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The Alliance

Une Europe inédite

Author(s) : Bernard LEFORT
Publishing countries : Bulgaria, France
Language(s) : French , bulgare

Europe is arising. For the last fifty years, step by step, a new geographical space and political entity have been forming. Among the sites of memory devoted to the recent history of Europe, the Jean Monnet Foundation, in Lausanne, has a number of archives with rare texts that allow people to follow and better understand how the idea of the European Union gained momentum across the years, both before and during World War II. Its documents are the core of this collection. The texts presented in this volume are used to shed new light on the “European institutional machinery.” This angle shows that the construction of modern Europe was not necessarily “technocratic,” but rather, like any original project, the result of trial and error, hesitations, conflicts that are often forgotten today, and a real dynamic.

Year of publication: 2001

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Passion

Author(s) : Michel SAUQUET - YE Shuxian
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French

Is the theme of passion the core locus of cultural difference between East and West? Western civilization sees in passion a founding experience, emotionally, aesthetically and spiritually fundamental. Yet the East is more skeptical, reflecting Buddhist wisdom, which invites people to free themselves from passion to achieve awakening.
In a chronicle embodied in contemporary China, Ye Shuxian chooses to talk about loving passion. Codified in traditional China and repressed under the Cultural Revolution, the feeling of love is expressed more strongly today.
Michel Sauquet shows all the richness and ambiguity of the word passion in European culture: it sustains life and suffering; it absorbs, builds and destroys. Loving passion, passion of the artist as best exemplified by the character of Rimbaud; mystical passion exalted by the music of Bach.

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Architecture

Author(s) : YANG Xin - Dom Angelico SURCHAMP
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French
Price : 9,45 €

For centuries, human cultures have rooted themselves in stone and monuments for utilitarian or artistic purposes, reflecting the power of kings or the greatness of gods. When first learning about Chinese architecture, what could be better than a guided visit to several emblematic monuments, such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace? This is what Yang Xin provides, in a text full of detailed description. We are taught how Chinese architecture is a total art, rooted in the axes of thought: relationship with nature, permanent negotiation between the yin and yang, the empty and full, the sky and the earth. On the other side, Dom Angelico Surchamp, eminent specialist in Roman art, sets forth a panorama of the history of Western architecture, showing the gradual evolution of the temple, church and dwelling house. Little by little, space becomes organized around key values. More than the simple struggle between man and the elements or between man and material, the art of building translates a vision of the world.

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Taste

Author(s) : GONG Gang - Paul ARIÈS
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French

So few people know Chinese culture, yet many are familiar with Peking duck and fried rice. Gong Gang happily explains how much, in China, the idea of beauty melds inseparably with the idea of goodness, in an association that may appear strange to a Westerner. Drinking tea, for example, invokes particular values, of clarity and limpidity, according to a broader definition of the five senses. For Paul Ariès, the issue is more controversial. Recalling the origin of good taste in the West, expressed particularly in culinary art and in restaurants, which arose in the early 19th century with characters such as Brillat-Savarin, Mr. Ariès is alarmed by globalization and its threat to this table culture. “Can good taste coexist with modernity?” An exchange of views that will delight culinary enthusiasts.

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Beauty

Author(s) : ZHU Cunming - Dominique FERNANDEZ
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French
Price : 9,45 €

There is a close relationship between the notion of beauty and that of culture, between aesthetic and humanity. “I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone” wrote Baudelaire, personifying the relationship. But is beauty truly accessible? How is beauty translated in the universe, whether Chinese or Western? From an original perspective, Zhu Cunming shows how the experience of beauty is universal but also profoundly tied to that of ugliness. Witness the temple bronzes and the dragon heads with enormous mouths, like so many hidden facets of the feeling of beauty. On the other side, Dominique Fernandez defines beauty as an experience of ambiguity. More than the cathedral, which speaks too directly of God, music in particular evokes this inaccessible intangible. Beginning with the myth of Orpheus, which runs through Western culture from Monteverdi to Jean Cocteau, Dominique Fernandez pursues the truth of beauty in an amazing meditation. A delightful, cultural read.

