On the surface, these controversies might seem to have little to do with France, except that France and the US loom large for each other whenever the question of truth is brought up: whether we can know it, whether science furnishes it, and so on. American analytic philosophers tend to believe that no French thinker can say anything that is not obfuscatory. In France, meanwhile, what is generically called postmodernism is often written off, with puzzlement or frustration, as a cultural misunderstanding, as what was lost in translation when Derrida landed on American shores all those years ago and set off the mania for “French theory.” Sometimes the “French” part is dropped altogether, and wariness about grand narratives, the absolute authority of science, and such things is treated as if it were invented from scratch in American universities. Three years ago I exited at the wrong metro stop and found myself by accident at the heart of a demonstration of the euphemistically named La Manif pour tous movement, a Catholic-led campaign against same-sex marriage and, crucially for them, homoparentalité, or adoption of children by same-sex couples. The person who had the microphone at the moment I passed by was riling up the crowd with angry denunciations of Judith Butler, and of the importation of “le gender studies” from American university curricula. The crowd hissed and booed, and no one mentioned any of the towering French intellectual precursors to the names and ideas invoked.