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Le Devoir
Le Devoir ("Duty") is a French-language daily based in Montreal and distributed throughout Canada. It was founded by journalist, politician, and nationalist Henri Bourassa in 1910.
U.S. voters cast their ballots for the 2022 midterm elections in New York City.
Ideas
François Brousseau

In Brazil And U.S., Elections As Stress Tests For Democracy

After the Brazilian presidential election and the American midterms, checking the temperature on the state of democracy in a world that has been heading in the opposite direction for too long.

-Analysis-

MONTREAL — Beyond climate change and the return of inflation, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic, we can add another element threatening the stability of the world: the backsliding of democracy and faith in a system based on the rule of law, free expression, and a sovereign choice of leaders.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden publishes an annual report that has tracked this decline.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was a growing desire for democracy around the world, and the number of people living under a system of freedom and the rule of law was on the rise. But that number has been decreasing since the beginning of the 21st century.

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Photos of Nobel in Literature recipient Annie Ernaux and "Grit Lit" queen Virginie Despentes
Society
Odile Tremblay

Ernaux And Despentes: How Two French Writers Reveal Women's Liberation So Differently

French writer Annie Ernaux's Nobel prize in literature took many by surprise, after a career spent largely in the shadows. A different kind of surprise comes in comparing her to another French writer, iconoclast media star Virginie Despentes.

MONTREAL — When Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Oct. 6, becoming the 17th woman to do so, I was completely taken aback, as this French writer had led a discreet career, never causing much commotion. But I am absolutely delighted to see her clean, clinical, intimate and fascinating work, consecrated in high places.

As early as the 1970s, her minimalistic, bare prose had allowed many women to get a better grasp of the fragility of their own condition.

For she, as a true auto-entomologist who observed the woman within herself, and saw a mirror of all others, is well-deserving of this crown. This now octogenarian author has always despised deception. Did she write novels? Yes and no: Rather, she laid her life bare — her childhood, her fears, her loves, the oppression and shame, all recorded in her perpetually updated diary.

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