Century France Research Articles

« Stimuler les phagocytes » : controverses autour de la naissance de l'immunité cellulaire à Paris à la fin du XIXe siècle au début du XXe siècle

This article traces the imaginative and linguistic work at play in the history of immunity from late nineteenth to early twentieth century France, culminating with Elie Metchnikoff, the “father” of immunology, and his discovery, the phagocyte. Metchnikoff founded a new discipline on the back of this small, ravenous actor, positing the “eater cell” as both the solution to and problem worsening the body's lack of synchronicity with itself and its surroundings. His inquiry rejoins discourses of decadence in its ontological anxiety about what determines self from other and how to go about restoring “harmony” - i.e. intactness and integrity - to fundamentally disharmonious, modern man, whose life, stripped of transcendence, is inexorably bound by time and biology.

Gourmand and Gourmet — A Glimpse of Women Status from the Gender of the Two Words

To get an idea of the social status of women in 19th century France, we can go through a linguistic study of the gender of two words gourmand and gourmet, both indicating an eater on the table. If the word gourmand has a feminine form gourmande, while the word gourmet only designates men eaters, it deserves a deeper look at their meaning for French writers, especially the master of realism, Honoré de Balzac, representing more or less the ideology about women at the time.

Alexandre Lion: The Forgotten Inventor of Incubator Shows.

Alexandre Lion: The Forgotten Inventor of Incubator Shows.

World of Learning, Sociability and City in early Eighteenth Century France

In this last paper, I wish to present the research project I am currently working on, which is about the connection between the world of learning and scholars and the emergence of urban identities in Europe in the first half of the 18th century. To speak in broader terms, what I would like to grasp is how the circulation of knowledge shaped the making of the great cultural metropolises in the period between the 17th and the 18th century, mainly in a few sites : Paris, Lyon, London, Edinburgh,...

Metaphoric Conceptualization of Translation and Translator in Para- and Metatexts: “dead” and “live” Metaphors

Intellectual pursuits in general and in translation particularly cannot be conceptualized without resorting to metaphorical means relating this experience to more perceptible ones. In European languages the metaphor in question is TRANSLATION IS MOVEMENT / RELOCATION. The terms for translation in various European languages (translatio(n), traduction, perevod) all imply the idea of relocation of a physical object. Translatare and traducere, the latter introduced by Italian humanists, find parallels (prēlozhiti and prēvoditi respectively) in Slavic prologues of the period. Although its verbal realization is conventional and even trite now, this conceptual metaphor has survived in lexemes designating the agent, the process and the result of translation activity. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the terms used by several late antique, medieval, and modern translators in their prologues, epilogues, and metatexts on translation, and especially vivid metaphorical imagery that regularly appear in their texts. This fact must not be neglected by translation theory. All the constituents of translation process, namely, agents, source and target texts, translation method, the signifier (lesignifiant) and the signified (le signifié) in the translated text, the process of translation and the life of the translated text in a new culture are discussed metaphorically. The agent of the activity under study (translator) is mostly represented via the metaphor of a master’s (author’s) servant, although sometimes the relationship between the author and the translator is envisioned as a competition or even a conquest. The motivation behind translators’ endeavor is often discussed in terms of the monetary “talent” parable (where talentum is a unit of weight) quoted or alluded to by Aelfric in England and John the Exarch in Bulgaria in the 10th century and Marie de France and Theodosius from the Cave Monastery in Kiev two centuries later. The relationship between source and target texts is illustrated with an artistic metaphor, among others. The signified and the signifier in the text are often presented as a body and clothing or a jewel and its wrappings. The translation process is often shown as that of construction in medieval texts and work of machinery in modern ones. The life of the target text in its new surroundings is discussed through revitalizing the old metaphor of relocation (as the cargo of a ship unloaded onto a distant shore) or through various biological metaphors.

