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By Area: France

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eBook available March 2010
Alsace to the Alsatians?

Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939

Fischer, C. J.

The region of Alsace, located between the hereditary enemies of France and Germany, served as a trophy of war four times between 1870–1945. With each shift, French and German officials sought to win the allegiance of the local populace. In response to these pressures, Alsatians invoked regionalism—articulated as a political language, a cultural vision, and a community of identity—not only to define and defend their own interests against the nationalist claims of France and Germany, but also to push for social change, defend religious rights, and promote the status of the region within the larger national community. Alsatian regionalism however, was neither unitary nor unifying, as Alsatians themselves were divided politically, socially, and culturally. The author shows that the Janus-faced character of Alsatian regionalism points to the ambiguous role of regional identity in both fostering and inhibiting loyalty to the nation. Finally, the author uses the case of Alsace to explore the traditional designations of French civic nationalism versus German ethnic nationalism and argues for the strong similarities between the two countries’ conceptions of nationhood.

Subject: General History
October 2005
The Art of the Project

Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture

Gratton, J. & Sheringham†, M. (eds)

The idea of the ‘project’ crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as ‘projects’, remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the ‘project’. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.

Subject: General Cultural Studies
March 2015
At Home in Postwar France

Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort

Rudolph, N. C.

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors — state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers — arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects’, planners’, and residents’ understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.

Subjects: Postwar History Urban Studies
January 2006
A Belle Epoque?

Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture 1890-1914

Holmes, D. & Tarr, C. (eds)

The Third Republic, known as the ‘belle époque’, was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women’s history.

Subjects: Gender Studies General Cultural Studies 18th/19th Century History
May 2006
The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789-1815

Heller, H.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public.

Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.

Subjects: Economic History 18th/19th Century History
July 2017
The Bressonians

French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship

Morari, C.

How should we understand film authorship in an era when the idea of the solitary and sovereign auteur has come under attack, with critics proclaiming the death of the author and the end of cinema? The Bressonians provides an answer in the form of a strikingly original study of Bresson and his influence on the work of filmmakers Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat. Extending the discourse of authorship beyond the idea of a singular visionary, it explores how the imperatives of excellence function within cinema’s pluralistic community. Bresson’s example offered both an artistic legacy and a creative burden within which filmmakers reckoned in different, often arduous, and altogether compelling ways.

Subject: Film Studies
eBook available July 2012
Building a European Identity

France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973-74

Gfeller, A. E.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the first oil price shock, and France’s transition from Gaullist to centrist rule in 1974 coincided with the United States’ attempt to redefine transatlantic relations. As the author argues, this was an important moment in which the French political elite responded with an unprecedented effort to construct an internationally influential and internally cohesive European entity. Based on extensive multi-archival research, this study combines analysis of French policy making with an inquiry into the evolution of political language, highlighting the significance of the new concept of a political European identity.

Subject: Postwar History
eBook available April 2018
Burgundy

A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste

Demossier, M.

Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social, and cultural world of Burgundy wines, the role of terroir, and its transnational deployment in China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. It demystifies the terroir ideology by providing a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept. While the Burgundian model of terroir has gone global by acquiring UNESCO world heritage status, its very legitimacy is now being challenged amongst the vineyards where it first took root.

Subjects: General Anthropology Food & Nutrition General Cultural Studies
January 2001
Categories and Classifications

Maussian Reflections on the Social

Allen, N. J.

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Durkheim's nephew, was a key figure among Durkheimians and helped to found the distinctive French tradition in the social sciences at the start of the 20th century. He dominated the teaching of social anthropology in Paris between the Wars, and his Essay on the Gift (1925) is a well established classic. However, it is only recently that the breadth and freshness of his oeuvre as a whole is being reassessed and is gaining wider appreciation.

Having found inspiration in Mauss's texts for over twenty years, the author here explores not only what he thought but also how his ideas can be developed and applied in new ways. Thus Durkheim and Mauss's notion of "primitive classification," often misunderstood, is well exemplified by Indo-European ideology as analysed by Georges Dumezil and current comparativists, and it is argued that this ancient ideology influenced the Durkheimian classification of "social facts." Mauss's reflections on kinship and social aggregation point us towards aspects of proto-human societies that are underemphasized by contemporary palaeoanthropology, and his vision of world history in terms of emic categories - fundamental ideas such as person, space, totality, substance - casts new light on much we take for granted, as well as on The Gift. Mauss specialized in religion, and his treatment of the rubric goes beyond his uncle's unitary definition in terms of the sacred.

In assembling and presenting his essays on this intellectual giant, the author tries both to convey the range and quality of Mauss's mind and to take further his scattered and partial insights.

Subject: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology
March 2019
Categories in Context

Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

Berrebi-Hoffmann, I., Giraud, O., Renard, L., & Wobbe, T. (eds)

Despite the wealth of empirical research currently available on the interrelationships of gender and labor, we still know comparatively little about the forms of classification and categorization that have helped shape these social phenomena over time. Categories in Context seeks to enrich our understanding of how cognitive categories such as status, law, and rights have been produced, comprehended, appropriated, and eventually transformed by relevant actors. By focusing on specific developments in France and Germany through a transnational lens, this volume produces insights that can be applied to a wide variety of political, social, and historical contexts.

Subjects: Gender Studies General History Sociology
April 2006
Claims to Memory

Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean

Reinhardt C.

Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.

Subjects: Colonialism General Cultural Studies
July 2009
Colette's Republic

Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914

Tilburg, P. A.

In France’s Third Republic, secularism was, for its adherents, a new faith, a civic religion founded on a rabid belief in progress and the Enlightenment conviction that men (and women) could remake their world. And yet with all of its pragmatic smoothing over of the supernatural edges of Catholicism, the Third Republic engendered its own fantastical ways of seeing by embracing observation, corporeal dynamism, and imaginative introspection. How these republican ideals and the new national education system of the 1870s and 80s - the structure meant to impart these ideals - shaped belle époque popular culture is the focus of this book. The author reassesses the meaning of secularization and offers a cultural history of this period by way of an interrogation of several fraught episodes which, although seemingly disconnected, shared an attachment to the potent moral and aesthetic directives of French republicanism: a village’s battle to secularize its schools, a scandalous novel, a vaudeville hit featuring a nude celebrity, and a craze for female boxing. Beginning with the writer and performer Colette (1873–1954) as a point of entry, this re-evaluation of belle époque popular culture probes the startling connections between republican values of labor and physical health on the one hand, and the cultural innovations of the decades preceding World War I on the other.

Subjects: Gender Studies 18th/19th Century History General Cultural Studies
eBook available March 2011
Collective Terms

Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

Epstein, B. S.

The banlieue, the mostly poor and working-class suburbs located on the outskirts of major cities in France, gained international media attention in late 2005 when riots broke out in some 250 such towns across the country. Pitting first- and second-generation immigrant teenagers against the police, the riots were an expression of the multiplicity of troubles that have plagued these districts for decades. This study provides an ethnographic account of life in a Parisian banlieue and examines how the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their collective life. The book focuses on the French ideal of integration and its consequences within the multicultural context of contemporary France. Based on research conducted in a state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, the book also provides a view on how the French state has used urban planning to shore up national priorities for social integration. Collective Terms proposes an alternative reading of French multiculturalism, suggesting fresh ways for thinking through the complex mix of race, class, nation, and culture that increasingly defines the modern urban experience.

Subjects: Urban Studies General Anthropology
July 2010
Comics in French

The European Bande Dessinée in Context

Grove, L.

