Free Thinking - French thought and politics.

Philip Dodd wrestles with an especially knotty question – does France have to stop being French to survive? Its a question which owes its urgency to recent events from the massacres of last year to the rise of the Right and an apparent erosion of the secular values that underpin the Fifth Republic. What price the France of Camus and New Wave Cinema in the face of globalisation? To answer these questions Philip is joined by the political commentator Anne-Elizabeth Moutet, the historian Liz Buettner, the Muslim scholar, Ziauddin Sardar and Andy Martin, an expert in 20th century French literature which did so much to fix the features of modern France in our minds.

Producer: Zahid Warley.

Europe After Empire by Elizabeth Buettner is published in April Islam Beyond the Mad Max Jihadis by Ziauddin Sardar is published in February