UNE HISTOIRE DE LA MARCHE

Walking has a history: Antoine de Baecque,
a talented storyteller, presents an original,
informed and lively account.

The author sets out to describe all possible forms of walking and the people who practice them: nomadic people, from the Lapp to the Sioux, itinerant merchants to shepherds, medieval apprentices to soldiers. Then there are pilgrims of all persuasions, those who return to the source of the Ganges and those who go to Compostela, who take the Tokaido road or walk to Mecca. If walking has now lost most of its professional practitioners, it has gained enthusiastic amateurs, leisure-time strollers and weekend hikers. And now we walk in the city, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries when urban promenades became a popular custom. Finally, walking has long represented a means of taking political action, as illustrated by Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

A historian of ideas who teaches film history at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, a specialist on the culture of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, ANTOINE DE BAECQUE wrote the volume on the Enlightenment in the The Cultural History of France (Seuil, 2005) and contributed to the collective reference works, A History of the body, A History of virility and A History of emotions (Seuil, 2006, 2011, 2015). At the
same time, as a critic and film historian, he was editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du Cinéma and later the culture section of Libération. He recently published Crossing the Alps. Essay of walked history (Gallimard, 2014), which won the Prix Ptolémée du Festival international de géographie and the Prix Augustin Thierry des Rendez-vous de l'histoire de Blois and has sold more than 7,000 copies.