When Angela Davis arrived in France in the early 1960s, she quickly learned that the country was not the refuge from Jim Crow racism that the young college student imagined it would be. But France nevertheless had an important impact on her thinking and development, as the turbulant decolonization fights of the decade “nourished her sense of politics.” Later, the country would play another important role in her life, as Alice Kaplan explains in her article in this week’s issue of The Nation, “Dreaming in French.”

—Elizabeth Whitman