Whereas in English-speaking countries comics are for children or adults ‘who should know better’, in France and Belgium the form is recognized as the ‘Ninth Art’ and follows in the path of poetry, architecture, painting and cinema. The bande dessinée [comic strip] has its own national institutions, regularly obtains front-page coverage and has received the accolades of statesmen from De Gaulle onwards. On the way to providing a comprehensive introduction to the most francophone of cultural phenomena, this book considers national specificity as relevant to an anglophone reader, whilst exploring related issues such as text/image expression, historical precedents and sociological implication. To do so it presents and analyses priceless manuscripts, a Franco- American rodent, Nazi propaganda, a museum-piece urinal, intellectual gay porn and a prehistoric warrior who's really Zinedine Zidane.

Subject: General Cultural Studies
February 2019
Concentrationary Art

Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean, and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts

Pollock, G. & Silverman, M. (eds)

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol’s key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

Subjects: General Cultural Studies Genocide Studies Postwar History
eBook available January 2012
Concentrationary Cinema

Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog

Pollock, G. & Silverman, M. (eds)

Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, identified on his return in 1945 as the ‘concentrationary universe’ which, now actualized, might release its totalitarian plague any time and anywhere? What kind of memory does the film create to warn us of the continued presence of this concentrationary universe? This international collection re-examines Resnais’s benchmark film in terms of both its political and historical context of representation of the camps and of other instances of the concentrationary in contemporary cinema. Through a range of critical readings, Concentrationary Cinema explores the cinematic aesthetics of political resistance not to the Holocaust as such but to the political novelty of absolute power represented by the concentrationary system and its assault on the human condition.

Subjects: Film Studies Genocide Studies General Cultural Studies
eBook available July 2010
Constructing Charisma

Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Berenson, E. & Giloi, E. (eds)

Railroads, telegraphs, lithographs, photographs, and mass periodicals—the major technological advances of the 19th century seemed to diminish the space separating people from one another, creating new and apparently closer, albeit highly mediated, social relationships. Nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in the relationship between celebrity and fan, leader and follower, the famous and the unknown. By mid-century, heroes and celebrities constituted a new and powerful social force, as innovations in print and visual media made it possible for ordinary people to identify with the famous; to feel they knew the hero, leader, or "star"; to imagine that public figures belonged to their private lives. This volume examines the origins and nature of modern mass media and the culture of celebrity and fame they helped to create. Crossing disciplines and national boundaries, the book focuses on arts celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Byron and Liszt); charismatic political figures (Napoleon and Wilhelm II); famous explorers (Stanley and Brazza); and celebrated fictional characters (Cyrano de Bergerac).

Subject: General History
February 2002
Crisis and Renewal in France, 1918-1962

Mouré, K. & Alexander, M. S. (eds)

Since 1914, the French state has faced a succession of daunting and at times almost insurmountable crises. The turbulent decades from 1914 to 1969 witnessed near-defeat in 1914, economic and political crisis in 1926, radical political polarization in the 1930s, military conquest in 1940, the deep division of France during the Nazi Occupation, political reconstruction after 1944, de-colonization (with threatening civil war provoked by the Algerian crisis), and dramatic postwar modernization. However, this tumultuous period was not marked just by crises but also by tremendous change. Economic, social and political "modernization" transformed France in the twentieth century, restoring its confidence and its influence as a leader in global economic and political affairs. This combination of crises and renewal has received surprisingly little attention in recent years.

The present collection show-cases significant new scholarship, reflecting greater access to French archival sources, and focuses on the role of crises in fostering modernization in areas covering politics, economics, women, diplomacy and war.

Subject: 20th Century History
eBook available May 2011
The Devil's Captain

Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

Mitchell†, A.

Author of Nazi Paris, a Choice Academic Book of the Year, Allan Mitchell has researched a companion volume concerning the acclaimed and controversial German author Ernst Jünger who, if not the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly was the most controversial. His service as a military officer during the occupation of Paris, where his principal duty was to mingle with French intellectuals such as Jean Cocteau and with visiting German celebrities like Martin Heidegger, was at the center of disputes concerning his career. Spending more than three years in the French capital, he regularly recorded in a journal revealing impressions of Parisian life and also managed to establish various meaningful social contacts, with the intriguing Sophie Ravoux for one. By focusing on this episode, the most important of Jünger’s adult life, the author brings to bear a wide reading of journals and correspondence to reveal Jünger’s professional and personal experience in wartime and thereafter. This new perspective on the war years adds significantly to our understanding of France's darkest hour.

Subjects: WWII History General Cultural Studies
October 2002
Durkheim Today

Pickering†, W. S. F. (ed)

There has been a growing interest in Durkheim, founding father of sociology, since the 1970s. This volume takes a look at the current stage of Durkheimian studies, pointing out paths scholars are now following as they examine the various themes of study that Durkheim opened up to the academic world. They clearly demonstrate the continuing importance of Durkheim's works and the benefits to be derived from re-reading them in the light of contemporary social developments.

Subjects: Sociology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology
November 1999
Essay on Time

A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic

Hubert, H.

Time, as we experience it, is a social and cultural phenomenon. The pioneering study of the social representation of time was by Henri Hubert (1872-1927). Hubert was a core member of the group who worked with Émile Durkheim and a close collaborator with Marcel Mauss. His essay on time is a good example of the group's originality and intellectually creative "collective ferment." This is its first English translation, and includes its review by Mauss.

Subjects: Sociology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology
September 2015
The Event of Charlie Hebdo

Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

Zagato, A. (ed)

The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.

Subjects: General Anthropology Sociology General Cultural Studies
eBook available October 2011
Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema

A Sartrean Perspective

Boulé, J.-P. & MacCaffrey, E. (eds)

At the heart of this volume is the assertion that Sartrean existentialism, most prominent in the 1940s, particularly in France, is still relevant as a way of interpreting the world today. Film, by reflecting philosophical concerns in the actions and choices of characters, continues and extends a tradition in which art exemplifies the understanding of existentialist philosophy. In a scholarly yet accessible style, the contributors exploit the rich interplay between Sartre’s philosophy, plays and novels, and a number of contemporary films including No Country for Old Men, Lost in Translation and The Truman Show, with film-makers including the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, and Mike Leigh. This volume will be of interest to students who are coming to Sartre’s work for the first time and to those who would like to read films within an existentialist perspective.

Subject: Film Studies
eBook available September 2012
Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema

A Beauvoirian Perspective

Boulé, J.-P. & Tidd, U. (eds)

Simone de Beauvoir’s work has not often been associated with film studies, which appears paradoxical when it is recognized that she was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered ‘othering’ gaze. This book is an attempt to redress this balance and reopen the dialogue between Beauvoir’s writings and film studies. The authors analyse a range of films, from directors including Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Lucille Hadzihalilovic, Sam Mendes, and Sally Potter, by drawing from Beauvoir’s key works such as The Second Sex (1949), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Old Age (1970).

Subject: Film Studies
eBook available March 2010
'For Their Own Good'

Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945

Torrie, J. S.

The early twentieth-century advent of aerial bombing made successful evacuations essential to any war effort, but ordinary people resented them deeply. Based on extensive archival research in Germany and France, this is the first broad, comparative study of civilian evacuations in Germany and France during World War II. The evidence uncovered exposes the complexities of an assumed monolithic and all-powerful Nazi state by showing that citizens' objections to evacuations, which were rooted in family concerns, forced changes in policy. Drawing attention to the interaction between the Germans and French throughout World War II, this book shows how policies in each country were shaped by events in the other. A truly cross-national comparison in a field dominated by accounts of one country or the other, this book provides a unique historical context for addressing current concerns about the impact of air raids and military occupations on civilians.

