French History

The purpose of this article is to analyse the role played by organized political violence in pre-1914 Europe, with special regard to labour conflicts, through the analysis of the social composition and the practices of four movements which deliberately resorted to armed organisation: the Somatén in Catalonia (Spain), the Jaunes trade union in the French Département du Nord, the Citizen Patrols, and the agrarian squads in the province of Bologna (Italy). Despite their different origins and contexts, these movements pursued similar political strategies based upon the deliberate use of violence and guns, and shared anti-socialist, authoritarian and anti-democratic purposes. The analysis of their practices and political cultures enable us to evaluate the nature of the democratic processes in pre-1914 Europe and also helps to contextualize and understand the political and social violence which came to the fore after the end of the war in 1918.

Thèse de doctorat en histoire de l'art, soutenue le 13 novembre 2020 à l'université Paris Nanterre, sous la direction de Rémi Labrusse et Christian Joschke.

PhD dissertation "Graphic Propaganda : Photomontage in the Visual Culture of the French Left (1925-1939)". Université Paris Nanterre, 2020. Under the supervision of Rémi Labrusse and Christian Joschke.

Cette étude porte sur la place du photomontage dans le graphisme français de l’entre-deux-guerres, plus particulièrement dans la presse illustrée, l’affiche et la propagande politique. Fondé sur la combinaison d’éléments photographiques de façon à créer des images composites, généralement reproduites par impression photomécanique, le photomontage a été promu par les graphistes d’avant-garde mais aussi par les éditeurs de presse à grand tirage. Il devient à partir des années 1920 un élément caractéristique de la culture visuelle moderne, jusqu’à investir très largement les pavillons de l’Exposition internationale de 1937. Si les développements du photomontage en URSS et en Allemagne sont bien connus, la France a souvent été considérée comme réticente à l’usage de ce procédé, privilégiant un modernisme mesuré et un ancrage dans le dessin. En analysant le rôle des réseaux culturels communistes dans le développement du photomontage politique, nous identifions des phénomènes de transferts culturels étroitement liés à la sociabilité militante. L’étude de la production imprimée des organisations de gauche permet d’expliciter les fonctions attribuées à l’image comme moyen d’influence politique. Sur le plan iconographique, les photomontages se caractérisent par des procédés rhétoriques qui orientent la lecture du document photographique. Sur le plan du montage, s’opère une conjonction de temporalités hétérogènes. En prêtant une attention particulière à la fois aux conditions de production, aux réseaux d’acteurs et aux discours de légitimation, nous proposons un essai en iconologie politique qui en même temps se situe au plus près de la matérialité des images.

This study examines the place of photomontage in French graphic design between the two world wars, particularly in the illustrated press, posters and political propaganda. Based on the combination of photographic elements to create composite images, generally reproduced by photomechanical printing, photomontage was promoted by avant-garde graphic designers but also by editors of large-circulation magazines. From the 1920s onwards, it became a characteristic element of modern visual culture, until it was widely used in the pavilions of the 1937 Exposition internationale in Paris. While the developments of photomontage in the USSR and Germany are well known, France was often considered to be reluctant to this technique, favouring instead a measured modernism and drawn illustrations. By analysing the role of communist cultural networks in the development of political photomontage, we identify phenomena of cultural transfer closely related to militant sociability. The study of the printed production of left-wing organisations makes it possible to clarify the functions attributed to the image as a means of political influence. On the iconographic level, photomontages are characterised by rhetorical processes which guide the reading of the photographic document. On the level of montage, they allow for a conjunction of heterogeneous temporalities in a single image. By paying attention to the conditions of production, to the networks of actors and to the discourses of legitimation, this essay in political iconology remains as close as possible to the materiality of images.

