how, as a young professor, I discovered “Le Nouvel Observateur”

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of “New Obs” and our file on the power of joy, the historian and feminist activist tells us how, in the 1950s, she immersed herself in reading a newspaper who was then called “the Observer”.

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“It was in the winter of 1951-1952. I was 23 years old. I had just been appointed to the Caen girls' high school, my first position. Caen was a city 75% destroyed. In the student dormitory, in the attic of the magnificent Abbaye aux Hommes, I had made friends with a day school teacher who, no doubt judging my political culture as a young graduate was very mediocre, had recommended to me a new periodical which was said to be great good and which she lent to me. An austere, very British page, giving little space to news items and all to political analysis. I was hungry for reflection and engagement. I liked it. I became a more and more regular reader, following the changes in the titles of the man we never stopped calling, in my little gang, “the Observer”. His line, progressive but non-partisan, non-conformist, anti-colonial, a bit libertarian, suited us. My historian friends wrote there: François Furet, Denis Richet, Jacques and Mona Ozouf. The “Manifesto of the 343” was an explosion. “Copernican Revolution”, say the philosopher Geneviève Fraisse like the anthropologist Françoise Héritier, a decisive shaking of patriarchy by women who have become masters of their bodies, their motherhood and, ultimately, their sexuality. #MeToo is a continuation of this. My colleague from Caen was right. »

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