La Ruée is a collective improvisation that takes over theater spaces. Boris Charmatz envisions historical, dancing, shouting, staggering chaos: a rush.

The artists invited for the occasion embody and vocalize, as fast as they can, the book Histoire Mondiale de la France edited by Patrick Boucheron. In a headlong rush of movement and text, they run from gesture to thought, from history to the moment of dance.

The result is the restless presentation of a book that covers the “entire” history of France, from prehistory through 2015. This is an invitation to dive into the “big” history, the history of a country whose definition keeps eluding our grasp. A history of what is permeable, uncertain, ever-shifting, of what is constantly being redefined. Isn’t this what art is all about: a tribute to the multiple, complex, and elusive part of that which we are nevertheless made of?

Histoire Mondiale de la France is a multicontributor volume edited by Patrick Boucheron. It’s a history of France that runs from the Chauvet Cave all the way to the events 2015.

Reconciling a critical approach with a riveting narrative, the book calls on a group of historians determined to make committed scholarly discourse accessible to the general reader. The stakes are clear: to take stock of a global history of France. The book thus aims to tell anew, yet with no counternarrative, the same old story, revisiting all the places of memory woven into the national narrative, however displacing, reorienting, and expanding it. In other words, it makes history more interesting!
This book is joyously polyphonic. It is our hope that a smattering of this joy will help to stave off the present anguish.