This study explores the basic transformations of the Holocaust-memory in France on the basis of French fiction films that are to be identified as part of cinematography of the Holocaust. The chosen approach that can be described as a history of memory referring to models of collective memory in cultural science studies. The aim is to specify the change of collective memory at the level of the particular filmic narratives and - by doing so – to identify and to analyze the long term development and ruptures in the French culture of remembrance since 1945. 
The empiric part of this study is preceded by methodological reflections that on the one hand permit a clear and differentiating application of the terms used in the current cultural studies of collective memory. On the other hand this chapter should help to conceive the material of research “Fiction Film” as primal source for historical science. The investigation is divided into five chronological parts and involves altogether a sample of 50 films into the general study before electing cases for deeper analyses.
The first section (1945-69) which is generally well covered by the research to date is paying particular attention to the creation and the formation of different formations of collective memory in France, a process that has left its prints in the early films about the Holocaust. The focus is laid on the complex relationship of national memory and other political collective memories as well as particular social memories which is forming the background of the creation of a Holocaust-memory in a strict sense at the begin of the 1960ies.
The second – primarily concerning the 1970ies – section is dealing with a central momentum of modification of collective long term memory in France. The cinema of this period is to understand as prominent forum of discourses which does not only reflect the ongoing transformation from Résistance dominated memory into a Holocaust dominated memory but also significantly stimulating this shift. Film as one influencing value in a public-democratic sphere of collective memory is documenting on various (visual + narrative) levels the decline of the herocentric national remembrance towards a transnational victim based Holocaust memory. In the following third period which is located in the 1980ies and 1990ies this fundamental transformation is continuously specified and at the same time showing consequences. In the broader context of continuous medialization and politicization of the Holocaust on an international level the study is concentrating on three elements of the transformation in collective Holocaust remembrance: Universalization, Americanization and Victimization.
The fourth section is for a moment dislocating its focus, as it turns from the production of French film to the public and intellectual reception of the most successful international Holocaust films in the 1990ies as well as the continued dispute over the appropriate representation of the Holocaust.
The last part of the empiric part is locating and defining current tendencies in the filmic representation of the Holocaust in French cinema. The author is taking into account films presented until the year 2010.
Besides a general description of the sometimes very divergent evolution of the cinematic-taking reference to the Shoah in France, the study continues to relate selected examples to general phenomena of social intercourse with the past, especially the "Patrimonialisation" (Pierre Nora), and the Sacralization and the Re -politicization of history.
The diachronically oriented investigation - so far are sparse on the subject of research - and the wide coverage radius of empirical data prove - regarding the reconstruction and analysis of individual changes and constellations of collective memory formation - as very fruitful. Result of the present study is a extended and comprehensive history of the Holocaust Memory in France since 1945.

Clausewitz è celeberrimo per la sua opera Vom Kriege (Della Guerra), unanimemente considerato uno dei classici imprescindibili dell'arte militare, ma pochi sanno che il Vom Kriege raccoglie solo i primi tre volumi dei lavori incompiuti del generale prussiano (Hinterlassene Werke über Krieg und Kriegführung), gli altri, secondo il principio, caro all'autore, che gli historische Beispiele machen Alles klar (gli esempi storici rendono tutto chiaro), essendone il complemento ed il sussidio. Infatti, nei volumi successivi, il riferimento corre continuamente alle enunciazioni dei primi tre volumi, per dimostrarne la validità e discutere i rischi della mancata applicazione dei princìpi, talvolta per emendarli, migliorarli ed adattarli alle situazioni specifiche, senza in ogni caso mai discostarsene. Questa opera, il primo dei restanti volumi, il quarto in generale, dunque non è solo il resoconto talvolta impietoso degli accadimenti militari e politici, ma una dettagliata ed acuta analisi dei processi decisionali e delle opzioni tattiche, degli errori e delle scelte corrette di entrambi i contendenti della prima Campagna d'Italia (1796-97). È anche un riconoscimento, spesso intriso di spunti polemici e malcelato odio, delle capacità del giovane generale Bonaparte, che al suo primo comando indipendente, trasformò un esercito di straccioni, indisciplinati e demotivati, privi di vestiario, vettovaglie e armamento, in un formidabile strumento di guerra, che non solo inflisse continue e ripetute sconfitte a due eserciti alleati, ma impose trattati di pace - qui riprodotti - con pesanti condizioni in termini economici, politici e territoriali a tutti gli altri stati italiani, cancellandone persino uno dalla mappa geografica. Nomi come Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Lodi, Lonato, Castiglione, Rovereto, Bassano, La Favorita, San Giorgio, Arcole, Rivoli, Mantova, non furono altro che le principali tappe di una delle campagne più decisive della storia e sancirono il mito di Napoleone come generale abilissimo, fortunato ed invincibile e l'inizio della sua parabola stupefacente, mossa da un'ambizione senza più limiti che portò guerra e distruzione, ma anche il fuoco inestinguibile dei valori rivoluzionari, in tutta l'Europa nel corso dei successivi vent'anni. In appendice, ad opera del curatore, una esaustiva cronologia, dieci ordini di battaglia, un dizionario dei principali protagonisti della campagna, una raccolta di trattati e armistizi, una corposa bibliografia.

