French Politics, Culture & Society

Over the past twenty years, the cultural and social history of the Great War has undergone a profound revitalization and given rise to new areas of research, such as the history of the body and of violence, the relationships between the front lines and the home front, the “cultures of war,“ and religious feeling. At the heart of this approach is an interest in intimacy, or the private life of soldiers and their relationships with their loved ones, an area that has been explored thanks to a new focus on personal archives: letters, diaries, photographs. Taking wartime France as its example, this article analyzes the contributions of this new history of World War I and assesses its methodological issues. The Great War can thus be seen in its full measure, not only as the first conflict conducted on a global scale, but also as a true anthropological turning point, one that caused tremendous upheaval for those who lived through it: new kinds of violence on the battlefields, new mourning rituals, unfamiliar difficulties in reconnecting with private life in the aftermath of the war.

This article attempts to reconstruct a genealogy of one of the most ubiquitous terms in contemporary French politics: the Anglo-Saxon. It traces the emergence of the term in the second half of the nineteenth century and examines its numerous meanings through the twentieth century. Rather than assume that references to the Anglo-Saxon have been little more than straightforward forms of anti-Americanism or Anglophobia, it suggests that the term has been mobilized in specific debates, both as a reflection of French decline and as an alternative “model“ to which France should aspire. A study of the notion of the Anglo-Saxon thus offers insight into how the French have imagined two of their most prominent global competitors and how they have come to terms with the consequences of social and economic modernization.

This article examines the beauty contest as a cultural register for shifting definitions of femininity in the 1920s. It focuses on the photographic beauty competition, the “Miss“ pageant, and the film Prix de Beauté, to show how beauty contests in France and the United States engendered transnational debates about feminine beauty, identity, and visibility. It asks how, as valueladen cultural enterprises and as popular commercial entertainments, these events fashioned models of modern womanhood that were simultaneously respectable and risqué; national and international; ordinary and exceptional.

This article analyzes references to history and, a fortiori, to memory in official French discourse during and after German unification. It shows that the understanding of the past complies, in every sense of the word, with France's European policy. Entirely oriented towards the promotion and justification of the European future, official memory distorts some historical facts in order to exorcise the present of a cumbersome past. Because it serves as a means of deferring to the national interest rather than as an end in itself, this representation of the past shows the limits of the official memory.

This article examines independent cinematic images of the Paris banlieue from the late 1990s to the present. Independent commercial and television films, documentaries, and amateur movies provide evidence of the changing representation of the Paris suburbs, and the shift from a spectacularized landscape of brutality to a more nuanced rendering of suburban life. It treats independent cinematic readings of the banlieue as related to the romanticized and touristic portrayal of central Paris.

Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite, Murder in the Metro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

Mémoires of Jacques Chirac, en collaboration avec Jean-Luc Barré - Tome 1, Chaque pas doit être un but (Paris: Éditions Nil, 2009) - Tome 2, Le Temps présidentiel (Paris: Éditions Nil, 2011)

Christine Haynes, Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France by Willa Z. Silverman

Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Nineteenth-Century France by Christine Hayne

Roderick Cooke La Responsabilité de l'écrivain: Littérature, droit et morale en France (XIXe-XXIe siècle) by Gisèle Sapiro

Venita Datta Dreyfus, Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century by Ruth Harris

Kenneth Mouré France's New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era by Philip Nord

Jeffrey Mehlman Correspondance, 1934-1968 by Jean Paulhan and Armand Petitjean

Justin Izzo L'Adieu au voyage: L'ethnologie française entre science et littérature by Vincent Debaene

Jean-Claude Barbier Recasting Welfare Capitalism: Economic Adjustment in Contemporary France and Germany by Mark Vail

Christopher Thompson Traîtres à la nation? Un autre regard sur la grève des Bleus en Afrique du Sud by Stéphane Beaud (with Philippe Guimard)

Paul A. Silverstein Collective Terms: Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France by Beth S. Epstein

Abstracts

Index to Volume 30 (2012)