9:30 a.m., Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006
Taylor Performing Arts Center
Admission: free

In the spring of 2006, millions of French students and citizens protested in Paris and other cities against a law the government had proposed as part of a much-needed reform in the labor market. The government finally passed the law, but President Chirac declared it still-born. Six months earlier, thousands of disenfranchised youths, mostly from France’s North- and sub-Saharan African community, had burned thousands of cars to protest against the high unemployment and discrimination that affects them. Why do the French oppose what look like common sense reform measures while still demanding change?

Jean-Benoît Nadeau, author of the popular book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, explained how the French see some of the challenges their country is facing in the 21st century, and why the problem is not always what outsiders, or even the French themselves, think it is. Combining historical analyses with his own observations, Nadeau explained what these “hot” issues actually mean to the French — from the question of “integrating” minorities to France’s place in the European Union, anti-Americanism, and the incursion of English — and why France’s attitude and solutions matter to the world.

Jean-Benoît Nadeau and his wife, Julie Barlow, are among the rare journalists who write for Canadian, American, and European publications in both English and French. They are award-winning contributors to Quebec’s national news magazine L’actualité, and their writing has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The International Herald Tribune, and the Courrier international. In 2003, Nadeau and Barlow published their critical and popular success, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks), which the London Daily Telegraph’s Paris correspondent Philip Delves Broughton praised for explaining, “better than anything else I have read, why the French are as they are.” Since then, it has sold 150,000 copies in English, French, Dutch, and Chinese. Nadeau is also the author of a humorous travelogue, Les français aussi ont un accent (Payot, 2002) while Julie Barlow recently published a travel guide on Montreal and Quebec for the For Dummies series (John Wiley and Sons, 2004). Based in Montreal, the couple is about to publish their next book together, The Story of French (St. Martin’s Press, November 2006).