Book Talk: Prof. Cécile Alduy in Conversation with Prof. Josh Landy

The French and Italian Department and French Speaking Worlds: Here and Now present: A Book talk on D’abord ils sont venus chercher les mots [First They Came for Words], les Arènes, 2026, by Prof. Cécile Alduy, in conversation with Prof. Joshua Landy. 

An Author Caught Up by Her Subject
A professor of literature at Stanford and a discourse analysis scholar, Cécile Alduy has spent years analyzing how the far right wages its culture war. In 2022, in La Langue de Zemmour (Zemmour’s Language), she showed how the presidential candidate was distorting concepts and history to short-circuit rational thinking and appeal to hatred and fear. Then, on January 20, 2025, her research caught up with her brutally. At Stanford, her life and work were upended, like those of colleagues, students and workers in universities, schools, administrations, and scientific labs nationwide, when the new administration unleashed terror and censorship on culture and science. In this first-person account, she tells what the far right does once in power, day to day.

A New Linguistic and Political Regime
“Women,” “climate crisis,” “disability,” “diversity,” “Black,” “equality,” “gender,” “social justice,” “LGBT,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “vaccine” ... These words, among others, have been banned or blacklisted by the Trump administration since March 2025. Cécile Alduy conducts a gripping investigation into this list, which grew from a handful of demonized terms into over 480 flammable ones through anticipatory obedience, self-censorship, and overcompliance. She shows how the culture war has now given way to a real-world war against individuals. Meanwhile, the tech world has provided the tools to track down and eliminate words and lives alike. “Deportation” is no longer a term from history books: it is state policy.

Dystopia as Daily Life
The book is about the disappeared: the dead and the vanished words, forbidden names and identities, twisted meanings and drained values. It explains what this new political and linguistic regime is and does: how it seeks to control what can be said and thought, and bends reality to fit its ideological fictions.

How can we analyze a power that is destroying the very concepts we need to understand it? It is a question of survival: intellectual, and, for many, already physical. Cécile Alduy started writing out of fear and paralysis: inscribing these stories became progressively an act of resistance, a search for meaning in a world that has become senseless, and the first step toward reclaiming the right to a language that is just and whole. 

If this book retraces the grip that far-right language has on speech and on minds, in the United States but also already in France, it is, also, a manual for breaking free.

Cécile Alduy is a professor of literature at Stanford University and an associate scholar at Cevipof, Sciences Po Paris. She is the author of La Langue de Zemmour (Seuil, 2022) and Marine Le Pen prise aux mots (Marine Le Pen Caught in Words, Seuil, 2015).

D’abord ils sont venus chercher les mots (First They Came for the Words)
Cécile Alduy
September 17, 2026 | €20 | 368 pages | 135 x 185 mm
To read an excerpt, click here.
Available as ePub (or here) and Kindle. To order a hard body with free shipping you may try Lireka.

RSVP for the book talk here.