How to shape Black diasporic identity in France by reading (about) literature

This article gives an overview of francophone African diasporic websites such as Africultures.com, africavivre.com and other digital magazines, networks and blogs that are present on different platforms. Taking recent novels, texts of literary criticism, reviews and comments as examples, I analyse in what way they share in discourse about diasporic and migratory identity positions of Afropéens (‘Afropeans’) (and differ therein from other readings of the same novels). Methodologically, I draw on Stephen Greenblatt’s concepts of self-fashioning and circulation of social energy as well as on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the production of social capital. With respect to socially preformed discursive formation of Black people as an ostensibly homogeneous minority in the twenty-first century France, I refer to Pap Ndiaye’s ground-breaking study La condition noire from 2009 which closely analyses the complex situation of the Black migrant and post-migrant population. I focus on two narrative texts which are widely perceived both in France and on an international level: First, the autobiographically inspired novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (The Belly of the Atlantic) by Fatou Diome and second, Marie Ndiaye’s narrative triptych Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women). Studying remarks and comments of literary criticism concerning these texts on francophone African diasporic websites, I raise the following questions: What relevance do these narrated characters (still) have today? To what extent do they shape the discourse of Black migrants in France? What kind of interpretation of the colonial history and context do they offer? And which emancipatory moments and decolonial strategies create a new, proper symbolic capital and, thus, add to the Imagined Community of ‘Noirs en France’ (‘Black people in France’)?

Bandits, pirates et hors-la-loi au temps des Lumières. Par Lise Andries

This fascinating study explores the cultural phenomenon of the outlaw in the long eighteenth century in France. As the title suggests, it presents a typology of criminals as well as their privileged topographies. It constitutes an excellent overview of its subject, ranging historically from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century and taking in not only France but also eighteenth-century Britain. Issues of gender and criminality are also usefully addressed. The breadth of coverage necessarily leads to occasional repetitions and the overall structure of the study is not always clear, something made worse by the lack of a conclusion. Nonetheless, the extensive bibliography, handily divided into subsections, indicates insightful further reading both in key primary sources and the most relevant and recent critical literature on the topic. What emerges consistently is that eighteenth-century outlaws operated primarily in liminal spaces, across borders of various sorts, often in the half-light of dawn or dusk, and they came into their own in the equally liminal imaginative space between fact and fiction, where the bourgeoning press culture met the popular literary forms of the ballad, memoir, and novel. This is particularly the case in England, where a more open judicial system, court reports, greater press and publishing freedoms, and rapid urbanization gave the figure of the contemporary outlaw more realism as well as a more prevalent place in the social imaginary than was the case in France. The pirate in particular is an English outlaw archetype whose heyday was the late seventeenth century, although Lise Andries makes pertinent distinctions between the very different forms of piracy operative in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean at the time. What is true for both France and England is that the outlaw gives real and fictional voice to alternative social values, challenging those of the prevailing order, as Andries demonstrates with her interesting survey of criminal types in Robert Challe, Alain-René Lesage, Prévost, Diderot, and Sade. By the time of the Revolution, the outlaw in France had become an autonomous literary creation, only to be reinvented again in light of the more radical political and social upheavals of the 1790s. While Andries never loses sight of the nasty, brutish, short lives of eighteenth-century criminals — their violence matched, and often surpassed, by that of the state and its officials — she makes a strong case for outlaw collectives offering thrillingly attractive counter-societies for many of their contemporaries. From the real-life cours des Miracles to the fabled pirate republics, these alternative communities are more nostalgic of lost golden ages than they are revolutionary. The exception, however, was Louis Mandrin’s popular banditry against the hated tax officials of the Ferme générale. Indeed, the most intriguing, enlightening chapter in the book is devoted to outlaw economies. It argues perceptively that colonial and metropolitan smuggling was an important motor for the modernization and liberalization of the French economy, since it flooded the market with ‘de-taxed’ goods and increased their circulation substantially. This is one insight among many in this informative, wide-ranging study.

A gallant holiday of the XVII century as an introduction to management

In the XVII century in France, under the influence of gallant aesthetics, a new secular socio-integrative model and a new typology of the holiday were formed, which not only spread throughout Europe, but also reached Russia. The transformation of holidays into a management tool is influenced by specific socio-political reasons: the transformation of the knightly estate into a courtier under the onslaught of the advancing monarchy, the final collapse of the old feudal system with its traditional ties. At the same time, new ties and a new social structure of the monarchy of the classical model were being formed. Under the influence of these processes, royal holidays have turned from recreation and entertainment into a powerful lever of political and social influence, which is used by the royal power. The study of the holiday phenomenon has a multidimensional character. However, none of the researchers analyzed the festive culture of modern times from the point of view of a management tool. In this article, the phenomenon of a gallant holiday is considered not only as an important socio-cultural phenomenon, but as an institution of elite management, a new tool of power that helped solve economic, social and psychological problems. Under the influence of gallant aesthetics in France in the XVII century, a new scenography of the holiday is being formed - a holiday system on several sites united by one plot. This is what modern experts call the method of installation and dismemberment of space. This scenography will henceforth come into use and establish itself in the festive European culture for centuries.

