WThe Annuario Pontificio is the annual directory of the Holy See of the Catholic Church. It lists the popes in chronological order and all officials of the Holy See's departments. It also provides names and contact information for all cardinals and bishops, the dioceses, the departments of the Roman Curia, the Holy See's diplomatic missions abroad, the embassies accredited to the Holy See, the headquarters of religious institutes, certain academic institutions, and other similar information. The index includes, along with all the names in the body of the book, those of all priests who have been granted the title of "Monsignor".
WThe Anthology of Black Humor is an anthology of 45 writers edited by André Breton. It was first published in 1940 in Paris by Éditions du Sagittaire and its distribution was immediately banned by the Vichy government. It was reprinted in 1947 after Breton's return from exile, with a few additions. In 1966, Breton, "having resisted the temptation to add more names", published the book again and called this edition "the definitive".
WLa Bible amusante pour les grands et les enfants was a book by Léo Taxil with illustrations by Frid'rick published in 1882 by Libraire anticléricale, in which he pointed out what he considered to be inconsistencies, errors and false beliefs. At the time of publication the author was accused of irreverently mocking the Bible. The Times called for the book to be suppressed.
WThe Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror is a book published in Paris, France in August 1933 and written by Otto Katz. It put forth the theory that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. Behind the book was German communist Willi Munzenberg.
WChristianity Unveiled, or examination of the principles and effects of the Christian religion is a book that criticizes Christianity attributed to Baron d'Holbach, probably published in 1766.
WThe Coming Insurrection is a French radical leftist, anarchist tract written by The Invisible Committee, the nom de plume of an anonymous author. It hypothesizes the "imminent collapse of capitalist culture". The Coming Insurrection was first published in 2007 by Editions La Fabrique, and later (2009) translated into English and published by Semiotext(e). The book is notable for the media coverage which it received as an example of a radical leftist manifesto, particularly from American conservative commentator Glenn Beck. The Coming Insurrection is also known for its association with the legal case of the Tarnac Nine, a group of nine young people including Julien Coupat who were arrested in Tarnac, rural France, on November 11, 2008 "on the grounds that they were to have participated in the sabotage of overhead electrical lines on France's national railways". The Tarnac Nine were variously accused of conspiracy, sabotage, terrorism, and being the author(s) of The Coming Insurrection.
WContre Sainte-Beuve is an unfinished book of essays written by Marcel Proust between 1895 and 1900 and first published posthumously in 1954. The book was discovered, with its pages in order, amongst Proust's papers after his death. It consists of several essays, three of which repudiate the body of work written by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a French literary critic active in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
WConversations on the Plurality of Worlds is a popular science book by French author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, published in 1686. It offered an explanation of the heliocentric model of the Universe, suggested by Nicolaus Copernicus in his 1543 work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The book is Fontenelle's most famous work and is considered to be one of the first major works of the Age of Enlightenment.
WCorydon is a book by André Gide consisting of four Socratic dialogues on homosexuality. The name of the book comes from Virgil's pederastic character Corydon. Parts of the text were separately privately printed from 1911 to 1920, and the whole book appeared in its French original in France in May 1924 and in the United States in 1950. It is available in an English translation (ISBN 0-252-07006-2) by the poet Richard Howard.
WLes Peintres Cubistes, Méditations Esthétiques, is a book written by Guillaume Apollinaire between 1905 and 1912, published in 1913. This was the third major text on Cubism; following Du "Cubisme" by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (1912); and André Salmon, Histoire anecdotique du cubisme (1912).
WDivagations is an 1897 prose collection by the French writer Stéphane Mallarmé. The book introduces the idea of "critical poems", a mixture between critical essays and prose poems. The book is divided into two parts, first a series of prose poems, and then the actual "divagations" - "wanderings" or "ravings".
WDu "Cubisme", also written Du Cubisme, or Du « Cubisme », is a book written in 1912 by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger. This was the first major text on Cubism, predating Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913). The book is illustrated with black and white photographs of works by Paul Cézanne (1), Gleizes (5), Metzinger (5), Fernand Léger (5), Juan Gris (1), Francis Picabia (2), Marcel Duchamp (2), Pablo Picasso (1), Georges Braque (1), André Derain (1), and Marie Laurencin (2).
WGaspard de la Nuit — Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot is the compilation of prose poems by Italian-born French poet Aloysius Bertrand. Considered one of the first examples of modern prose poetry, it was published in the year 1842, one year after Bertrand's death from tuberculosis, as a manuscript dated 1836, by his friend David d'Angers. The text includes a short address to Victor Hugo and another to Charles Nodier, and a Memoir of Bertrand written by Sainte-Beuve was included in the original 1842 edition.
WH. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is a work of literary criticism by French author Michel Houellebecq regarding the works of H. P. Lovecraft. The English-language edition for the American and UK market was translated by Dorna Khazeni and features an introduction by American novelist Stephen King. In some editions the book also includes two of Lovecraft's best known short stories: "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness."
WThe Heures de Charles d'Angoulême is a book of hours commissioned in the late 15th century by Charles, Count of Angoulême, father of king Francis I of France. It is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, under the number Latin 1173.
