Une chasse aux sorcières
Meaning: A campaign of persecution driven by suspicion rather than evidence.
Language: French
Literally: A witch hunt
Category: Daily Life
Origin: The literal hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries supplied the term, and the American hearings of the 1950s fixed its modern political sense. Arthur Miller's The Crucible made the parallel explicit.
More idioms — Daily Life
- Pas besoin de sortir de Saint-Cyr — It doesn't take a genius to work that out.
- Faire table rase — To sweep everything away and start from nothing.
- Rendre son tablier — To resign, usually in protest.
- Sans tambour ni trompette — Discreetly, without any announcement.
- Prendre la tangente — To slip away, or to dodge a question.
- Partir à Tataouine — To be packed off somewhere remote and unpleasant.
More French idioms
- Prendre le taureau par les cornes — To tackle a difficulty head-on instead of avoiding it.
- Les vaches maigres — A period of hardship and scarcity — the opposite of les vaches grasses.
- Les vaches grasses — A period of plenty.
- Aller comme un tablier à une vache — To suit someone appallingly badly.
- Adorer le veau d'or — To make money one's god.
- Une tunique de Nessus — A gift that destroys the person who accepts it.
From our proverbs
- A fool may give a wise man counsel. — Even those lacking judgment can occasionally offer valuable advice through chance or simp…
- Every man is either a fool or a physician after thirty years of age. — Experience either teaches you wisdom or your ignorance becomes permanent folly by middle…
- An old fool is the worst of fools. — Inexperience excuses foolishness; years of repeating mistakes demonstrate willful ignoran…
Loading the full interactive collection…