Emma Claussen. Politics and ‘Politiques’ in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History.

In Politics and ‘Politiques’ in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History, Emma Claussen provides a detailed analysis of the shifting definitions of the term “politique,” as it was deployed as both an adjective and a noun in a range of published texts from the early sixteenth century to the conclusion of the Catholic League. Her stated ­­methodology is to examine published works that employ the term extensively and to treat it as a “keyword” that ­­underwent ­­continuous elaboration, ideological applications, and borrowing over the course of the century and ­­especially during the French Wars of Religion. This treatment of the term as a discursive construct rather than a description of a specific political stance in regard to the French monarchy and civil order is abetted by the claim that there was in fact no politique party in ­­sixteenth-century France nor any individuals who would have actively used the designation in...

Women’s diplomacy in the XVI century France: the example of Louise of Savoy

This article is dedicated to researching the women's diplomacy in France in the first half of the XVI century from the perspective of gender history. Despite the fact that ambassadorial offices were mostly occupied by men, women could still perform as diplomats both officially and informally. The image of a woman as a politician is revealed on the example of diplomatic activity of Duchess of Angoulême Louise de Savoy, mother of Francis I de Valois. The article determines her position among the power elites from contemporaries' point of view. The article also reveals the role of a high-ranking lady in exercising diplomatic functions and highlights the features of the official correspondence form of the king's mother. The main directions of foreign policy during the regencies of Louise of Savoy are determined. The role of royal women in exercising diplomatic functions in relation to the political aspects of making the «Ladies' Peace» in 1529 in Cambrai is considered. The author concludes that personality factors, political authority and personal relations played a major role in women's diplomatic work. In the conditions of instability of the French crown, Louise of Savoy manages to avoid the political and economic crisis in the country and create a unique precedent in the sphere of foreign affairs. This allowed her successors to expand diplomatic networks further by continuously conducting correspondence. Apart from concluding traditional dynastic alliances, diplomatic activity included negotiations, carried out by ladies either through trusted ambassadors or in person, signing peace agreements, and forming their own female diplomatic clientele.

Women’s diplomacy in the XVI century France: the example of Louise of Savoy

This article is dedicated to researching the women's diplomacy in France in the first half of the XVI century from the perspective of gender history. Despite the fact that ambassadorial offices were mostly occupied by men, women could still perform as diplomats both officially and informally. The image of a woman as a politician is revealed on the example of diplomatic activity of Duchess of Angoulême Louise de Savoy, mother of Francis I de Valois. The article determines her position among the power elites from contemporaries' point of view. The article also reveals the role of a high-ranking lady in exercising diplomatic functions and highlights the features of the official correspondence form of the king's mother. The main directions of foreign policy during the regencies of Louise of Savoy are determined. The role of royal women in exercising diplomatic functions in relation to the political aspects of making the «Ladies' Peace» in 1529 in Cambrai is considered. The author concludes that personality factors, political authority and personal relations played a major role in women's diplomatic work. In the conditions of instability of the French crown, Louise of Savoy manages to avoid the political and economic crisis in the country and create a unique precedent in the sphere of foreign affairs. This allowed her successors to expand diplomatic networks further by continuously conducting correspondence. Apart from concluding traditional dynastic alliances, diplomatic activity included negotiations, carried out by ladies either through trusted ambassadors or in person, signing peace agreements, and forming their own female diplomatic clientele.

The Astrolabe and the Book in 16th Century France

Abstract The relationship between books about astrolabes and the instruments themselves is examined through an analysis of the numbers surviving, and something of the context in which they were produced. Such biographical information as is available for the makers of astrolabes in France is rehearsed, and a checklist of surviving instruments is appended.