Subject: WWII History
April 2010
Forging Political Identity

Silk and Metal Workers in Lyon, France 1900-1939

Mann, K.

Escaping the traditional focus on Paris, the author examines the divergent political identities of two occupational groups in Lyon, metal and silk workers, who, despite having lived and worked in the same city, developed different patterns of political practices and bore distinct political identities. This book also examines in detail the way that gender relations influenced industrial change, skill, and political identity. Combining empirical data collected in French archives with social science theory and methods, this study argues that political identities were shaped by the intersection of the prevailing political climate with the social relations surrounding work in specific industrial settings.

Subjects: Economic History 20th Century History
August 2016
The France of the Little-Middles

A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

Cartier, M., Coutant, I., Masclet, O., & Siblot, Y.

The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

Subjects: Sociology General Anthropology Urban Studies
January 2015
France After 2012

Goodliffe, G. & Brizzi, R. (eds)

In May 2012, French voters rejected the liberalizing policies of Nicolas Sarkozy and elected his opponent, the Socialist François Hollande, president. In June 2012, the incumbent president’s center-right UMP party was swept out of government in the ensuing parliamentary elections, giving way to a new center-left majority in the National Assembly. This book analyzes the contexts and results of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections in France. It assesses the legacies of the Sarkozy presidency that informed the 2012 electoral campaigns, scrutinizing his domestic social and economic policies on the one hand and European and foreign policies on the other. In turn, the elections’ outcomes are also analyzed from the standpoint of various political parties and other institutional interests in France, and the results are situated within the broader run of French political history. Finally, the book examines the principal challenges facing the Hollande administration and new government of Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and assesses how effectively these have been met during their first year in office.

Subject: Postwar History
June 1995
France and America in the Revolutionary Era

The Life of Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, 1725-1803

Schaeper, T. J.

This is the first detailed study account of the life and career of Chaumont whose chief claim to fame was the fact that from 1777 to 1785 Benjamin Franklin lived in his home in the Parisian suburb of Passy. Basing his work on documents from two dozen archives in the United States and France, Schaeper demonstrates that Chaumont was far more than merely a landlord. Prior to the American Revolution he had become one of the most powerful and respected businessmen of the Old Regime. For personal as well as patriotic reasons he aided the American insurgents and worked with a wide array of persons. In addition to Franklin, these included John Adams, Silas Deane, Caron de Beaumarchais, the marquis de Lafayette and the comte de Vergennes. Chaumont performed an astounding range of services - acting as intermediary, an adviser, and a supplier of arms and clothing. His most dramatic contribution to the American cause involved John Paul Jones. It was Chaumont who obtained the famous Bonhomme Richard for the commodore. Through looking at the activities of this intriguing individual the author is able to offer many new insights into both American and French history. Lively and well written this biography will appeal to both the historian and the general reader.

Subject: 18th/19th Century History
December 2007
France and the Construction of Europe, 1944-2007

The Geopolitical Imperative

Sutton, M.

In the second half of the twentieth century France played the greatest role - even greater than Germany’s - in shaping what eventually became the European Union. By the early twenty-first century, however, in a hugely transformed Europe, this era had patently come to an end. This comprehensive history shows how France coupled the pursuit of power and the furtherance of European integration over a sixty-year period, from the close of the Second World War to the hesitation caused by the French electorate’s referendum rejection of the European Union’s constitutional treaty in 2005.

Subjects: Economic History Postwar History
June 2019
France and the German Question, 1945–1990

Bozo, F. & Wenkel, C. (eds)

In the immediate aftermath of World War Two, the victors were unable to agree on Germany’s fate, and the separation of the country—the result of the nascent Cold War—emerged as a de facto, if provisional, settlement. Yet East and West Germany would exist apart for half a century, making the "German question" a central foreign policy issue—and given the war-torn history between the two countries, this was felt no more keenly than in France. Drawing on the most recent historiography and previously untapped archival sources, this volume shows how France’s approach to the German question was, for the duration of the Cold War, both more constructive and consequential than has been previously acknowledged.

Subject: Postwar History
November 2000
France At War in the Twentieth Century

Propaganda, Myth, and Metaphor

Holman, V. & Kelly, D. (eds)

France experienced four major conflicts in the fifty years between 1914 and 1964: two world wars, and the wars in Indochina and Algeria. In each the role of myth was intricately bound up with memory, hope, belief, and ideas of nation. This is the first book to explore how individual myths were created, sustained, and used for purposes of propaganda, examining in detail not just the press, radio, photographs, posters, films, and songs that gave credence to an imagined event or attributed mythical status to an individual, but also the cultural processes by which such artifacts were disseminated and took effect.

Reliance on myth, so the authors argue, is shown to be one of the most significant and durable features of 20th century warfare propaganda, used by both sides in all the conflicts covered in this book. However, its effective and useful role in time of war notwithstanding, it does distort a population's perception of reality and therefore often results in defeat: the myth-making that began as a means of sustaining belief in France's supremacy, and later her will and ability to resist, ultimately proved counterproductive in the process of decolonization.

Subjects: 20th Century History WWI History WWII History
June 2011
France in the Age of Organization

Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy

Clarke, J.

In interwar France, there was a growing sense that ‘organization’ was the solution to the nation’s perceived social, economic and political ills. This book examines the roots of this idea in the industrial rationalization movement and its manifestations in areas as diverse as domestic organization and economic planning. In doing so, it shows how experts in fields ranging from engineering to the biological sciences shaped visions of a rational socio-economic order from the 1920s to Vichy and beyond.

Subject: 20th Century History
May 2005
France in the Era of Fascism

Essays on the French Authoritarian Right

Jenkins, B. (ed)

France's response to the rise of European fascism during the 1930s, and subsequently to the Nazi occupation 1940-44, has been a difficult subject for the nation’s historians. The consensus amongst leading French authorities on the period has been the claim that France was largely 'immune' to fascism in the 1930s, and that the Vichy regime was an aberration produced by defeat and occupation. Over the last 30 years, this position has gradually been undermined, mainly through the work of foreign scholars, but it nonetheless remains intact. This volume brings together for the first time the leading critics of the standard French interpretation, who have used these essays to refine and update their positions, or to move the debate onto new terrain.

Subject: WWII History
November 2012
The French Road Movie

Space, Mobility, Identity

Archer, N.

The traditionally American genre of the road movie has been explored and reconfigured in the French context since the later 1960s. Comparative in its approach, this book studies the inter-relationship between American and French culture and cinemas, and in the process considers and challenges histories of the road movie. It combines film history with film theory methodologies, analysing transformations in social, political and film-industrial contexts alongside changing perspectives on the meaning and possibilities of film. At once chronological and thematic in structure, The French Road Movie provides in each chapter a comprehensive introduction to key themes emerging from the genre in the French context – liberty, identity and citizenship, masculinity, femininity, border-crossing – followed by detailed, innovative and often revisionist readings of the chosen films. Through these readings the author justifies the place of the road genre within French cinema histories and reinvigorates this often neglected and misunderstood area of study.

Subjects: Film Studies General Mobility Studies
August 1997
The French Defeat of 1940

Reassessments

Blatt, J. (ed)

Why France, the major European continental victor in 1918, suffered total defeat in six weeks at the hands of the vanquished power of 1918 only two decades later remains moot. Why the stunning reversal of fortunes? In this volume thirteen prominent scholars reexamine the French debacle of 1940 in interwar perspectives, utilizing fresh analysis, original approaches, and new sources. Although the tenor of the volume is critical, the contributors also suggest that French preparations for war knew successes as well as failures, that French defeat was not inevitable, and that the Battle of France might have turned out differently if different choices had been made and other paths been followed.