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Nature

Author(s) : YUE Dai Yun - Anne SAUVAGNARGUES
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French
Price : 9,45 €

While Europeans are in a struggle or in forced coexistence with nature, the Chinese are, according to Confucian tradition, in symbiosis, in communion, mutually dependent. “We look at each other, the sky and I, without tiring”, sings the famous poet Li Po, cited by Yue Dai Yun. In the countless legends recounted by Yue Dai Yun, man is or becomes nature: how many young girls and (formerly human) gods or goddesses have been transformed into hills and their tears into streams? Mountains, river water and the immensity of seas are not things in China, but living realities that teach man time, death and the insurmountable. As a result, says Yue Dai Yun, we must “not force ourselves or, worse, oppose nature, but rather adapt to ourselves.” For many Chinese people, nature is the source, not the object, of intellectual thought. There is nothing like climbing, for example, to think: “The succession of mountains has no limits for the Chinese, for it represents the elevation of their mind and the expansion of their thought.” Let us not seek out the East-West opposition throughout these two texts. Doesn’t the aforementioned Chinese veneration for high reliefs correspond to our own tradition, that of the Sinai and the Thabor, not to mention the mount of the well-known Sermon? Would our mystics argue when the Chinese say, according to Yue Dai Yun: “There are mountains beyond the mountains; there is another world beyond ours”? And does China have a monopoly on wonder? The magic of nature’s products, which Miao women take to market in autumn, these wild, dazzling red fruits, these leaves of palm – Aristotle also knew this magic. His ideas, according to Anne Sauvagnargues, “were always limpid, full of rocks, animals, men and the starry sky that we observe at night when we lie on the ground.”
Reading these two very different, very literary texts, the reader learns about visions of the world and of nature that were often inherited from the distant past. Distant? Not really! The story of saving the moon", in which Yue Dai Yun heroically took part in her childhood, tells us how much traditional myths permeate men and women today and just may give them the strength to fight for a less despoiled nature

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Death

Author(s) : TANG Yi Jie - Xavier LE PICHON
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French
Price : 9,91 €

Two top-level researchers – a French geophysicist and a Chinese philosopher – talking about death: quite daunting for a reader unaccustomed to academic language. Not to fear. Professor Tang Yijie, president of the Academy of Chinese Culture, and Xavier Le Pichon, professor at the Collège de France, talk about their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, about their beliefs and their faith. Above all, about life.
Tang Yijie and Xavier Le Pichon have met several times to discuss the essential issues of existence. These two texts thus do not present a simple comparison. They respond to each other, with a nearly pedagogical concern for addressing the other’s culture and for presenting – and questioning – the most representative features of their own civilizations.

Although he considers the place of Christian culture within European culture to be “no doubt excessive,” Xavier Le Pichon chooses to approach the mystery of death from his personal perspective as a Catholic. In the European context, he lucidly shows the extent to which death – formerly incorporated into life and a reminder that “the fate of man is eternal happiness” – has become, through the centuries and with the advance of medicine, an event that is increasingly tied to the pain of living. A passage toward the light, yes, but at so high a cost! Impressive, for example, are these words written by his father on the approach of death: “Death is the most important act of life; it is like the seal affixed to a letter written with so many tears, so much blood and suffering. It is the crowning achievement of life.”

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Dream

Author(s) : JIN Si Yan - Maurice BELLET
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French

When we learn that a “Grand Diviner” existed long ago during the Middle Kingdom, a sort of oneiromantic secretary of state placed at the head of an “office of divination,” and when we read what Jin Siyan writes on the role of dreams in her own life, we understand that for the Chinese, dreams are a serious affair. Is it for the sake of counterpoint that Maurice Bellet rues the difficulty of Western man – “this dreamer who does not know himself” – to do the same? Not quite. Philosopher, psychoanalyst, priest and occasional novelist, Maurice Bellet knows and loves dreams after having worked with and on them for other people and for himself and after having long studied their creative value. Although he mentions himself only rarely in his contribution to this book, his analyses and parables reveal his true essence, as they contain much more experience than abstract speculation.
Jin Siyan attaches no more importance to the detached speculation of life. Formerly a teacher at the University of Beijing, lecturer at ENA and professor of Chinese civilization and comparative literature at the University of Artois, her interest is in recounting. She recounts the everyday dreams of her happy rural childhood, those of the legends and myths of ancient China; she describes ghosts and what the dream was in such troubled times as the Cultural Revolution.
For very different reasons, the two writers discuss the dream as mediator. For Maurice Bellet’s Western man, built on divisions – soul/body, subject/object – the dream is a sort of interface “at the junction of mind and body.”
For the Chinese, generally unfamiliar with this type of opposition, the dream is nevertheless an emissary. “It moves unhindered, Jin Siyan tells us, oscillating between the worlds of yin and yang.”

