’ in the University's Arts Faculty.
Irène Némirovsky was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin born in Kiev Ukraine under the Russian Empire; she lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.
The Chase of the Golden Meteor is a novel by Jules Verne. It was one of the last novels written by the prolific French hard science fiction pioneer. The book, however, is seen as less an early example of hard science fiction than a social satire lampooning greed, monomania and vanity. Verne first wrote La Chasse au météore in 1901 and then rewrote it before his death, but it was only published in 1908, three years after the author's death, one of seven such posthumous novels.
The First French Empire, officially the French Empire or the Napoleonic Empire, was the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte of France and the dominant power in much of continental Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. Although France had already established an overseas colonial empire beginning in the 17th century, the French state had remained a kingdom under the Bourbons and a republic after the French Revolution. Historians refer to Napoleon's regime as the First Empire to distinguish it from the restorationist Second Empire (1852–1870) ruled by his nephew Napoleon III.
Tunisian literature exists primarily in Arabic and in French. Arabic literature in Tunisia dates to the 7th century, with the arrival of Arab civilization in the region. Arabic literature is more important than francophone literature—which followed the introduction of the French protectorate in 1881—both in volume and value. The national bibliography lists 1,249 non-academic books published in 2002 in Tunisia, of which 885 titles are in Arabic. Nearly a third of these books are intended for children.
Julian (Jules) Christopher Paul Eden is a controversial author, journalist, businessman and former doctor. He was the founder of the UK's first online medical clinic, e-Med in 2000.