Subject: WWII History
December 2004
The French Exception

Godin, E. & Chafer, T. (eds)

The notion of French exceptionalism is deeply embedded in the nation's self-image and in a range of political and academic discourses. Recently, the debate about whether France really is "exceptional" has acquired a critical edge. Against the background of introspection about the nature of "national identity," some proclaim "normalisation" and the end of French exceptionalism, while others point out to the continuing evidence that France remains distinctive at a number of levels, from popular culture to public policy. This book explores the notion of French exceptionalism, places it in its European context, examines its history and evaluate its continuing relevance in a range of fields from politics and public policy to popular culture and sport.

Subject: General History
eBook available January 2014
The French Right Between the Wars

Political and Intellectual Movements from Conservatism to Fascism

Kalman, S. & Kennedy, S. (eds)

During the interwar years France experienced severe political polarization. At the time many observers, particularly on the left, feared that the French right had embraced fascism, generating a fierce debate that has engaged scholars for decades, but has also obscured critical changes in French society and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of essays shifts the focus away from long-standing controversies in order to examine various elements of the French right, from writers to politicians, social workers to street fighters, in their broader social, cultural, and political contexts. It offers a wide-ranging reassessment of the structures, mentalities, and significance of various conservative and extremist organizations, deepening our understanding of French and European history in a troubled yet fascinating era.

Subject: 20th Century History
March 2013
French Film in Britain

Sex, Art and Cinephilia

Mazdon, L. & Wheatley, C.

In a market long dominated by Hollywood, French films are consistently the most widely distributed non-English language works. French cinema, however, appears to undergo a transformation as it reaches Britain, becoming something quite different to that experienced by audiences at home. Drawing on extensive archival research the authors examine in detail the discourses, debates and decisions which have determined the place accorded to French cinema in British film culture. In so doing they provide a fascinating account of this particular instance of transnational cinematic traffic while simultaneously shedding new light on British film history. From the early days of the Film Society, via the advent of the X certificate to the new possibilities of video and DVD, this book reveals the complex and detailed history of the distribution, exhibition, marketing and reception of French cinema in Britain.

Subject: Film Studies
eBook available August 2016
French Foreign Policy since 1945

An Introduction

Bozo, F.

When Charles de Gaulle declared that “it is because we are no longer a great power that we need a grand policy,” he neatly summarized France’s predicament on the world scene. In this compact and engaging history, author Frédéric Bozo deftly recounts France’s efforts to reconcile its proud history and global ambitions with a realistic appraisal of its capabilities, from the aftermath of World War II to the present. He provides insightful analysis of the nation’s triumphs and setbacks through the years of decolonization, Cold War maneuvering, and European unification, as well as the more contemporary challenges posed by an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world.

Subject: Postwar History
June 2004
French Intellectuals Against the Left

The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s

Christofferson, M. S.

In the latter half of the 1970s, the French intellectual Left denounced communism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics through a critique of left-wing totalitarianism that paved the way for today's postmodern, liberal, and moderate republican political options. Contrary to the dominant understanding of the critique of totalitarianism as an abrupt rupture induced by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Christofferson argues that French anti-totalitarianism was the culmination of direct-democratic critiques of communism and revisions of the revolutionary project after 1956. The author's focus on the direct-democratic politics of French intellectuals offers an important alternative to recent histories that seek to explain the course of French intellectual politics by France's apparent lack of a liberal tradition.

Subject: Postwar History
January 2003
French Women in Politics: Writing Power

Paternal Legitimization and Maternal Legacies

Ramsay, R. L.

Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.

Subject: Gender Studies
eBook available September 2013
General de Gaulle's Cold War

Challenging American Hegemony, 1963-68

Martin, G. J.

The greatest threat to the Western alliance in the 1960s did not come from an enemy, but from an ally. France, led by its mercurial leader General Charles de Gaulle, launched a global and comprehensive challenge to the United State’s leadership of the Free World, tackling not only the political but also the military, economic, and monetary spheres. Successive American administrations fretted about de Gaulle, whom they viewed as an irresponsible nationalist at best and a threat to their presence in Europe at worst. Based on extensive international research, this book is an original analysis of France’s ambitious grand strategy during the 1960s and why it eventually failed. De Gaulle’s failed attempt to overcome the Cold War order reveals important insights about why the bipolar international system was able to survive for so long, and why the General’s legacy remains significant to current French foreign policy.

Subject: Postwar History
December 2006
God's Eugenicist

Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline

Reggiani, A

The temptations of a new genetically informed eugenics and of a revived faith-based, world-wide political stance, this study of the interaction of science, religion, politics and the culture of celebrity in twentieth-century Europe and America offers a fascinating and important contribution to the history of this movement. The author looks at the career of French-born physician and Nobel Prize winner, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), as a way of understanding the popularization of eugenics through religious faith, scientific expertise, cultural despair and right-wing politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Carrel was among the most prestigious experimental surgeons of his time who also held deeply illiberal views. In Man, the Unknown (1935), he endorsed fascism and called for the elimination of the "unfit." The book became a huge international success, largely thanks to its promotion by Readers' Digest as well as by the author's friendship with Charles Lindbergh. In 1941, he went into the service of the French pro-German regime of Vichy, which appointed him to head an institution of eugenics research. His influence was remarkable, affecting radical Islamic groups as well Le Pen’s Front National that celebrated him as the "founder of ecology."

Subject: General History
September 2000
The Great Train Race

Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815-1914

Mitchell†, A.

From their origins, railways produced an intense competition between the two major continental systems in France and Germany. Fitting a new technology into existing political institutions and social habits, these two nations became inexorably involved in industrial and commercial rivalry that eventually escalated into the armed conflict of 1914. Based on many years of research in French and German archives, this study examines the adaptation of railroads and steam engines from Britain to the continent of Europe after the Napoleonic age. A fascinating example of how the same technology, borrowed at the same time from the same source, was assimilated differently by the two continental powers, this book offers a groundbreaking analysis of the crossroads of technology and politics during the first Industrial Revolution.

Subjects: 18th/19th Century History 20th Century History
March 2003
Group Identities on French and British Television

Scriven, M. & Roberts, E. (eds)

Advances in audiovisual technology, most notably the advent of the popular usage of digital technology in the last few years, have altered the face of popular television. Thanks to cable, satellite and now digital technology, television broadcasts can reach an international audience. The reaction from cultural critics has been mixed. As the debate concerning the effects of new telecommunications and audiovisual technology continues unabated, this book examines the underlying hypothesis that collective allegiances are moving away from the national paradigm towards the global/local model and provides a balanced appraisal of the depiction of a select number of group identities on television in Britain and France.

Subjects: Media Studies General Cultural Studies Sociology
March 2005
Holocaust Monuments and National Memory

France and Germany since 1989

Carrier, P.

Since 1989, two sites of memory with respect to the deportation and persecution of Jews in France and Germany during the Second World War have received intense public attention: the Vélo d'Hiver (Winter Velodrome) in Paris and the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe or Holocaust Monument in Berlin. Why is this so? Both monuments, the author argues, are unique in the history of memorial projects. Although they are genuine "sites of memory", neither monument celebrates history, but rather serve as platforms for the deliberation, negotiation and promotion of social consensus over the memorial status of war crimes in France and Germany. The debates over these monuments indicate that it is the communication among members of the public via the mass media, rather than qualities inherent in the sites themselves, which transformed these sites into symbols beyond traditional conceptions of heritage and patriotism.

Subjects: Postwar History Genocide Studies
June 2001
Human Nature and the French Revolution

From the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code

Martin, X.