The Surveillance State and the Surveillance Private Sector: Pathways to Undercover Policing in France and the United States

As a form of social control, undercover tactics played an important state-building role during the Nineteenth Century, in both the United States and France. Yet undercover policing played this role very differently in France than in the US, which made do with a less developed surveillance capacity at all levels of government. The instability of successive French regimes encouraged French political authorities to expand their use of infiltration and to privilege high policing purposes of undercover tactics over the crime-fighting purposes favored by local elites. And while nineteenth-century France, like the United States, often governed through delegations of authority to local elites, French authorities jealously guarded undercover tactics as their exclusive prerogative. As a result, undercover tactics became a marginal crime-fighting tactic in nineteenth century France, becoming identified primarily with the state's surveillance of its political opponents. In the United States, by contrast, the private sector was able to deploy undercover tactics against suspected criminals, organized labor, political radicals, and purveyors of vice. Though the private sector readily accepted delegations from the public sector, the direction of influence also ran in the opposite direction, from the private sector to the state, as American private sector used undercover tactics to replace, bypass, and harness state institutions in ways that their French counterparts could not. In the United States, the private sector's use of undercover tactics came to shape public policing, as prominent detectives entered government and brought their tactics with them, and as Progressive era reformers took up the undercover tactics pioneered by private detectives, modeled them for the state through public-private partnership, and used them to set the anti-corruption, anti-radical, and anti-vice enforcement agenda of government. If French undercover tactics helped to build the French state from the inside out, by consolidating the state's hold over territory and attempting to control disorder and dissent, American undercover tactics became a vector of private sector influence that helped build the state from the outside in by shaping both investigative means and ends at all levels of government.

Henri Legrand du Saulle's 1873 book: "La Folie Héréditaire" (hereditary madness).

In his 1873 monograph "La Folie Héréditaire," the French Alienist Legrand du Saulle (LdS) first outlined his understanding of hereditary factors in insanity and then described in detail the theory of Hereditary Madness (HM) that emerged from the writings of his mentor Bénédict Morel. This form of insanity was thought to arise only in families with neuropathic traits. Degeneration theory, proposed by Morel, postulated a within-family "evolution" of increasingly severe psychopathology, typically beginning with mild neuropathic traits and associated idiosyncrasies, and progressing over generations to hereditary madness, mental retardation, epilepsy, and eventual sterility. LdS took strong positions in favor of (i) the heterogeneous transmission of mental illness within families, (ii) consideration of both direct and collateral relatives, and (iii) the inheritance of a predisposition to illness, not the illness itself. He carefully examined the wide range of psychopathology and physical stigmata that occurred in what he called "inheritors" of the neuropathic trait. A unique feature of his work was the use of familial patterns of psychopathology to define a psychiatric disorder. While the theory of HM did not gain wide popularity outside of 19th century France, the concept of neuropathic traits was used extensively in early 20th century psychiatric genetics.

Cliometrics of Primary Education in the Long Nineteenth Century France

The objective of this article is to study the links between the financing of primary education, schooling and economic growth in France in the nineteenth century. To do so, we use information on the financing allocated by the State, the departments, the municipalities, and households over the period 1820–1913. Our analysis is in two stages. First, we analyse the evolution of these different types of financing over time, relying on the outliers’ methodology to detect the existence of possible breaks in the series. Next, we study the causal relationships between the different types of financing, the number of children enrolled in primary education and the gross domestic product. Over the period studied, our results confirm that mass schooling is primarily driven by political will, before being explained by the increase in wealth available in the economy.

Language reforms in France of the XVII century and the formation of gallant aesthetics.

The study of language as a carrier of a new aesthetic ideal in the first half of the XVII century in France and language reforms as a consequence of the emergence of a new ethos are at the intersection of sociolinguistics, history and cultural studies. For almost three centuries, French has been not only the language of international communication, like Latin. He carried a new aesthetic, introduced new literature, gave an opportunity to join a new manner of behavior and lifestyle in general. French became not so much the language of educated people, like Latin, as the language of secular educated people, it expressed the ideals of gallantry, good manners and upbringing, which foreigners came to Paris to study. To explain the phenomenon of the spread of the French language and the influence of French culture not only on Russia, but also on other European countries, it is necessary to return to the language reforms of the XVII century, when the language becomes a reflection of a new aesthetic. This study aims to show why the discussion around language flows into a discussion about style, and it, in turn, about the superiority of the new aesthetics. The reforms of the French language, on the one hand, were the result of the establishment of new aesthetic principles in the consciousness, on the other hand, they influenced the aesthetic principles of their time. Simplicity, naturalness and purity of style, clarity of expressions that convey exactly the thoughts come to French literature and later transferred to art as a whole. The successes of linguistic and literary reforms for contemporaries are associated with the political successes of France, because "the greatness of the empire and the elegance of the language always go hand in hand."

