[11/12/25] Quintane, Nathalie / Larson, Jonathan (tr.): The Cavalier

Winter Editions, paperback

Publication Date: November 12, 2025

Publisher Marketing: A Parisian ’68er embarks to the provinces to teach high school Philosophy but is soon driven out for “corrupting the youth.” Fifty years later, and teaching in the same French Alpine town, Nathalie Quintane delves into the scandal to probe the political order and the failures of a utopian generation. After the social upheavals of the late 1960s, the barricaded streets gave way to self-managed communal living in the backcountry. While it was the school teacher Nelly Cavallero who attracted the media spotlight, countless other insurgent unruly radicals contested the oppressive order, organizing in schools, factories, and communes. In The Cavalier, Quintane paints an intimate and urgently political portrait of revolutionary desires and the rising tides of reaction that determined, among many others, Nelly’s fate.

“The Cavalier conducts an intimate, anarchic, and speculative archaeology of a modern-day witch hunt, unearthing ‘glimpses (and) snatches’ of an elusive young radical whose countercultural convictions evoke the revolutionary spirit of Joan of Arc. At the grand gallop of New Wave cinema, hurdling time, place, characters, and archives, this unclassifiable work of historical attention delivers “‘not the revival of a scandal nor even of an offbeat news item, but a current update for the here and now.’” —SUZANNE BUFFAM

“What starts as an inquiry into a forgotten small-town sex scandal becomes, in the hands of Quintane, nothing less than the excavation of the radical political and cultural energies systematically snuffed out during the unending counter-revolution that followed May ’68. In The Cavalier, Quintane displays the gift Walter Benjamin attributed to his ideal historian of setting alight the sparks of hope still burning in the ashes of the past.” —RYAN RUBY

“In Nathalie Quintane's La Cavalière the distant strains still carry of a greatest generation of French radicalism. Jonathan Larson's translation, with smudged-glass transparency, renders the ‘glimpses’ and ‘snatches,’ not to mention the ‘inaccuracies and fantasies,’ of a dream-adjacent research project that may speak to us, in words imploring not to work, to love perhaps, to live a life that matches us, today.” —JACQUELINE FELDMAN

"Without the faintest hint of nostalgia, these rocket bursts penetrate the present in a radical, superb gesture.” —FABRICE GABRIEL, Le Monde