When General de Gaulle empowered the President of the 5th Republic with far-reaching executive attributes, he sought to alleviate the head of state from what he called the “grenouillages” of politics. This has worked efficiently. Yet, his intention was certainly not to avoid debate over policy-proposals and between candidates. Unfortunately, this is what is happening in the 2012 French presidential election: it has moulded into a referendum on one individual, the President. For this very reason, it seems the socialists have a very good shot at taking the Elysée. Not because they have a better project – they don’t; not because their candidate is better – he isn’t; but because Sarkozy is unpopular and because there has been little debate between the main candidates – if at all. Nicolas Sarkozy may …

After publishing Postwar in 2005, a tour de force of European history since World War II, winning the Arthur Ross Book Award for best book in international affairs and numerous other awards, Tony Judt prepared to write an ambitious intellectual and cultural history of Twentieth Century social thought. A professor of European History at New York University (NYU), founder and director of the Erich Maria Remarque Institute at NYU, frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and public intellectual, Judt’s plan for his next book mothballed, as personal history intervened in the form of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. By late 2008, Judt no longer had use of his hands. Two years later, …