Contemporary French Politics Research Articles

The Role of French Revolution Fan Discussions on Tumblr in Shaping Contemporary French Political Discourse

History fandom gathers people who discuss and produce narratives of history. Through media participation, history fandom has risen to attract mainstream attention. Meanwhile, political campaigns on media increasingly converge with fandom mobilization, many of which rely on narrating history to convey their ideas. However, whether and how history fandom has influenced the political discourses on media has not been researched. To explore the potential development of these two domains, this article studied the fan discussions of contemporary politics in the French Revolution fan community on Tumblr. With discourse analysis of the language and power background of history fans’ blogs that are relevant to contemporary French politics, this article demonstrated the capability and limitation of fans’ narratives of history in influencing mainstream politics. Shaped by Tumblr’s platform ecosystem, the fandom has collective political values and bases its history narratives on them to resist the ideologies imposed by existing political structures. Nevertheless, to challenge the structure, history fans need to extend their influence beyond the cultural realm. If political forces and fandom can be further connected by the narration of history, the fans’ immaterial labour can be exposed to mainstream media, allowing fans’ self-emancipatory activities to bring social-political changes.

Allegory and Accusation: The Rhetoric of Islamo-gauchisme

While historical and anthropological critiques of secularism have illuminated its contradictory claims, they have been less attentive to secularism’s rhetorical force, i.e., its performative effect. Before theorizing the rhetoric of “Islamo-Gauchisme” and contemporary secularism more broadly, then, this article first traces this inattention to an influential line of argument grounded in anthropologist Talal Asad’s critiques of religion and secularism (1993, 2003, 2018), which opposes secularism’s (putatively) transparent and referential language and autonomous subject, derived from Protestantism, to the performative, pedagogical discourse and subject of authoritative traditions of pious discipline, medieval Christianity and contemporary Islam, in particular. Next, the article lays the ground for theorization by foregrounding the performative and citational, or “theatro-graphic” (Weber 2001), qualities of secular rhetoric in Walter Benjamin’s (2019) and Paul de Man’s (1983) treatments of Baroque and pre-romantic allegory. It closes by reading the performative force of accusation and allegory in the avowedly secular (laïc) rhetoric of contemporary French politics.

Thinking about Conflict with, or without, Karl Marx? The Academic “Feud” in Contemporary French Political Philosophy

The philosophical and political advantages tied to a break with Marxist thinking have been notable. With such a break with Marxism, economic and scientific determinism have been discounted—and it is in this sort of determinism that a classic critique of Marxism finds a reason for discrediting the Marxist-Leninist project. However, it seems that the cost of totally abandoning Marxist thinking has not been sufficiently examined. This article proposes a comparative study of two philosophers’ conceptions of conflict: Chantal Mouffe’s perspective will be examined and compared to Cornelius Castoriadis’s view of radical democracy and its treatment of conflict. The article seeks to show that a full break with Karl Marx weakens political radicalism. In other words, by opting for a perspective on conflict that fully renounces the Marxist view, Mouffe is doing away with the idea of direct democracy and/or that of a revolutionary project. Her approach differs from that of Castoriadis who seeks, in some sense, to remain faithful to the emancipatory aspects of Marxian thought.

The Routledge Handbook of French Politics and Culture. Edited by Marion Demossier, David Lees, Aurélien Mondon, and Nina Parish

This handbook aims to provide an overview of the most pressing and mediatized cultural and political issues facing contemporary France, placed against the backdrop of modern European history. Essays by prominent academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds make up the book’s four parts. The contributions in the first part provide a foundation for the subsequent sections, focusing on modern and contemporary French politics, with special attention to the electoral politics leading to the Macron presidency, the history of the notion of Gaullism, colonization of and involvement in Africa, and the evolution of women’s political participation. The second and third parts engage with questions related to belonging, identity, and spaces of contestation. The authors interrogate a wide range of highly politicized topics in France, such as policies on immigration and ‘integration’, Islamophobia, the racialization of Romani people, protest movements, constructions of and discourses surrounding the banlieue, and contemporary feminisms. The final part addresses the mediation of memory, remembrance, and culture. Contributors analyse exhibition decisions made in First World War museums, the role of propaganda and mass media in politics, music nostalgia, the figure of the public intellectual, and representations of Jews. One of the book’s strengths is its inclusion of many chapters dedicated to interrogating questions of race, racism, and othering. Marwan Mohammed, Marion Demossier, Tom Martin, Fabien Truong, Mehammed Mack, and Rebecca Infield and Rebekah Vince offer particularly illuminating contributions that consider the interplay between French national identity and various forms of race politics. If the ambitious aim of this book is to provide a survey of the French political and cultural landscape, it bears mentioning that any attempt to canonize cultural issues worthy of study necessarily involves the politics of exclusion and inclusion. While Mack’s chapter does look at the gay nightclub space, this handbook would have been improved if more space were devoted to the consideration of queer and trans issues in France. Moreover, certain chapters reveal blind spots and a disconnect with the populations being spoken for. For instance, ‘Gender and Crisis’ ventures into troubling territory with the suggestion that misogyny may be present in fashion companies’ decisions simply to sell headscarves (p. 183). Such a claim fits within femonationalist discourses that instrumentalize feminism against Muslims by characterizing Islam as a fundamentally oppressive religion from which women must be ‘saved’. Similarly, ‘The French “Banlieues”’ dubiously asserts that racial polarization is ‘inscribed […] in mindsets [in America], far more than in France’ and attributes ‘most’ riots in the banlieue to the ‘accidental’ killings of youth by police (p. 137). A consideration of the many high-profile, non-accidental instances of excessive force throughout French history that have led to the deaths of Black and Maghrebi people would have been helpful here. In summary, this handbook’s twenty-three chapters provide a foundation necessary for students of contemporary French culture and politics. However, readers should engage critically and thoughtfully, as academics themselves are not impervious to the effects of the mediatization and politicization of the topics discussed throughout this book.