What view of man did the French Revolutionaries hold? Anyone who purports to be interested in the "Rights of Man" could be expected to see this question as crucial and yet, surprisingly, it is rarely raised. Through his work as a legal historian, Xavier Martin came to realize that there is no unified view of man and that, alongside the "official" revolutionary discourse, very divergent views can be traced in a variety of sources from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Code. Michelet's phrases, "Know men in order to act upon them" sums up the problem that Martin's study constantly seeks to elucidate and illustrate: it reveals the prevailing tendency to see men as passive, giving legislators and medical people alike free rein to manipulate them at will. His analysis impels the reader to revaluate the Enlightenment concept of humanism. By drawing on a variety of sources, the author shows how the anthropology of Enlightenment and revolutionary France often conflicts with concurrent discourses.

Subjects: General Cultural Studies 18th/19th Century History
January 1997
Humanity's Soldier

France and International Security, 1919-2001

Chuter, D.

French security policy has posed a puzzle to many people outside France, including politicians and even defense specialists such as the author, who took time off from his administrative position in Whitehall in order to study French thinking about security in detail. As with many other studies, he takes as his point of departure the traumatic defeat of 1940 but argues that the origins of current French policy are grounded in events and ideas that go back hundreds of years. They are ideas that are scarcely known or often misinterpreted in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Subject: 20th Century History
July 2004
The Imaginary Revolution

Parisian Students and Workers in 1968

Seidman, M.

The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.

Subject: Postwar History
November 2004
The Inverted Mirror

Mythologizing the Enemy in France and Germany, 1898-1914

Nolan, M. E.

It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other - distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility between the two countries in the years before the First World War. Most remarkably, as the author discovered, the qualities each country ascribed to its chief adversary appeared to be exaggerated or negative versions of precisely those qualities that it perceived to be lacking or inadequate in itself. Moreover, banishing undesirable traits and projecting them onto another people was also an essential step in the consolidation of national identity. As such, it established a pattern that has become all too familiar to students of nationalism and xenophobia in recent decades. This study shows that antagonism between states is not a fact of nature but socially constructed.

Subject: 20th Century History
May 2000
The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution, 1793-1795

Kennedy, M. L.

A pendant to two well-received books by the same author on the departmental clubs during the early years of the Revolution, this book is the product of thirty years of scholarly study, including archival research in Paris and in more than seventy departments in France. It focuses on the twenty-eight months from May 1793 to August 1795, a period spanning the Federalist Revolt, the Terror, and the Thermidorian Reaction. The Federalist Revolt, in which many clubs were involved, had momentous consequences for all of them and was, in the local setting, the principal cause of the Reign of Terror, a period in which more than 5,300 communes had clubs that reached the zenith of their power and influence, engaging in a myriad of political, administrative, judicial, religious, economic, social, and war-related activities. The book ends with their decline and final dissolution by a decree of the Convention in Paris.

Subject: 18th/19th Century History
July 2003
L'Evaluation en Comité

A Textes et rapports de souscription au Comité destravaux historiques et scientifiques, 1903-1917

Durkheim, E.

Durkheim wrote hitherto unknown and unpublished reports for the social and economic sciences section of the government's Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. There are 56 reports in all, each reviewing a book - e.g. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience - and recommending whether or not to purchase it for state-funded libraries.

The reports are of considerable interest in their range, content and confidential nature. This critical and fully annotated edition makes them available for the first time, along with reports that others made to the committee on Durkheim's own books. The context is explained in an editorial introduction, 'Durkheim au CTHS', and in a specially commissioned essay by the historian of philosophy and social science in the Third Republic, Jean-Louis Fabiani.

Subjects: Sociology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology
April 2010
The Life of Property

House, Family and Inheritance in Béarn, South-West France

Jenkins, T.

In Béarn, a region of south-west France, longstanding and resilient ideas of property and practices of inheritance control the destinies of those living in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research that combines ethnography and intellectual history, this study explores the long-term continuities of this particular way of life within a broad framework. These local ideas have found expression twice at the national level. First, sociological arguments about the family, proposed by Frédéric Le Play, shaped debates on social reform and the repair of national identity during the last third of the nineteenth century – and these debates would subsequently influence contemporary European thought and social policy. Second, these local ideas entered into late twentieth-century sociological categories through the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu. Through these examples and others, the author illustrates the multi-layered life of these local concepts and practices and the continuing contribution of the local to modern European national history.

Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology General History
October 2009
Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification

Bozo, F.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this important book explores the role of France in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War and German unification. Most accounts concentrate on the role of the United States and look at these events through the bipolar prism of Soviet-American relations. Yet because of its central position in Europe and of its status as Germany’s foremost European partner, France and its President, François Mitterrand, played a decisive role in these pivotal international events: the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet rule starting in 1988, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s return to unity and full sovereignty in 1989/90, and the breakup of the USSR in 1991. Based on extensive research and a vast amount of archival sources, this book explores the role played by France in shaping a new European order.

Subject: Postwar History
December 1994
Montaigne Amongst the Moderns

Receptions of the Essays

Marchi, D.

Montaigne is one of the most cross-cultural writers ever – both in the assimilation of writings from other cultures into his own work and in the subsequent translations, critical receptions, and creative adaptations of the Essais by other writers throughout the world for the last four hundred years. His work is generally considered as exemplary of the European Renaissance, yet also demonstrates a remarkable relevance to the literary and intellectual activity at the present time. However, whereas there has been an abundance of commentary on Montaigne during the first centuries after his death, much less attention has been paid to his impact on writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly those outside France. This study redresses the imbalance.

By establishing a stylistic and ideological relationship between Montaigne’s work and that of such writers as Emerson, Nietzsche, Pater, Woolf, and Sollers, we not only gain a greater appreciation of the richness of the Essays, but also of some of the roots of modernist and postmodernist writing.

Subject: General Cultural Studies
eBook available July 2016
National Policy, Global Memory

The Commemoration of the “Righteous” from Jerusalem to Paris, 1942-2007

Gensburger, S.

Since 1963, the state of Israel has awarded the title of “Righteous among the Nations” to individuals who risked their lives sheltering Jews during the Holocaust. This distinction remained solely an Israeli initiative until the late 1990s, when European governments began developing their own national categories, the most prominent of which was the “Righteous of France,” honoring those who protected Jews during the Vichy regime. In National Policy, Global Memory, Sarah Gensburger uses this dramatic episode to lend a new perspective to debates over memory and nationhood. In particular, she works to combine two often divergent disciplines—memory studies and political science—to study “memory politics” as a form of public policy.

Subjects: Postwar History Genocide Studies
eBook available July 2014
Nationalism and the Cinema in France

Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995

Frey, H.

It is often taken for granted that French cinema is intimately connected to the nation’s sense of identity and self-confidence. But what do we really know about that relationship? What are the nuances, insider codes, and hidden history of the alignment between cinema and nationalism? Hugo Frey suggests that the concepts of the ‘political myth’ and ‘the film event’ are the essential theoretical reference points for unlocking film history. Nationalism and the Cinema in France offers new arguments regarding those connections in the French case, examining national elitism, neo-colonialism, and other exclusionary discourses, as well as discussing for the first time the subculture of cinema around the extreme right Front National. Key works from directors such as Michel Audiard, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, François Truffaut, and others provide a rich body of evidence.

Subjects: Film Studies 20th Century History
September 2011
Nazi Labour Camps in Paris

Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, July 1943-August 1944

Dreyfus, J.-M. & Gensburger, S.

