France

Une lecture de Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution. The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech, Oxford University Press, 2009. ...

During the spring and this summer, I worked on and off, in my free time, on a side project about French researchers and their publications. This is an ongoing work, it will probably move slowly and last for some time, but I think it’s interesting to start documenting the first results. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the French Higher Ed landscape will know this is a daunting task: polite decision makers talk of a fragmented system; less polite people confess it’s a terrible mess, a jumble of overlapping structures and competing loyalties, with Universities, University groups, Ecoles, the CNRS, labs big and small with multiple parent organisations. And changing all the time: they split and regroup like crazy cells in a petri dish. ...