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.

Since the 1990s, Nathalie Quintane has written more than 20 rigorous and genre-defiant works, each distinctive in scope and precision, critiquing everything from the literary marketplace and the education system, to fascization in France and abroad.

“The Cavalier conducts an intimate, anarchic, and speculative archaeology of a modern-day witch hunt in provincial France, 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, as Quintane puts it succinctly, ‘not the revival of a scandal nor even of an offbeat news item, but a current update for the here and now.’”
—Suzanne Buffam