Year of publication: 1999

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Science

Author(s) : YANG Huanming ; Pierre LÉNA
Publishing countries : China, France
Language(s) : Chinese , French

Symbol of progress and of the reasoning process that tirelessly seeks to explain the real and the fate of the universe, science is also an extraordinary locus of dialogue between cultures via its tendency toward the universal.

Pierre Léna, an astrophysicist, lays out a “promenade of science” mentioning questions that everyone asks themselves. Isn’t science, the search for the invisible through visible appearances, only the domain of specialists? A patient exercise in proof or an elaborate mathematical structure, maybe even a subtle relationship between truth and change?

A specialist in the human gene, Yang Huanming offers the Chinese perception of science, tied to cosmology, wisdom and the vision of the universe and the forces that drive it. He also addresses the ethical dimension in terms of the human genome.

Collection Near and far

In this collection “Near and Far”, two authors, one Chinese, the other French, meet and exchange on topics chosen for their relevance in our daily life and in human relations. They tell us about their own experience and explore the roots of their respective civilizations to discuss how philosophers, writers and poets spoke of these topics.

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Bibliodiversity Observatory

Éditer dans l’espace francophone (Publishing in the French-speaking world)

A thorough report by Luc Pinhas, in French

Why do books have such restricted circulation in the French-speaking world? Which way does the flow go and which are one-way streets? What current legislation encourages publishing and the marketing of works? Are public policies sufficient? What setbacks are encountered in the marketing of works? Luc Pinhas draws a comprehensive portrait of the state of publishing, including legislation, circulation, distribution and marketing of books in the French-speaking world. This dossier, featuring entries on many themes and geographic locations, provides a complete overview of local realities, illustrated with telling examples. After analysing measures that states, associations and syndicates of publishing and book-store professionals have implemented, the author puts forward some proposals to fuel a much-needed debate. To achieve this and to hear what the main players had to say, especially with regard to the South, a fruitful survey was conducted at the Ouagadougou book fair in November 2004, in partnership with the international Association of French-speaking Bookstore Managers (AILF) - [http://www.librairesfrancophones.org/]

Year of publication: 2005, 288 pages, 15 X 21 cm, ISBN: 978-2-9519747-1-X

Collection État des lieux de l’édition

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Call to French-language authors, publishers and institutions, March 2007

Publishing countries : Ivory Coast

African literature in French is today better represented and better known in Europe than in Africa, where its distribution remains hampered by many obstacles. However, there are solutions, which require the mobilisation of various stakeholders in the book industry. One solution is co-publishing, based on a joint trade agreement. The publication of “L’Ombre d’Imana” by Véronique TADJO, a groundbreaking example of pan-African co-publishing, proves that it is possible, through joint action, to create the conditions necessary for a (re)appropriation by Africa of its literature. To make this possible, the Alliance is appealing to everyone, authors, publishers and institutions alike, to join forces and promote the bibliodiversity at the heart of the francophone spirit. This appeal is endorsed by many authors and book industry professionals.

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80 recommendations & tools in support of bibliodiversity

These 80 recommendations are built on the principles upheld in the 2014 International Declaration of independent publishers, an important document promoting bibliodiversity, signed on September 20th 2014, by more than 400 independent publishers from 45 countries.

They raise the necessary prerequisites, divided by themes, for the development, maintenance and strengthening of bibliodiversity in concerned countries. Some recommendations are accompanied by tools and projects (existing or to be developed in the context of the 2015-2016 Alliance programme of activities), enabling a practical implementation of independent publishers’ proposals.

Contents of the 80 recommendations & tools in support of bibliodiversity:

* Public policies safeguarding bibliodiversity
* Proposals and actions supporting digital bibliodiversity
* The Amazon system, a threat to bibliodiversity?
* Essential measures for publishing in local and national languages
* Methods for rethinking book donations
* Proposals and actions to develop solidarity publishing partnerships
* Activities to strengthen diversity in youth publishing

For all book actors to take ownership of these recommendations and tools, we invite you to contact us with your comments, suggestions, ideas, and proposals that could enhance and strengthen this document.

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