A Big-Data Approach to Contemporary French Politics

Mixing the methods of machine learning and those of French cultural studies, this article explores recent trends in French politics. We analyze a large data set from Twitter (over a hundred and fifty million tweets) in order to reveal notable currents in discourse around the Gilets Jaunes and the French presidency (with particular focus on Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen). This article delineates our methods and places this data analysis in a broader cultural and political context, concentrating primarily on major trends in French politics from 2017 to late 2019. We argue that our interdisciplinary approach reveals elements of French political discourse that would otherwise remain obscure, especially regarding the rise and fall of the Gilets Jaunes movement on Twitter.

Political Relations of the University of Paris, 1200-1450

Political Relations of the University of Paris, 1200-1450 Nathan Parmeter 1 Introduction After the Western Roman Empire disintegrated, intellectualism and education dramatically declined in Western Europe as disorder, decay and instability took hold. 2 Emerging out of the chaos came a revival of urban areas and trade, which in turn led to a renewed interest in academia and scholarly work. 3 In the long-run, this newly-found interest in education and academia precipitated the rise of the universities, which were considered the pinnacle of Medieval education and learning as the idea and structure of the university became unique to Western Europe during this period. 4 One of the most significant universities from this era was the University of Paris, which was founded in the mid-12 th Century and like other universities, became a corporation created through a charter. 5 Over time, the institutional rules that allowed the University of Paris to remain independent as a corporate entity created special political relations between the university corporation, inside factions within the university, the Catholic Church and state authorities. Early on, the power of the university to decide its own regulations and rules produced factions within the university to vie for that power, while years later, the university created special political relations with state authorities to advance its interests in contemporary French politics. Background and History of the Medieval University During the early half of the Medieval Period, education and academia in Western Europe underwent several major changes as the region declined and then rebounded to economic and social stability. For several hundred years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 472 A.D., the intellectual sphere in Western Europe collapsed as chaos, urban decline and frequent migrations and invasions became the norm. 6 During that time, scholarly work and education were the jobs of transmitters at rural monastery schools, who spread ideas of intellectualism and classical works to upcoming cohorts of students. 7 In the 900s and 1000s, cathedral schools emerged as newer centers of intellectualism and education, with different schools focusing on The author, being also an editor, recused himself from the editing process regarding this article. It received no special treatment and was required to conform to all standard requirements. Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18-19. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 34. Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 267. Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18-19. Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 54-55.

Transformations in the Contemporary French Political Landscape: Between Electoral Strategies and Ideological Realignment

Transformations in the Contemporary French Political Landscape: Between Electoral Strategies and Ideological Realignment

Memory and Forgiveness: Addressing the Legacy of the Dark Years in Contemporary French Politics

On July 16, 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first president to publicly acknowledge the French Republic’s shared responsibility in the persecution and deportation of thousands of Jews to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Speaking at the anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, Chirac issued a public apology for the French state’s complicit role in the deportation and extermination of Jews, while emphasizing that the errors committed during the war were a ‘faute collective’ and thus the blame for the deportations had to be shouldered collectively by the French nation. In the years following Chirac's groundbreaking speech, France as a nation has grappled with the notion of a devoir de memoire within the political and cultural frame of contemporary memory of French complicity during the war. However, with this heightened public interest in the French obligation to remember its wartime past, the tension between memory and history has become increasingly palpable and a growing debate on the problematic nature of the call for remembrance has ensued. This essay will examine the ongoing debate surrounding collective memory and history in contemporary French politics as well as the underlying question of whether forgiveness of the French Republic for its actions against Jews during the Dark Years can truly be achieved. By concluding with an examination of Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the aporia of forgiveness, I hope to further explore the symbiotic relationship between political discourse and collective memory and how this affects the reconciliation process in postwar France.

