Christopher E Forth and Bertrand Taithe (eds), French masculinities: history, culture and politics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. xi, 249, illus., £50.00 (hardback 978-0-230-00661-4).

Abstract

Christopher E Forth and Bertrand Taithe's edited volume is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of collected articles on the history of masculinity. What this selection does especially well is provide an overview of the history. Though there are a few essays in the collection that have a very limited research focus, most authors attempt to give an overview of their period and topic. This is especially useful as a starting point for discussing both the scope of the history as well as seeing what still needs to be done. The volume covers only modern history, starting with the late eighteenth century elite and ending with a contemporary piece on the suburbs, the veil and recent rioting by disaffected youths. The majority of the essays focus on the post-1870 period, when both imperialism and the Third Republic redefined and solidified the French male, only to have him questioned and perverted after 1940. The first three chapters cover the Old Regime, the Revolution and the Napoleonic period. What we see here is the shift away from the Old Regime masculine emphasis on civility and refinement (traits which were made fun of by the Germans and the British as effeminate) towards a militarization of society. By the height of the Revolution all able-bodied men were to be treated as property of the state through military service. As Christopher Forth shows, by the late nineteenth century, physicians and anthropologists worried about the softening of the physical body in modern society. The imperial project and the Franco-Prussian war were key moments in defining an unstable and highly criticized version of French masculinity. The French male was weak and overly intellectual and some even suggested that African colonials be recruited into the French army to reinvigorate it. Robert Aldrich's chapter on colonial masculinities reinforces this idea by arguing that colonial domination made up for masculine weakness in France. The First World War did not help quell the sense of threat to the men of the metropole. Judith Surkis uses the example of venereal disease between the wars to illustrate both the precariousness of the French male's ability to protect the family as well as the menace of foreign men who were blamed for spreading the infections. Michael Sibalis, in his masterful overview of French homosexuality and effeminacy, is the only other author to use medical history prominently. For the Second World War, Miranda Pollard investigates the various competing forms of masculinity after the French defeat in 1940 represented by Petain, De Gaulle and the Resistance. Three much more specific topics represent the post-war period: the roman noir, masculine stardom and a discussion of the writer Serge Doubrovsky. Andre Rauch's final chapter on recent violence in the suburbs focuses on the women who are abused and controlled by the disaffected immigrant youths, as much as on the men themselves. Rauch's piece is the most powerful, but also the most problematic. He jumps from topic to topic, not distinguishing between the Muslim youths whose sisters wear veils, and immigrant and French youth from other religious backgrounds. In the Afterword, Robert Nye, one of the leading historians on the topic, points to the continued vision of France as hyper-civilized and thus feminized, especially by Americans post-9/11. France has gone from a great nation to a declining one, both militarily and demographically. French (elite) men have had 200 years of failing to live up to the iconic masculinities created by the Revolution and Napoleon, while hanging on to the Old Regime vision of the civilized, intellectual gentleman.