WThe Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César is the first medieval French prose compilation of stories of antiquity, mostly consisting of the so-called Matter of Troy and of Rome, besides text from the Bible and other histories. Composed in the early 13th century in northern France, it told the history of the world from the creation to the time of Julius Caesar. Often copied, it underwent an important redaction in Italy in the 14th century; its influence extended into the Renaissance. In manuscripts from the 14th and 15th centuries it was frequently found together with the Faits des Romains, which continued the history of the Roman Empire.
WThe Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi is an encyclopaedic collection of 36 large (quarto) volumes written between 1749–1804, initially by the Comte de Buffon, and continued in eight more volumes after his death by his colleagues, led by Bernard Germain de Lacépède. The books cover what was known of the "natural sciences" at the time, including what would now be called material science, physics, chemistry and technology as well as the natural history of animals.
WThe Historian's Craft is a 1949 book by Marc Bloch and first published in English in 1953. At that stage he was not as well known in the English-speaking world as he was to be in the 1960s where his works on feudal society and rural history were published. The book was written in 1941 and 1942. Bloch joined the French Resistance prior to its completion.
WThe Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation is a 1987 book by the philosopher Jacques Rancière on the role of the teacher and individual towards individual liberation. Rancière uses the example of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher in the late 18th century who taught in Belgium without knowledge of their language (Flemish), to explain the role of liberation after Marxism. The work expresses Rousseauist ideas, e.g. in the state of nature humans are morally good, and emphasizes that individual change precipitates societal change. Its arguments draw heavily from the French socialist party's debates on education during the 1980s. It was translated to English in 1991 by Kristin Ross.
WIn Letter on the Blind for the Use of those who can see, Denis Diderot takes on the question of visual perception, a subject that, at the time, experienced a resurgence of interest due to the success of medical procedures that allowed surgeons to operate on cataracts and certain cases of blindness from birth. Speculations were then numerous upon what the nature and use of vision was, and how much perception, habit, and experience allow individuals to identify forms in space, to perceive distances and to measure volumes, or to distinguish a realistic work of art from reality.
WMontaillou is a book by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie first published in 1975. It was first translated into English in 1978 by Barbara Bray, and has been subtitled The Promised Land of Error and Cathars and Catholics in a French Village.
WOn the Track of Unknown Animals is a cryptozoological book by the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans that was first published in 1955 under the title Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées. The English translation by Richard Garnett was published in 1958 with some updating by the author and with a foreword by Gerald Durrell. A revised and abridged edition was published in 1965, and a further edition in 1995. It is credited with introducing the term cryptozoology and established its author as the "Father of Cryptozoology."
WPastiches et mélanges is a collection of writings by Marcel Proust released in 1919.
WLes Plaisirs et les Jours is a collection of prose poems and novellas by Marcel Proust. It was first published in 1896 by Calmann-Lévy, and was Proust’s first publication.
WLes Prophéties is a collection of prophecies by French physician Nostradamus, the first edition of which appeared in 1555 by the publishing house Macé Bonhomme. His most famous work is a collection of poems, quatrains, united in ten sets of verses ("Centuries") of 100 quatrains each.
W"Que sais-je?" (QSJ) is an editorial collection published by the Presses universitaires de France (PUF). The aim of the series is to provide the lay reader with an accessible introduction to a field of study written by an expert in the field. As such, they are a good example of haute vulgarisation. The sentence "Que sais-je?" is taken from the works of French essayist Michel de Montaigne.
WReflections on Violence, published in 1908, is a book by the French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel on class struggle and revolution. Sorel is known for his theory that political revolution depends on the proletariat organizing violent uprisings and strikes to institute syndicalism, an economic system in which syndicats truly represent the needs of the working class.
WThe Rules of Sociological Method is a book by Émile Durkheim, first published in 1895. It is recognized as being the direct result of Durkheim's own project of establishing sociology as a positivist social science. Durkheim is seen as one of the fathers of sociology, and this work, his manifesto of sociology. Durkheim distinguishes sociology from other sciences and justifies his rationale. Sociology is the science of social facts. Durkheim suggests two central theses, without which sociology would not be a science:It must have a specific object of study. Unlike philosophy or psychology, sociology's proper object of study are social facts. It must respect and apply a recognized objective scientific method, bringing it as close as possible to the other exact sciences. This method must at all cost avoid prejudice and subjective judgment.
WThe Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a memoir by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes his life before and after suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome.
WTelevision: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment is the 1990 English-language translation of Jacques Lacan’s text "Télévision" accompanied by a "Dossier on the Institutional Debate". The single volume thus includes two distinct projects which were separately translated.
WTête-à-tête is a 2006 non-fiction book by Hazel Rowley about the lives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
WLe Théâtre François is a book in three volumes by Samuel Chappuzeau which is the main source of information on French theatre in the 17th century.
WTraité des Amateurs is the short name of the celebrated book Traité Théorique et Pratique du jeu des Echecs, par une Société des Amateurs, published in France in 1786 and subsequently translated into German and English.
WTreatise on Relics or Tract on Relics is a theological book by John Calvin, written in 1543 in French about the authenticity of many Christian relics. Calvin harshly criticizes the relics' authenticity, and suggests the rejection of relic worship. The book was published in Geneva, and was included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
WWind, Sand and Stars is a memoir by the French aristocrat aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and a winner of several literary awards. It deals with themes such as friendship, death, heroism, and solidarity among colleagues, and illustrates the author's opinions of what makes life worth living.