On 18 July 1943, one-hundred and twenty Jews were transported from the concentration camp at Drancy to the Lévitan furniture store building in the middle of Paris. These were the first detainees of three satellite camps (Lévitan, Austerlitz, Bassano) in Paris. Between July 1943 and August 1944, nearly eight hundred prisoners spent a few weeks to a year in one of these buildings, previously been used to store furniture, and were subjected to forced labor. Although the history of the persecution and deportation of France’s Jews is well known, the three Parisian satellite camps have been subjected to the silence of both memory and history. This lack of attention by the most authoritative voices on the subject can perhaps be explained by the absence of a collective memory or by the marginal status of the Parisian detainees - the spouses of Aryans, wives of prisoners of war, half-Jews. Still, the Parisian camps did, and continue to this day, lack simple and straightforward descriptions. This book is a much needed study of these camps and is witness to how, sixty years after the events, expressing this memory remains a complex, sometimes painful process, and speaking about it a struggle.

Subjects: WWII History Genocide Studies
eBook available October 2008
Nazi Paris

The History of an Occupation, 1940-1944

Mitchell†, A.

Basing his extensive research into hitherto unexploited archival documentation on both sides of the Rhine, Allan Mitchell has uncovered the inner workings of the German military regime from the Wehrmacht’s triumphal entry into Paris in June 1940 to its ignominious withdrawal in August 1944. Although mindful of the French experience and the fundamental issue of collaboration, the author concentrates on the complex problems of occupying a foreign territory after a surprisingly swift conquest. By exploring in detail such topics as the regulation of public comportment, economic policy, forced labor, culture and propaganda, police activity, persecution and deportation of Jews, assassinations, executions, and torture, this study supersedes earlier attempts to investigate the German domination and exploitation of wartime France. In doing so, these findings provide an invaluable complement to the work of scholars who have viewed those dark years exclusively or mainly from the French perspective.

Subject: WWII History
eBook available January 2008
The New Face of Political Cinema

Commitment in French Film since 1995

O'Shaughnessy, M.

Since 1995 there has been a widespread return of commitment to French cinema taking it to a level unmatched since the heady days following 1968. But this new wave of political film is very different and urgently calls out for an analysis that will account for its development, its formal characteristics and its originality. This is what this book provides. It engages with leading directors such as Cantet, Tavernier, Dumont, Kassovitz, Zonca and Guédiguian, takes in a range of less well known but important figures and strays across the Belgian border to engage with the seminal work of the Dardenne brothers. It shows how the works discussed are helping to reinvent political cinema by finding stylistic and narrative strategies adequate to the contemporary context.

Subject: Film Studies
June 2010
Out of the Study and Into the Field

Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology

Parkin, R.& de Sales, A. (eds)

Outside France, French anthropology is conventionally seen as being dominated by grand theory produced by writers who have done little or no fieldwork themselves, and who may not even count as anthropologists in terms of the institutional structures of French academia. This applies to figures from Durkheim to Derrida, Mauss to Foucault, though there are partial exceptions, such as Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu. It has led to a contrast being made, especially perhaps in the Anglo-Saxon world, between French theory relying on rational inference, and British empiricism based on induction and generally skeptical of theory. While there are contrasts between the two traditions, this is essentially a false view. It is this aspect of French anthropology that this collection addresses, in the belief that the neglect of many of these figures outside France is seriously distorting our view of the French tradition of anthropology overall. At the same time, the collection will provide a positive view of the French tradition of ethnography, stressing its combination of technical competence and the sympathies of its practitioners for its various ethnographic subjects.

Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology General History
eBook available February 2013
Palimpsestic Memory

The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film

SIlverman, M

The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of ‘palimpsestic memory’, which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Subjects: Film Studies Genocide Studies
February 2002
Party, Society, Government

Republican Democracy in France

Hanley, D.

According to received wisdom parties have played a mainly destructive role in French political development. Of questionable legitimacy, pursuing narrow sectarian goals, often corruptly, they have brought about division, weakness and the collapse of regimes. A proper reading of history suggests differently. By combining historical research and contemporary political science theory about party, the author shows that for over a century party has irrigated French democracy in often invisible ways, brokering working compromises between groups divided strongly along social, political and cultural lines. The key to this success is the party system, which allowed for a high degree of collusion and cooptation between political elites, rhetoric notwithstanding. This hidden logic has persisted to this day despite the advent of presidentialism and remains the key to the continuing prosperity of French democracy.

Subject: General History
December 2003
The Populist Challenge

Political Protest and Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization in France

Rydgren, J.

During the last decade and a half a new political party family, the extreme Right-wing populist (ERP) parties, has established itself in a variety of West European democracies. These parties represent a monist politics based on ethnic nationalism and xenophobia as well as an opposition against the 'political establishment'. Being the prototypic ERP party, the French Front National (FN) has been a model for ERP parties emerging elsewhere in Western Europe.

This study presents a theoretically based explanation that combines the macro and the micro-level, as well as the political supply and the demand-side. More specifically, this study shows that it is necessary to consider both opportunity structures, created by demand and supply-side factors, as well as the ability of the FN to take advantage of the available opportunities. Of particular interest is the author's analysis of the sociology and attitudes of the FN-voters.

Subject: Peace & Conflict Studies
July 2007
Postcoloniality

The French Dimension

Majumdar, M. A.

“Postcolonial theory” has become one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which have become rather sterile and are characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. Gradually, a gulf has emerged between Anglophone and Francophone thinking in this area. The author investigates the causes for the apparent stagnation that has overtaken much of the current debate and explores the particular characteristics of French global strategy and cultural policy, as well as the divergent responses to current debates on globalization. Outlining in particular the contribution of thinkers such as Césaire, Senghor, Memmi, Sartre and Fanon to the worldwide development of anti-imperialist ideas, she offers a critical perspective on the ongoing difficulties of France’s relationship with its colonial and postcolonial Others and suggests new lines of thought that are currently emerging in the Francophone world, which may have the capacity to take these debates.

Subject: Colonialism
June 2004
Race in France

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference

Chapman, H. & Frader, L.L. (eds)

Scholars across disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic have recently begun to open up, as never before, the scholarly study of race and racism in France. These original essays bring together in one volume new work in history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and legal studies. Each of the eleven articles presents fresh research on the tension between a republican tradition in France that has long denied the legitimacy of acknowledging racial difference and a lived reality in which racial prejudice shaped popular views about foreigners, Jews, immigrants, and colonial people. Several authors also examine efforts to combat racism since the 1970s.

Subjects: Postwar History Sociology
December 2001
Recollections of France

Memories, Identities and Heritage in Contemporary France

Blowen, S., Demossier, M. & Picard, J. (eds)

Since the 1980s, France has experienced a vigorous revival of interest in its past and cultural heritage. This has been expressed as part of a movement of remembering through museums and festivals as well as via elaborate commemorations, most notably those held to celebrate the bi-centenary of the Revolution in 1989 and can be interpreted as part of a re-examinaton of what it means to be French in the context of ongoing Europeanization. This study brings together scholars from multidisciplinary backgrounds and engages them in debate with professionals from France, who are working in the fields of museology, heritage and cultural production. Addressing subjects such as war and memory, gastronomy and regional identity, maritime culture and urban societies, they throw fresh light on the process by which France has been conceptualized and packaged as a cultural object.

Subjects: General Cultural Studies Postwar History
October 2005
Remaking France

Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan

McKenzie, B.