Book Review: Political Theory: Recognition Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy: Reopening the Dialogue

Book Review: Political Theory: Recognition Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy: Reopening the Dialogue

The Rise of the Anglo-Saxon: French Perceptions of the Anglo-American World in the Long Twentieth Century

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.

Marine Le Pen and the 'New' FN: A Change of Style or of Substance?

The electoral challenge of the far right is an enduringly problematic feature of contemporary French politics. In the first rounds of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Front National (FN) under new leader Marine Le Pen attracted a combined total of ten million votes, bringing its ultra-nationalist policies to the centre of national political debate. This article examines the FN's impact on these elections and its implications for French politics. Drawing on official FN programmes, detailed election results and a range of opinion polling data, it assesses the strength of support for Le Pen and her party and seeks to explain their electoral appeal. In particular, it subjects to analysis the claim that the new leader has ‘de-demonised’ the FN, transforming it from perennial outsider to normal participant in mainstream French politics; and it reflects on the strategic dilemma posed for the centre-right by this newly invigorated far-right challenge.

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy by Mustafa Dikeç

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy by Mustafa Dikeç

Frederic Bussmann, Sammeln als Strategie. Die Kunstsammlungen des Prince de Conti im Paris des ausgehenden Ancien Regime

Louis-François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717–76), is well known as one of the most important collectors in Paris during the second half of the eighteenth century. The dispersal of the collection in 1777 and 1779 was widely regarded as a crucial event for the Parisian art market. Today, a Conti provenance is still seen as a letter of nobility for paintings. Surprisingly, the first in-depth study of the collection has only recently appeared. Frédéric Bußmann has written a reliable monograph on the Prince and the fullest account of his patronage and collecting to date. Given the central importance of Conti for the history of French eighteenth-century collecting, Bußmann's book fills an important gap. Bußmann carefully analyses Conti's position in contemporary French politics. The first part of the book provides a useful critical summary of Conti's political activities and his position in relation to the royal court. As a young man, he was close to Louis XV and assumed an influential position. After long periods of tension with the King, Conti gradually withdrew from court when the Seven Years’ War began. He had been an outspoken critic of the Renversement des alliances. His strong position in the parliaments had become his power-base and came, as so often, with Jansenist leanings. His support of the Parliament when it was exiled from Paris gave him the reputation of a defender of old liberties.

Culinary Connections and Colonial Memories in France and Algeria

Late nineteenth-century globalization of the food industry gave formal and informal empire more significance than ever before. This article argues that the French response to this vast colonial marketplace was to embrace the local or terroir, the connection with place and history, as an antidote. Notions of terroir complicated the story of colonial culinary competition and dependence – in the period of empire and the post-colonial period – raising questions of identity, belonging, and the legacy of empire. The consequence was the creation of a sense of a gastronomic “us” and “them” between France and the colonies with implications that continue to play out in contemporary French politics.

Devant L'Empire: France and the Question of “American Empire,” from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush

Many observers of contemporary French politics would find it difficult to resist the temptation to conclude that France, alone among the European allies of the United States, has consistently had the greatest difficulty in adjusting to the reality of America's power. When that power occasions, as it frequently does, debates about “American empire,” French opposition to American influence seems to become even more pronounced. In fact, there has in recent decades been a distinctive French negative assessment of the merits of American empire, but it would be a mistake, or so this paper argues, to assume that French interests have invariably been at odds either with American power or with American empire. Using four eponymous figures to illustrate the French perspective on American empire in the past 100 years, this essay highlights how and why that assessment has evolved.

Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century Michelle Moyd Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. By Gregory Mann. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. The Oscar-nominated film Indigenes introduced moviegoers to the story of North African soldiers from the former French empire who helped liberate France from Nazi occupation during World War II. The film gives audiences a sense of the sacrifices made by colonial soldiers, and hints at the debt France owes them for these sacrifices. The film focuses on the North African experience, but West African recruits also fought for France in both world wars. A small but rich historiography on the West African soldiers known collectively as the Tirailleurs Senegalais has illuminated their origins, contributions, and struggles for compensation and fair treatment from an often disinterested France.1 With the subject having attracted so much attention in the last two decades, one might wonder what remains to be said about it. Gregory Mann demonstrates in Native Sons that there are still many pressing questions to be answered at this particular intersection of West African and French colonial histories. Native Sons extends and challenges the existing literature, and also analyzes the historical roots of France’s debt to its African veterans, made so visible by Boucharem’s film. He focuses on the experiences of ancien militaire, or career soldiers, from the present-day nation of Mali, tracing them through their far-flung wartime experiences in France, the Mediterranean, and Asia. As Mann himself remarks, “telling a story of mobility wile remaining rooted in a particular place is no simple task” (24). He takes this opportunity to make an original argument about how military culture provided stability for soldiers as they tried to assert economic control over their families back in West Africa, and to keep their relationships alive over great distances and the formidable obstacles of space and time Mann argues that to truly understand how different groups in contemporary French politics discuss immigration, we must understand that the terms of the debate are products of a contentious political language of mutual if uneven obligation, the sources of which lie deep in West African history and on the very surface of the colonial relationship between France and Mali (2). The French recruited their colonial soldiers from enslaved groups, following on from nineteenth-century local African practices of military vassalage and household slavery. In Malian social and military history, the practice and consequences of soldiering cannot easily be disentangled from the social aftermath of slavery and subordination (29). A specific language of mutual obligation that informed French-African colonial and post-colonial relations throughout the twentieth-century grew out of this regional history of slavery, patronage, and clientship. The recurring theme in this political language is the idea of the blood debt, whereby West African sacrifices in the name of the French empire should have secured the veterans and their families’ long-term tangible benefits in the form of monetary compensation, political power, and prestige. This binding obligation between African soldiers and their French officers was often disappointed by French metropolitan and colonial officials. For example, in 1960 Article 71 of the French Finance Law froze base pension rates for former French nationals, directly affecting the long-term value of veterans’ pensions in newly independent Mali (142). These past injustices continue to animate lively discussion on the fraught relationship between France and its former African colonies. Since at least the late 1990s, West Africans and West African immigrants living as sans-papiers in France have become quite comfortable using the rhetoric of the blood debt in their claim to political belonging in France. Mann’s five finely textured chapters explore different registers of this political language and how it inflected the lives of Mali veterans over time, informing their political aspirations and decisions at local and supra-local levels. He begins with a fascinating portrait of how two generations of a Malian soldiering family of slave origins used their military service as a route to political power with differing degrees of success, and in different phases of Mali’s colonial and independence-era history. This family...

The Public and the Private in Contemporary French Politics

This article examines selected aspects of the changing public/private interface in the mediatisation of politicians in contemporary France. It argues that there is normative confusion surrounding attempts to establish an agreed dividing line between the public and the private in both politicians' mediated communication and journalists' political coverage. Such confusion is a product of mutually reinforcing changes in the interdependent relationship between three sets of actors: politicians, journalists and the public. Politicians need to use the media for the purposes of self-publicity and the projection of a coherent electoral image; journalists operate in highly competitive media markets which are dominated by the pursuit of audiences and advertising revenue; and the public as voters have become disenchanted with the political class, while as media users they have become accustomed to the exposure of the private lives of celebrities.

For Political Philosophy:Dialogues with Contemporary French Political Philosophers, Tokyo, University of Tokyo Press,2004

For Political Philosophy:Dialogues with Contemporary French Political Philosophers, Tokyo, University of Tokyo Press,2004

The presidential party and the fifth republic

Until 1986 the prevailing interpretation of the French Fifth Republic was one of encroaching presidential domination; notwithstanding some welcome revisionism occasioned by ‘cohabitation’, presidentialism continues to permeate analysis of contemporary French politics. This article attempts a comparative assessment of the presidential party as it has functioned under the first four presidents of the French Fifth Republic: de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand. It is contended that each presidential party has shared certain attributes, resulting from systemic influences in France's semi‐presidential system; while retaining distinct characteristics derived from its identity as a particular type of party, and from the experience of a varying political context. The opportunities and constraints faced by successful presidential parties outweigh in importance their dissimilarites, inherited from their experience of different models of party organisation and ideology. No presidential party that ha...

Paradoxes of ethnic politics: The case of Franco‐Maghrebis in France

Abstract Ethnic politics is a paradoxical phenomenon in France. While predominant French ideologies and institutional arrangements reinforce a ‘no ethnic politics’ model, there have been substantive challenges to this traditional model, including changes in state practices, and the political emergence of Franco‐Maghrebis and the immigrant association movement. Using the affaire des foulards [headscarves affair] of 1989 as a case‐study, the article seeks to clarify the ethnic politics paradox in France. I argue that the emergence and configuration of ethnic politics in France are being shaped by a series of constraints. These constraints are reflected in the ways in which the headscarves affair was created, defined, and managed. I suggest that the constraints are rooted not only in French ideologies and institutional arrangements, but also in the ‘nationalist logic’ of contemporary French immigration politics, the integrationist strategies of Franco‐Maghrebi groups, and the immigre perspective of the state...