Michel Biard, Philippe Bourdin, Hervé Leuwers (dir.), Dictionnaire des Conventionnels, 1792-1795, Ferney-Voltaire, Centre international d'étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2022, 1300 p. en 2 volumes
ISBN : 978-2-84559-153-0
Jusqu'au 15 février 2022, l'ouvrage est en souscription :
https://www.etudesrobespierristes.com/2021/11/30/dictionnaire-des-conventionnels/

La Russie est indéniablement la grande oubliée, en France, du centenaire de la Première Guerre mondiale et plus encore lorsqu’il s’agit de l’histoire des brigades venues combattre sur le front d’Orient. Cet article tend à montrer qu’il y a pourtant là un terrain particulièrement fertile, tant du point de vue de l’histoire diplomatique que de l’expérience combattante proprement dite.
Plan :
I - Entente et fronts périphériques en 1915
II - Les brigades russes au combat en Macédoine, 1916-1917
III - 1917 : Révolution macédoniennes
IV - Le démantèlement des brigades russes en Macédoine

This article scrutinizes the nineteenth-century legacy of the old regime’s commercial empire through the ambiguous case of the Monneron brothers. Having gained for- tune and recognition in Indian Ocean trade, the brothers sat as deputies in the National Assembly, but by the end of the 1790s their affairs and reputations had been destroyed. Their experiences reveal how the politics of commerce fundamentally changed during the Revolution. But the Monnerons also draw our attention to structural developments in French commercial imperialism that preceded and transcended the Revolution. They helped facilitate French investment in the Indian Ocean in the final decades of the old regime, a ‘spatial fix’ in merchant capital that was carried out in anticipation of crisis in the Atlantic, and that was consolidated around the turn of the century through the introduction of sugar cultivation in the Mascarene islands. By reading the biographies of the Monnerons alongside the life of their capital, this article attempts to acknowledge the undeniable ruptures of revolutionary politics without losing sight of broader developments in the global history of capitalism.

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.

Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”

Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
ISBN: 978-0-271-07320-0

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

Juin 1940. Demain je serai enfin soldat. J’aurai ma place modeste, mais définie, précise, nette, dans l’ensemble de ceux qui doivent résister. J’aurai mon matricule sans nom, « soldat inconnu » parmi tant d’autres. Je ne serai plus en marge de l’œuvre commune, je ne serai plus un intellectual à l’écart de la grande route nationale – instrument fragile et sensible, qui revient sans cesse sur lui-même pour méditer, être dans lequel la vie s’arrête pour donner lieu à la pensée. / Июнь 1940. Завтра наконец-то мне суждено стать солдатом. У меня появится свое непритязательное, зато определенное место, строго установленный уклад жизни, я встану в один строй вместе с теми, кто уже присягнул, чтобы сопротивляться врагу. Мне дадут безымянный порядковый номер – «неизвестный солдат», среди множества других. Я не буду больше выброшен за пределы общего дела, мне уже не быть больше интеллектуалом вне событий грандиозной всенародной борьбы, находящимся на обочине великого национального пути – хрупким и чувствительным орудием познания, вечно рефлексирующим, постоянно осознающим себя существом, останавливающим ход жизни, с целью уступить место мысли.