Public diplomacy, neglected following the end of the Cold War, is once again a central tool of American foreign policy. This book, examining as it does the Marshall Plan as the form of public diplomacy of the United States in France after World War Two, offers a timely historical case study. Current debates about globalization and a possible revival of the Marshall Plan resemble the debates about Americanization that occurred in France over fifty years ago. Relations between France and the United States are often tense despite their shared history and cultural ties, reflecting the general fear and disgust and attraction of America and Americanization. The period covered in this book offers a good example: the French Government begrudgingly accepted American hegemony even though anti-Americanism was widespread among the French population, which American public diplomacy tried to overcome with various cultural and economic activities examined by the author. In many cases French society proved resistant to Americanization, and it is questionable whether public diplomacy actually accomplished what its advocates had promised. Nevertheless, by the 1950s the United States had established a strong cultural presence in France that included Hollywood, Reader’s Digest, and American-style hotels.

Subject: Postwar History
January 2003
The Road to War

France and Vietnam 1944-1947

Shipway, M.

How did France become embroiled in Vietnam, in the first of long wars of decolonization? And why did the French colonial administration, in late 1946, having negotiated with Ho Chi Minh for a year, adopt a warlike stance towards Ho's régime which ran counter to the liberal colonial doctrine of liberated France? Based on French archival sources, almost all of them previously unavailable to the English-speaking reader, the author assesses the policy that emerged from the 1944 Brazzaville conference; and the doomed attempt to apply that policy in Indo-China.

Subject: Colonialism
April 2005
Rock of Contention

Free French and Americans at War in New Caledonia, 1940-1945

Munholland, K.

What went wrong in Free French relations with Americans during World War Two? Two peoples, presumably sharing a common cause in a war to defeat the axis powers, often found themselves locked in bitter disputes that exposed fundamental differences in outlook and intentions, creating a profound misunderstanding or mésentente that was a major source of Franco-American conflict during the war and has persisted since then. The site for this dispute was the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia. By documenting carefully French policy toward the American presence in New Caledonia during the war, the author demonstrates the existence of a deep-seated suspicion, fear, even paranoia about the Americans that colored almost every phase of Free French policy. Revising traditional views, the author lays bare the roots of the antagonism, which stem from perceptions and biases.

Subjects: WWII History Colonialism
June 2004
Sartre Against Stalinism

Birchall, I. H.

Most critics of the political evolution of Jean-Paul Sartre have laid emphasis on his allegedly sympathetic and uncritical attitude to Stalinist Communism due, to a large extent, to their equation of Marxism with Stalinism. It is true that Sartre was guilty of many serious misjudgements with regard to the USSR and the French Communist Party. But his relationship with the Marxist Left was much more complex and co tradictory than most accounts admit. This book offers a political defence of Sartre and shows how, from a relatively apolitical stance in the 1930s, Sartre became increasingly involved in the politics of the Left; though he always distrusted Stalinism, he was sometimes driven to ally himself with it because of the force of its argument.

Subjects: 20th Century History General Cultural Studies
December 2005
Sartre Today

A Centenary Celebration

Hoven, A. van den & Leak, A.

Sartre Today is a tribute to Jean-Paul Sartre on the centenary of his birth (1905-2005). With twenty-two contributions from leading Sartre scholars in North America and the United Kingdom, this volume will greatly enhance Sartre scholarship in the English-speaking world.

The diversity of these chapters reflects the depth and breadth of Sartre's wide-ranging engagement with the political and cultural issues of his time. Yet as these contributions demonstrate, it is clear that Sartre's work still offers an important framework through which to address contemporary issues of a similar magnitude. This applies to Sartre's enduring contribution to philosophy and his conception of violence and terror, as well as analyses of the latest political events in the United States. Other contributions address Sartre's relationship to the contemporary understanding of neuroscience and group therapy as well as his conception of literature, biography, the theater and cinema.

This rich volume will be of great use not only to all Sartre scholars but also to anyone who has an interest in modern philosophy, politics, psychology, and literature.

Contributors: Thomas R. Flynn, Joseph S. Catalano, Reidar Due, Steve Martinot, Ronald E. Santoni, David Detmer, John Duncan, Hazel E. Barnes, Betty Cannon, Constance L. Mui, Peter Caws, Ann Jefferson, Dennis A. Gilbert, Colin Davis John Gillespie Ian Birchall, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone, Azzedine Haddour, Ronald Aronson, William L. McBride

Subject: General Cultural Studies
December 2004
Sartre, Self-formation and Masculinities

Boulé, J.-P.

Published on the occasion of Sartre's Centenary, this book helps to understand the man behind the work, offering a psycho-social analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre with an emphasis on his masculinity. It sets out to contextualize Sartre in terms of his psycho-sexual formation and processes of self-constitution in view of his childhood. The main period under detailed study is 1905-1945, before Sartre became the Sartre. It concentrates on his early childhood, his teenage years in La Rochelle, the years at the Ecole Normale, and the first few years of his adulthood, with specific attention on the war years. An analysis of Sartre's relationships follows, with Simone de Beauvoir and other women and men (including love and sex), before a postscript covering the period 1973-1980. This essay is not a reductive account. It tells the story of Jean-Paul Sartre, from the inside out, so that the achievements of one of the major intellectuals of the 20th Century can be measured against his own internal struggles.

Subjects: General Cultural Studies Gender Studies
December 2007
Shades of Indignation

Political Scandals in France, Past and Present

Jankowski, P.

At the end of the twentieth century France found itself in the midst of another scandalous fin de siècle, awash with rumors and revelations of wrongdoing in high places. As the millennium expired, the Republic’s servants, some sitting, others retired, received much condemnation, whether welcomed or resented. When taken together, surely les affaires now approximate in political significance (if not in noise or invective) those of the Dreyfus or Panama scandals a century ago? Yet the author argues this is not so. Today, treason has vanished and is slowly giving way to a transgression different in kind, but equivalent in gravamen: the crime against humanity. Corruption is far from disappearing, yet now it inspires resignation rather than indignation - and as such, it has lost its power to scandalize. Jankowski claims that such transformations tell a tale. The state that once aspired to pre-eminence as the sole magnet of loyalty, touchstone of probity, and guarantor of right, has yielded significant ground to the individual who is now more likely to elevate his own dignity and cry scandal on his own behalf. [In these times,] Individualism is de-politicizing the group and [ultimately] diluting the mystique of France, the nation-state par excellence.

Subject: General History
February 2002
The Shaping of Environmental Policy in France

Szarka, J.

Drawing on an extensive range of political, legal and sociological materials, the author presents and evaluates environmental policy-making in France at a time when environmental problems are growing in complexity and gravity.

He highlights the range of inputs to the policy process – including popular movements, green parties, interest group representation, EU legislation and international treaties – and evaluates the diverse nature of the outcomes which lead him to conclude that because new developments involve not only changes in policy content but also adaptation of policy style, environmental demands are progressively changing the shape of politics itself.

Subjects: Environmental Studies Sociology
October 1996
Shaping the Novel

Receptions of the Essais

Mitchell, C. T. & Côté, P. R.

The dialogue between form and message is intrinsic to the novel as genre. Yet the strength of that discourse has been shaken in the twentieth century by an increasing doubt about affirmations of any kind and a growing awareness of the relativity of knowledge and perception. The novel reflects this intellectual current by turning its glance inward to mediate on the creative act as a form of self-contained assertion of its own particular significance. The three writers on whom this study focuses, all major twentieth century authors, were chosen because they can be considered as important representatives of this novelistic self-consciousness. Building on André Malraux's vision of the colloquium as an open-ended verbal interchange, this study calls upon the voices of Anne Hérbert and Patrick Modiano to enter into a dialogue on novelistic form.

