French Politics, Culture & Society

In a 1989 article published by Annales under the title “Le monde comme représentation,”1 Roger Chartier articulated a conceptual framework for bridging the gap that had traditionally separated the history of mentalities from social and political history. While the former field—pioneered by Georges Duby, Robert Mandrou, and Philippe Ariès in the 1960s—had legitimized the study of collective beliefs, anxieties, and desires as historical phenomena, the latter remained largely devoted to more concrete, easily quantifiable factors such as structures, institutions, and material culture. Drawing on the anthropological and psychoanalytical premises that had informed the work of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Michel de Certeau, among others, Chartier emphasized the performative dimension of individual and collective representations in order to argue that they should be understood not only as evidence registering the exercise of social and political power, but as underlying catalysts of change in their own right. Like habitus, Pierre Bourdieu’s complex model of social causality and evolution, Chartier framed representation as a symbiotic “structuring structure” that deserved to sit at the heart of historical inquiry.

The present article argues that Hélène Berr's Journal goes well beyond mere testimony to provide an astute analysis not only of the persecutory measures, arrests, camps, and deportations but also of the various attempts to camouflage the violence and even of the wider implications of what she ultimately recognized to be a systematic extermination. Hélène Berr thus presents an extraordinary case of a young French Jewish student at the Sorbonne who, steeped in literature but untrained in history, nevertheless achieved a degree of historical lucidity that, in view of the confused, limited, and often unreliable information available to her in Nazi-occupied Paris, we can only consider as remarkable. Above all, Hélène Berr's very personal confrontation with history, as it unfolded in all the sinister complexity of what we now know as the Holocaust, enables us to better understand these events in the human terms in which they were experienced and with the ethical dimensions that they take on for us today.

This article explores representations of Franco-German friendship through two complementary lenses: through the post-liberation trial dossier of a female collaborationist in southwestern France, and through Dolce, the second part of Irène Némirovsky's compelling novel, Suite Française. The primary aim is to illuminate and contrast the roles that historical and fictional narratives play in our interpretations and understanding of Franco-German relations in occupied France. The article also assesses the ethnographic value of the novelist's notes that accompanied the unfinished manuscript of Suite Française. Located at the intersections of history, ethnography, and literature, the article examines the ways in which the methods of the historian and the ethnographer, on the one hand, and the novelist, on the other, overlap and differ.

Jean Dutourd's novel Au bon beurre (1952) and Claude Autant-Lara's film La Traversée de Paris (1956) offer the best-known depictions of black market activity in Occupied France, appreciated by audiences who had lived through the war. This article looks at the black market stories they tell and their reception in France in the 1950s. It focuses on the fictional stories in relation to the historical experience from which they were drawn, and analyzes their selective representation of behaviors and the key relationships on which black market activity relied. Both works capture widely shared Occupation experiences of food shortages and exploitation. They highlight popular resentment of profiteers, the ability of the wealthy to escape wartime hardship and postwar justice, and the corruption and incompetence of the state in managing shortages and postwar purges.

Among the best-selling French literary works of the twentieth century, Vercors' novella has enjoyed an exceptionally rich afterlife thanks to numerous print editions as well as several influential stage and screen adaptations: Jean-Pierre Melville's 1947 feature film, Jean Mercure's 1949 play, Vercors' own 1978 theatrical rendering, and a 2004 television movie written by Anne Giafferi and directed by Pierre Boutron. Taking a comparative approach that weighs the aesthetic and ideological priorities of these authors and directors alongside shifts in historiography and French political culture, this article traces the evolution of Le Silence de la mer as a contested site of national memory and a means of negotiating the ethically-charged concepts of collaboration and resistance.

This essay follows the strange career in France of the Bessarabian Jew, Joseph Joinovici, before, during, and after the Second World War. A corrupt but exceedingly talented dealer in scrap metal before the war, he was officially branded an “economically worthwhile Jew” by the occupying forces and quickly amassed a considerable fortune. He was also a leading associate of the French Gestapo leaders Henri Lafont and Pierre Bony, but appears to have devoted a considerable portion of his wealth to bribing German officials into releasing a number of potential victims. A credible claim has been made that he was a principal financier of the insurrection that issued in the Liberation of Paris. Particular attention is paid to the claim by the philosopher Pierre Boutang that the eccentric Joinovici was the exemplary citizen of France's Fourth Republic.

The essay is a detailed cinematic and cultural analysis of Ça commence aujourd'hui by Bertrand Tavernier (1999), Être et Avoir by Nicolas Philibert (2003) and Entre les Murs by Laurent Cantet (2008). It contrasts the cinematic depictions of three French schools in rural, urban, and suburban France. Through a comparison of locations, pedagogy, and student expectation, the essay shows a contrasted and diffracted vision of the French educational system portrayed in the films. In the context of school reforms debated in France, the essay points out the variety and complexity of different schools visualized through the cinematic lens, and it questions the French Republic's ability to successfully fulfill its mission to educate young citizens of various social, racial, and cultural backgrounds.

Sarah A. Curtis The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris by Leslie Page Moch

Claudie Bernard La Virginité féminine: Mythes, fantasmes, émancipation by Yvonne Knibiehler

Bertram M. Gordon Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920–1945 by Julie Fette

Christopher Endy The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power by Richard F. Kuisel

Michael Seidman La Fin du village: Une histoire française by Jean-Pierre Le Goff

Andrea Smith Rites of the Republic: Citizens' Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Southern France by Mark Ingram

Abstracts

Index to Volume 31 (2013)