Louis XIV, roi des arts

In October 1961, the KGB went to the writer Vassili Grossman to seize the manuscript of his novel "Life and Destiny." Built on the model of Tolstoy's "War and Peace", this book traces the fate of a family during the war. From Moscow to the ruins of Stalingrad, from the Ukrainian ghettos to the gulag, it is a great Russian epic written at the height of men, populated by ordinary heroes and tyrants, historical figures and anonymous people. Grossman bears witness to the darkest hours of Stalinism. It exposes the cogs of the implacable totalitarian machine and denounces the perversion of the ideal of 1917.

Le manuscrit sauvé du KGB: Vie et destin de Vassili Grossman

In April 1939, "Grapes of Wrath" entered the pantheon of literature with a bang. Americans are at loggerheads over the odyssey of the Joad family, tenant farmers from Oklahoma who, like thousands of others, were driven from their land during the Great Depression. Eighty years have passed since the famous work was published, and 90 years since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. To mark this occasion, the documentary examines the genesis of the novel, its themes, its renewed reception during the financial crisis of 2008.

The Grapes of Wrath: The Ghost of Modern America

Opéra de Paris, une saison (très) particulière

Summer 1953. Françoise Sagan, a young French girl, begins writing Bonjour Tristesse. A few months later she becomes a published author, while France is scandalized by her frank description of female youthful sexuality.

Bonjour Tristesse, Hello Scandal: The Raunchy Book That Shocked France

The life and work of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), the greatest French-language playwright, Molière, who revolutionized theater by bringing to the stage, with lucidity and dazzling modernity, the themes of his time and who had a special relationship with Louis XIV, the dazzling Sun King, that allowed him to develop as an artist while using his talent, like that of many other artists of his time, to enhance his personal glory.