Subject: General Cultural Studies
eBook available February 2008
Stardom in Postwar France

Gaffney, J. & Holmes, D. (eds)

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that took place. By exploring stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields, represented here by famous figures such as Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday or Jean-Luc Godard, and less conventionally treated areas of enquiry (politics [de Gaulle], literary [Françoise Sagan], and intellectual culture [Lévi-Strauss]) the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the mechanisms of popularity and success, and their cultural, social, and political roles. The picture that emerges shows that many cultural articulations remained or became identifiably "French," in spite of the American mass-culture origins of these social, economic, and cultural transformations.

Subjects: Postwar History Film Studies General Cultural Studies
January 2006
A Stranger in Paris

Germany's Role in Republican France, 1870-1940

Mitchell†, A.

In this compact and tightly argued essay, the author maintains that the French Third Republic - and European history during this period in general - can only be understood if particular attention is paid to the special relationship that existed between France and Germany. The experience of the French people was so intimately related to that of its closest neighbor that a bilateral perspective becomes unavoidable. Without the unifying theme of Germany's crucial role in acting upon and within the French Republic, this story would become a much more random tale of events. After 1870, an autonomous national history of France is no longer possible.

Subjects: 18th/19th Century History 20th Century History
April 1999
Television Broadcasting in Contemporary France and Britain

Scriven, M. & Lecomte, M. (eds)

The importance of contemporary television broadcasting for the shaping and development of national cultures and identities is increasingly evident. Television as the privileged medium for the dissemination of information and for mass entertainment has irreversibly altered the manner in which nations perceive themselves and each other. This volume explores the multiple and complex ways in which audiovisual developments in two important European states have impacted on the life styles and attitudes of the population at large and its governing elites.

This is the first study that is devoted to the highly significant roles played by France and Britain in the formulation of European audiovisual policy and that provides a truly comparative analysis of the contemporary audiovisual scene in the two countries. It consists of four complementary sections: an overview of the audiovisual landscapes in Britain and France; an analysis of television programming; an account of the new cable and satellite media, and an assessment of European audiovisual integration. Overall, this volume offers a constructive contribution to the continuing debate on national and European broadcasting.

Subjects: Media Studies Sociology
October 2001
Themes in French Culture

A Preface to a Study of French Community

Mead, M. & Metraux, R.

Margaret Mead collaborated with her long-time colleague Rhoda Métraux in this unique study of French culture. The Hoover Institute at Stanford University originally published this volume, which grew out of the Columbia University project on Research of Contemporary Cultures in 1954. It is one of the few works by American social scientists dealing with broad themes of French life.

Mead and Métraux present a vivid picture of the French starting with the organization of the house and its architecture, and drawing original conclusions for the structure of French families and overall cultural values. This work, long out of print, is a fascinating and penetrating portrait of a contemporary European society.

Subjects: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology General Cultural Studies
October 2015
Transatlantic Parallaxes

Toward Reciprocal Anthropology

Raulin, A. & Rogers, S. C. (eds)

Anthropological inquiry developed around the study of the exotic. Now that we live in a world that seems increasingly familiar, putatively marked by a spreading sameness, anthropology must re-envision itself. The emergence of diverse national traditions in the discipline offers one intriguing path. This volume, the product of a novel encounter of American anthropologists of France and French anthropologists of the United States, explores the possibilities of that path through an experiment in the reciprocal production of knowledge. Simultaneously native subjects, foreign experts, and colleagues, these scholars offer novel insights into each other’s societies, juxtaposing glimpses of ourselves and a familiar “others” to productively unsettle and enrich our understanding of both.

Subject: General Anthropology
June 2000
Under Siege

Portraits of Civilian Life in France During World War I

Young, R. (ed)

Studies on the First World War are plentiful but most tend to focus on the combatants. This volume offers a new and highly original perspective that shows the reader the civilian side of this protracted and destructive war through a succession of "snapshots": 130 excerpts from leading American and Canadian newspapers provide a collective portrait of life behind the battle lines, what is often called the "second" front. Written principally by Paris-based journalists, and intended for popular reading audiences, these articles depict ordinary people in a way that still touches the reader of today. They record eye-witness testimony of Paris under aerial bombardment, the gutted cathedrals at Reims and Arras, the cemeteries around Compiègne, the subterranean living quarters at Cambrai, and the heart-breaking orphanages at Chambly.

Introduced and concluded by the editor, the volume also offers biographical notes on some of the leadingjournalist contributors, maps to familiarize readers with the geography of northern France, and detailed subject and geographical indices. The volume ends with a select bibliography of works on the subject of French civilian life during the Great War.

Subject: WWI History
January 1998
A Year of Revolutions

Fanny Lewald's Recollections of 1848

Lewis, H. (ed)

Lewald (1811-1889), the best-selling German woman writer in the nineteenth century, proved akeen and perceptive observer of the social, artistic, and political life of her times, of which these Recollections offer an excellent example. Written from a woman's perspective, this first-hand account of the revolutions in both Germany and France must be considered a unique document. It is further enhanced by her detailed description of the Frankfurt Parliament and her relationships with many of the prominent politicians and thinkers of that eventful period.

Subject: 18th/19th Century History Gender Studies

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By Area: France

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Alsace to the Alsatians?

Visions and Divisions of Alsatian Regionalism, 1870-1939

Fischer, C. J.

Subject: General History

The Art of the Project

Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture

Gratton, J. & Sheringham†, M. (eds)

Subject: General Cultural Studies

At Home in Postwar France

Modern Mass Housing and the Right to Comfort

Rudolph, N. C.

Subjects: Postwar History Urban Studies

A Belle Epoque?

Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture 1890-1914

Holmes, D. & Tarr, C. (eds)

Subjects: Gender Studies General Cultural Studies 18th/19th Century History

The Bourgeois Revolution in France 1789-1815

Heller, H.

Subjects: Economic History 18th/19th Century History

The Bressonians

French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship

Morari, C.

Subject: Film Studies

Building a European Identity

France, the United States, and the Oil Shock, 1973-74

Gfeller, A. E.

Subject: Postwar History

Burgundy

A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste

Demossier, M.

Subjects: General Anthropology Food & Nutrition General Cultural Studies

Categories and Classifications

Maussian Reflections on the Social

Allen, N. J.

Subject: Theory & Methodology in Anthropology

Categories in Context

Gender and Work in France and Germany, 1900–Present

Berrebi-Hoffmann, I., Giraud, O., Renard, L., & Wobbe, T. (eds)

Subjects: Gender Studies General History Sociology

Claims to Memory

Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean

Reinhardt C.

Subjects: Colonialism General Cultural Studies

Colette's Republic

Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914

Tilburg, P. A.

Subjects: Gender Studies 18th/19th Century History General Cultural Studies

Collective Terms

Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

Epstein, B. S.

Subjects: Urban Studies General Anthropology

Comics in French

The European Bande Dessinée in Context

Grove, L.

Subject: General Cultural Studies

Concentrationary Art

Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean, and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts

Pollock, G. & Silverman, M. (eds)

Subjects: General Cultural Studies Genocide Studies Postwar History

Concentrationary Cinema

Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog

Pollock, G. & Silverman, M. (eds)

Subjects: Film Studies Genocide Studies General Cultural Studies

Constructing Charisma

Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Berenson, E. & Giloi, E. (eds)

Subject: General History

Crisis and Renewal in France, 1918-1962

Mouré, K. & Alexander, M. S. (eds)

Subject: 20th Century History

The Devil's Captain

Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941-1944

Mitchell†, A.

Subjects: WWII History General Cultural Studies

Durkheim Today

Pickering†, W. S. F. (ed)

Subjects: Sociology Theory & Methodology in Anthropology