Wanted : your memories of FUSAC magazine 1988 – 2014
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Wanted : your memories of FUSAC magazine 1988 - 2014
Détails de l'annonce
Rue: 42 rue du Chemin Vert
Code Postal: 92100
Ville: Boulogne Billancourt
Pays: France
Send us your memories ! 2028 marks Fusac’s forty years as one of the most important anglophone lifelines in Paris. Quelle aventure ! Des souvenirs inoubliables !
We’re putting together a book for the occasion and would like to hear from you about your experience reading and using Fusac and how it changed your Parisian life.
Here’s a resumé to jog your memories.
For many expats in France, memories of reading FUSAC (France USA Contacts) are synonymous with the pre-internet era of navigating life in Paris. Since its launch in 1988, the magazine served as the « offline » lifeline for the English-speaking community.
Core Memories of the FUSAC paper version
- The « Expat Bible »: Before digital platforms, FUSAC was the primary source for finding housing, English-speaking jobs (often nannying or teaching or restaurant work), used furniture and household items of all sorts, friends, service providers such as plumbers and electricians, and everything else under the sun.
- Physical Rituals: Readers remember picking up free copies at English-language bookstores, cafes, or the American Church in Paris. The magazine produced over 20 million copies across 523 print issues during its 26-year run. That comes to 9617 days or 316 months or 1373 weeks that Fusac loomed over the anglophone landscape of Paris and France.
- Friendship & Romance: The classifieds were famous for « friendship ads. » At least four marriages are known to have resulted from connections made through FUSAC ads in the 1990s.
- Cultural Benchmarking: A popular feature, « 90+ Ways You Know You’re Becoming French » by Shari Leslie Segall, became a cultural touchstone. It allowed expats to measure their integration through humorous observations and was later published as a standalone book.
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The « Speak Easy Puzzle » was a flagship feature in FUSAC magazine Created by the publication’s founders for the expat and bilingual community in Paris, this linguistic game offered a fun, visual way to master idiomatic expressions in both French and English. The feature presented readers with illustrated word-and-picture puzzles based on colorful cultural idioms. The main goal was to help learners –be they French natives or native anglophones — to bridge the cultural gap and become truly bilingual. It became incredibly popular among expats, language students, and teachers. In fact, readers frequently clipped the pages out of the magazine to save them. It was nuts ! C’était complètement marteau!Modern Evolution
While the print magazine ended in 2014, the brand continues to hold a place in the community:
- Online Presence: The FUSAC website still hosts classified ads, articles, and puzzles.
- Bill & Rosa’s Book Room: The founders, Lisa and John Vanden Bos, transitioned into running a physical space called Bill & Rosa’s Book Room in Boulogne-Billancourt, which serves as a hub for used English books and community gatherings.
- Pop Culture Legacy: Its importance was even immortalized in literature, such as the 2021 novel Em’s Awful Good Fortune, where the protagonist finds a therapist through FUSAC.
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In the 2003 film Love Actually, FUSAC makes a notable cameo that anchors a key romantic storyline in reality.
During the final act, the character Jamie (played by Colin Firth) returns to France to find Aurélia. Upon landing at the Marseille airport, he is seen getting into a taxi while holding a copy of FUSAC. -
In 2000 French journalist Jean-Paul Jody wrote the novel Stringer, published by Editions Babel. FUSAC was mentioned in the novel on page 16 as the main character was seaching for an apartment in Paris:
« …Trois étages plus haut, la chaudière de mon cerveau bouillonnait. J’ai repris mes esprits avant de sonner. Des pas légers ont glissé jusqu’à la porte et se sont arrêtés. Quelqu’un me lorgnait à travers l’oeilleton. J’ai tendu l’exemplaire de FUSAC dans lequel la fille avait fait paraître son annonce. La porte s’est entrouverte… »
- Read more about Fusac cultural references here : https://fusac.fr/fusac-in-pop-culture/
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Protests in Paris and Martine Frank
Protests in Paris and Martine Frank
Protests in Paris and Martine Frank
Images, Press and Feminist Struggles
Photographic exhibit until March 7, 2027
In the 1970s, Martine Franck (1938-2012) photographed feminist struggles, primarily in Paris. As a woman photographer, the attention she paid to the mobilizations of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) protests in Paris and elsewhere shaped her outlook on the social world and would durably orient her body of work.
The question of images became central to feminist struggles in reaction to media representations within a dominant visual culture, one that objectified women’s bodies and could distort or discredit their demands. As a founding member of the Viva agency (1972), Martine Franck shared this vigilance toward images. Viva was conceived as a "refuge for photographers who understand the reach of the image, know its informative power, refuse the uses that could be made of it, and do not want to escape their social reality."
This exhibition …
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about Protests in Paris and Martine Frank
484,000 Trees in Paris and counting
484,000 Trees in Paris and counting
There are more than 484,000 trees in Paris! This makes Paris one of the most treed cities in Europe and here we’re only counting the «public» trees.
trees lining public streets (96 500);
trees in parks and gardens (36 500);
trees in cemeteries (34 000);
trees along the Péripherique (8000);
trees in school yards and sports areas (9 000);
trees in the bois de Boulogne et Vincennes (300 000) for a total of 160 species.
Most trees in public spaces and lining streets live to just 60 to 80 years. Trees have a tough time dealing with pollution and other incidents of city life. But there are still 222 remarkable trees in Paris that have been classified by the city. The 222 are remarkable either for their beauty or fantastic shape, their history or their rarity. Here are a few of the trees deemed remarkable in our fair city. A list and map of 60 trees worth seeing is available on http://www.paris.fr
Brochure: https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2019/07/24/c99…
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about 484,000 Trees in Paris and counting