"The Culture of Dress History in France: The Past in Fashion, 1814-1900," studies the role of historic dress and dress history in creating knowledge about the past in nineteenth century France. This research examined how the practice of writing about, collecting, exhibiting, making, and representing historic and historicizing dress helped the French visualize their past. The conceptual questions raised by looking at the way that people observed and used historic artifacts not only expands the history of studying artifacts but also contributes to our thinking about how to study an artifact.

Directed by Peter Miller and Michele Majer. 433 pages. Defended in September, 2015. Registered in ProQuest in 2016.

Le document présenté ici constitue le mémoire que j'ai rendu en 2015 pour l'obtention du grade de Master, sous la direction de M. Paul Bertrand, à l'Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve. Il contient des coquilles, quelques imprécisions, et mérite d'être corrigé par bien des aspects. Il est autrement accessible, en format papier, via la réserve patrimoniale de la Bibliothèque des arts et des lettres de l'Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve.

| Résumé. Le capitaine gascon La Hire est un personnage populaire de la tradition johannique : il apparaît dans tous les romans, pièces de théâtre, films ou jeux vidéo qui concernent la Pucelle d’Orléans. Néanmoins, au niveau de l’historiographie scientifique, il demeure partiellement dans l’ombre. Quelques études biographiques ont été conduites à son propos, mais leur faible rayonnement et leur caractère vétuste justifie que l’on se penche de nouveau sur lui.

Fort d’une carrière de plus de vingt ans (1419-1443), La Hire a été de tous les fronts de son époque. Il n’a manqué presque aucune grande bataille. Ceci explique que son nom se soit retrouvé dans une grande quantité de chroniques rédigées par ses contemporains, et dans autant plus de documents d’archives aujourd’hui disséminés à travers toute la France et ailleurs.

Toutefois, l’époque durant laquelle Étienne de Vignolles a pratiqué son métier de capitaine d’armée est l’une des plus chaotiques de l’histoire de France, alors rongée par la guerre civile. La monarchie est incapable de payer ses troupes sur base d’une solde régulière, dès lors, celles-ci sont livrées à elles-mêmes et vivent d’expédients. Dans ces circonstances, et déjà de son vivant, La Hire a souvent été assimilé à un bandit de grand chemin, aussi redoutable envers ses ennemis que pour ses propres alliés. Cependant, pour avoir grandement contribué à l’effort de guerre contre les Anglais, la mémoire aime aussi le présenter comme un héros national.

Notre étude, à l’appui des concepts de Max Weber, va démontrer que La Hire était en vérité une figure de transition, dans une société en pleine mutation, d’où la complexité de son personnage. Néanmoins, il apparaît clairement qu’il ait davantage contribué au maintient de l’ordre social, qu’au déraillement anarchique de la société.

В 1968 году в Москве скончался крупный специалист по истории российского Просвещения и российско-французских отношений Михаил Штранге. Однако жизнь этого человека не была типична для успешного советского ученого.

Во-первых, Михаил Михайлович был эмигрантом, который после нескольких десятилетий пребывания за рубежом вернулся на родину (1947 г.), не подвергся репрессиям и состоялся как специалист. Во-вторых, Михаил Михайлович участвовал в антинацистском Сопротивлении; заграницей был хорошо знаком с известными деятелями культуры – историком Броделем, библиофилом Рубакиным и поэтом Цветаевой. Ну, а в-третьих, имя Михаила Штранге исследователи связывают с участием в убийстве невозвращенца Рейсса (1937 г.) и работе советской разведывательной сети в Европе.

На основе различных источников – из архива Дома Русского Зарубежья, НИОР РГБ, материалов эмигрантской периодики и воспоминаний знакомых Штранге – автор попытался реконструировать судьбу М.М. Штранге.