French Involvement in the Greek War of Independence

During the wars of the eighteenth century France lost most of its colonies. By 1821 the Restoration had also negated all the gains from Napoleon’s European expansion, meaning France could hardly be considered an imperial power. After 1823, however, it actively turned its focus to the Levant in order to regain a position of power. This article argues that France displayed extraordinary resilience in world politics. It managed to make major inroads into peripheral regions, such as Greece, and achieved considerable influence in the Mediterranean and an important degree of informal power. The article traces some highly diverse French projects and projections in the Eastern Mediterranean to better integrate French interventions in revolutionary Greece into the deployment of France’s global colonial ambitions.

Marriage, land and law. Signing a marriage contract in Normandy and Ile-de-France, at the time of the Napoleonic Code

ABSTRACT This article should aim to better understand the importance and the role of the prenuptial agreement in the regions where the ‘système de partage égalitaire’ (partible inheritance) prevailed in nineteenth century France. In some regions, under Ancien Regime ‘coutumes’, prenuptial agreement played a important role in the installation of a new household and, in some systems, it was crucial in the transmission of wealth from one generation to another. Indeed, it is quite easy to understand the importance of the prenuptial agreement in inequal inheritance system; but it is more difficult to explain the existence of such contracts in the partible inheritance regions where the transmission of wealth, the rule of inheritance, was, and is always, very simple: the heritage is equally divided between heirs (male and female) without donation or will. How then can we explain the overall growth in the number of marriage contracts at the beginning of the 19th century and the great variability in the use of this practice by region? Does this usage reflect a new desire on the part of families to better control the process of transmission of property within the new framework of the Civil Code? Through two databases of contracts we try to assess the factor which explained the choice to enact a contract or to do not. The first one is cross sectional for the year 1822 for six micro regions in the core of the Paris Basin. The second one is longitudinal (1813–26) for the region of Vernon (in Normandy) at the border of the Paris Basin. Both corpus highlight the role of the life course, marital status, and family configuration of each spouse but also the often-underestimated role of notaries, their habits, and legal practices in the choice of the type of contract.

Alexander Benois and his study of 18th-century French painting

The article summarizes the role of Alexander Benois in the study of French painting of the 18th century. His interest in this period is connected both with the peculiarities of art collecting in Russia and with rediscovery of French painting of the 18th century in France. Benois was well aware of the historical and literary sources of the 18th century as well as of the modern art history in France. The article examines the main categories used by Benois, who combined the methods of connoisseurship and essayism, and also analyzes the language and terms that he used in his books and articles.

Saint Petersburg at the Forefront of Demographic Transition in Russia

In post-reform Russia, a demographic transition began — a replacement of the traditional type of population reproduction with the modern one. A significant part of the population had rationalized demographic behavior; demographic indicators had improved; the efficiency of population reproduction had increased; intra-family relations had been humanized; and individual birth control had been developed — mainly in cities. The demographic transition began earlier than is commonly thought — among the townspeople of the Saint Petersburg province, where obvious signs of birth control and a decrease in mortality and marriage were already revealed in the first half of the 19th century. The province was in the lead because it was the most urbanized and one of the most cosmopolitan, and Saint Petersburg was the most cosmopolitan city in Russia, which had intensive economic and cultural ties with the West, where demographic transition had already begun at the end of the 18th century in France. In the second half of the 19th century, it spread among the entire urban population, and at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries — among the entire rural population of Russia, but to varying degrees in individual provinces. Demographic indicators had improved because of the progress of medicine and sanitation, the expansion of free medical care, an increase in the cultural level of the population, a change in demographic mentality, and the beginning of birth control, as well as due to an increase in the standard of living of the general population.