Un été avec is a French radio programme and book series produced by France Inter since 2012. Broadcast in the summer, it consists of commentaries and reflections about a famous writer or literary work. The material is published as a book the year after the radio broadcast.
Series have been made about Michel de Montaigne (2012), Marcel Proust (2013), Charles Baudelaire (2014), Victor Hugo (2015), Niccolò Machiavelli (2016), Homer (2017), Paul Valéry (2018), Blaise Pascal (2019), Arthur Rimbaud (2020), Colette (2021), Vladimir Jankélévitch (2022) and Don Quixote (2023).
In the summer of 2012, France Inter broadcast Un été avec Montaigne, a radio programme in 40 episodes with analyses of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. The series was written by the literature professor Antoine Compagnon of the Collège de France. It was well received and published as a book the next year by Éditions des Équateurs.[1] France Inter made the series a yearly occurrence, applying the same formula to a famous writer every summer.[2] Compagnon has returned several years but other writers have also written for the programme. Sylvain Tesson was initially approached to make a series about Jack London, but preferred Homer and got his wish granted in 2017.[3] Colette was chosen as subject for the 2021 edition due to a listener complaint that the programme only had covered male writers.[4]
A Summer with Montaigne was published in English translation in 2019.[5]
| Title | Subject | Written by | Original broadcast | Published | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Un été avec Montaigne | Michel de Montaigne | Antoine Compagnon | 2 July – 24 August 2012[6] | 16 May 2013[7] | |
| Un été avec Proust | Marcel Proust | , Antoine Compagnon, Raphaël Enthoven,, Adrien Goetz,, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Yves Tadié | 1 July – 22 August 2013[8] | 5 July 2014[9] | |
| Un été avec Baudelaire | Charles Baudelaire | Antoine Compagnon | 15 July – 22 August 2014[10] | 21 May 2015[11] | |
| Un été avec Victor Hugo | Victor Hugo | Laura El Makki and Guillaume Gallienne | 29 June – 21 August 2015[12] | 4 May 2016[13] | |
| Un été avec Machiavel | Niccolò Machiavelli | Patrick Boucheron | 11 July – 19 August 2016[14] | 11 May 2017[15] | |
| Un été avec Homère | Homer | Sylvain Tesson | 1 July – 26 August 2017[16] | 26 April 2018[17] | |
| Un été avec Paul Valéry | Paul Valéry | Régis Debray | 17 July – 24 August 2018[18] | 23 May 2019[19] | |
| Un été avec Pascal | Blaise Pascal | Antoine Compagnon | 8 July – 23 August 2019[20] | 2 June 2020[21] | |
| Un été avec Rimbaud | Arthur Rimbaud | Sylvain Tesson | 29 June – 21 August 2020[22] | 5 May 2021[23] | |
| Un été avec Colette | Colette | Antoine Compagnon | 5 July – 27 August 2021[24] | 18 May 2022[25] | |
| Un été avec Jankélévitch | Vladimir Jankélévitch | 4 July – 28 August 2022[26] | 31 May 2023[27] | ||
| Un été avec don Quichotte | Don Quixote | William Marx | 3 July – 25 August 2023[28] | 1 May 2024[29] | |
| Un été avec Romain Gary | Romain Gary | Maria Pourchet | 1 July – [30] | TBA |
Le Figaros Thierry Clermont described the first book, A Summer with Montaigne, as a success and attributed this to the simplicity and pertinence conveyed by Compagnon's presentation of Montaigne's themes.[31] Marion Mayer of Télérama called the programmes about Colette fascinating and wrote that they manage to include much without becoming indigestible.
The books have been commercially successful. A Summer with Montaigne sold 250,000 copies. Tesson's Un été avec Homère sold 200,000 copies.