This book is OPEN ACCESS and available for download on JSTOR and other online repositories (see attached link to Cornell Press page and JSTOR DOI).

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values.

This paper examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant Eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman’s writings on Paris-its history and specific places within the city-we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist Republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it means to be "French."

Kann ein einzelner Sammelband die historische Erzählung eines Landes aus global-
historischer Perspektive neu justieren? Dieses hochgesteckte Ziel setzen sich die Herausgeber:innen von Histoire Mondiale de la France, publiziert im Jahr 2017. 2019 ist eine englischsprachige Übersetzung unter dem Titel France in the World erschienen. Anhand von 131 nur wenige Seiten kurzen Kapiteln zu einzelnen Jahreszahlen von 34.000 v. Chr. bis 2015 n. Chr. soll die französische Geschichte aus globalhistorischer Perspektive neu erzählt werden.

Qui finance Hollywood et pour
quel retour sur investissement ?
Cet article propose de comprendre
comment une production
diffusée à l’échelle mondiale a pu,
depuis plus d’un siècle, se développer
et s’imposer au reste du monde alors
qu’elle constitue un investissement
financier des plus médiocres, fait
ignoré par l’essentiel de la littérature
sur la question. En effet, mises à part
quelques périodes fastes (les débuts du
parlant, la Seconde Guerre mondiale…),
Hollywood a toujours dégagé
des profits très limités au regard des
sommes investies et surtout des risques
encourus.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, Napoleon instigated a series of institutional and political reforms intended to actualize social and moral regeneration in France. In doing so, he conceived of his role as preceptor of the nation through the political writings of the Enlightenment. With its biblical and ancient references, this literature revived the figure of the ideal legislator in response to a weakened divine-right monarchy. The present article discusses the legacy and evolution of the legislator political motif featured in an example of Napoleonic art, a relief ensemble completed in 1807 by Jean-Guillaume Moitte for the new iconographic program of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée: “The Muse of History leaning on the tradition of Thucydides and Herodotus”. This composition surmounted four personages on each side of the window: the prophet and lawgiver Moses, the Egyptian goddess Isis, the pious Roman legislator Numa Pompilius, and the founder of the Inca dynasty Manco Capac. The themes surrounding this composition provide a significant illustration of attempts at the regeneration and subordination of religious communities through legislation taken by Napoleon’s administration.

I've uploaded the final manuscript of this article, which was published in Mathilde Lévêque and Déborah Lévy-Bertherat, dir., Enfants sauvages : Représentations et savoirs.  Hermann, 2017, pp.49-62.
It is based on the paper I presented at the conference on Feral Children (Enfants sauvages) at the École Normale Supérieure in December 2015. Takes a post-colonial approach to the life and times of Marie-Angélique Leblanc (Fox territory 1712?--Paris, 1775), the so-called "wild girl of Champagne" (jeune fille sauvage de Champagne) discovered in 1731.  With thanks to the many readers on academia.com who helped make it better!

"Food knowledge in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages: between culinary practice and food hygiene": How is food knowledge spread in Paris at the end of the Middle Ages? This is the purpose of this article. At that time, Paris was already a big city where food of all kinds poured in. Three poles disseminate and organize food knowledge: public authorities that legislate on the supply and safety of consumers; food professionals that codify manufacturing standards; and Parisians who transmit the practical knowledge of food... /

Comment se diffusent les savoirs alimentaires dans le Paris de la fin du Moyen Âge ? Tel est le propos de cet article. A cette époque, Paris est déjà une grande ville où affluent des denrées de toutes sortes. Trois pôles diffusent et organisent les savoirs alimentaires : les pouvoirs publics qui légifèrent sur l'approvisionnement et la sécurité du consommateur ; les professionnels de bouche qui codifient les normes de fabrication ; et les Parisiens qui transmettent la connaissance pratique de l'aliment...