French Observers Research Articles

Au Nom de la Patrie: Southern Identities and Patriotic Mobilisation in First World War France

Abstract At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, many French commentators doubted that France had the strength to withstand the trials of war. Yet the national mobilisation for war was an indisputable success that surprised military planners and political leaders alike. Despite inauspicious beginnings and the unprecedented material and human costs of war, France held out, and the Republican nation-state emerged victorious and to a large extent reinforced by the war. However, the subsequent failure to mobilise successfully in 1939–40 begs the question of the nature and transformation of French patriotism in the First World War. Interestingly, in a field characterised by its vibrant, sophisticated and highly contentious debates, French historians appear to have skirted around the problem of patriotic mobilisation. This article reconsiders this question by investigating social mobilisation in the country’s southern periphery, focusing on the town of Béziers. It underlines the need to locate patriotism by considering its valence in the particular social and geographic contexts that determined the war experience at the front or at home. It also suggests the necessity to re-politicise the idea of national sentiment while maintaining the necessary distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Finally, it argues that the analysis of wartime mobilisation in France must be part of a larger reflection on the mobilisation of space and place in the era of the Great War.

A Tale of Two Theories

A Tale of Two Theories

Review of “The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory”

Since former President Trump’s 2020 Executive Order banning critical race theory, the scholarship has been at the center of an international moral panic. Right-wing American, British, and French commentators invented a conspiracy theory version of critical race scholarship (Marxism! Black supremacy!). Once constructed, conspiracists blamed critical race theory for several alleged social ills, including making white kids uncomfortable and destroying nationalist sentiment. Although the acute stage of this moral panic may be receding, critical race theory’s reputation as a body of scholarship aimed at diagnosing and curing racial inequality is tarnished. Scholars concerned about racial inequality—for intellectual and ethical reasons—should be worried, as it will likely take time to reverse the damage. Answering objections from academic and lay opponents of critical race theory, Ali Meghji’s The Racialized Social System: Critical Race Theory as Social Theory shows what recovering from this moral panic will look like. Contra academic detractors who claim that critical race theory does not provide a coherent analytical framework, Meghji contextualizes the development of critical race theory in legal studies in relation to the broader set of critical theories of race and racism that were bubbling up in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The theoretical imprimatur of these currents runs deep, as these intellectual movements were part of a long lineage of radical thought from racially marginalized scholars such as Oliver Cromwell Cox, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Joyce Ladner. For lay readers (and I’m sure this book will draw interested non-specialists), Meghji provides an accessible overview showing critical race theory’s explanatory power across the social sciences.

The Civil Code of Andrés Bello and the exegetical movement in Colombia

This paper is interested in the reception of the civil code of Andrés Bello in Colombia during the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Likewise, it relates the above to the emergence of the Colombian exegetical movement, close to –as well as different– from the movement of French commentators on the Civil Code of 1804, a movement that will be called, pejoratively in the 20th century, as “exegesis”. Now, this work is justified by the importance of articulating, due to the potentialities that this allows, the legal history with the comparative law, remembering that both disciplines had common origins. This is so, to understand law historically, it is necessary to understand it as a product of cultures in constant communication, in such a way that comparative analysis, in our view, appears as necessary for history, and vice versa. We hope then that the reader can observe that exegesis, if we may use this word, was not homogeneous throughout the Western Hemisphere, but there are still points in common regarding some of its most important postulates. Understanding this movement happens, we believe, by recognizing the similarities and differences with other previous, concomitant, and subsequent movements.

Debating the “Jewish Question” in Tunisia

In Tunisia, the end of World War I and the return of Muslims and European settlers from the front brought attacks against local Jews who had been exempt from conscription under French colonial rule. French commentators spoke of a “Jewish question” fueled by Muslim fanaticism and Jewish profiteering, obscuring their own divisive attitudes and policies. Colonial archives and the popular press, however, reveal that this was far from a monolithic sectarian concern. Jews responded to violence with a variety of transnational political visions. I explore how some Jews reaffirmed their loyalty to France, while others highlighted colonial hypocrisies. Others turned to solutions such as US protection or the Zionist movement. This Tunisian story, with its unique colonial arrangement and legal ambiguities, foregrounds an oft-overlooked North African perspective on the global questions of identity, nationalisms, and minority politics at the end of World War I.

Thomism in Ecstasy: Olivier-Thomas Venard on the Wording of Theology and the Expropriation of Cultural Discourses

Thomism in Ecstasy:Olivier-Thomas Venard on the Wording of Theology and the Expropriation of Cultural Discourses Cyril O'Regan I would like to begin this reflection with a very general dilation on the theological achievement of the Dominican Olivier-Thomas Venard, rendered in his trilogy of Pagina sacra, La langue de l'ineffable, and Littérature et théologie, and brought to the attention of the Anglophone theological public by the translation efforts of Francesca Murphy and Kenneth Oakes in their A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality (Bloomsbury, 2019). The substantial five-hundred-page anthology still represents only a third of the trilogy. Yet, even in translation the trilogy comes across as breathtakingly beautiful, not only because in large part it manifests the capacity to bear with and to bear the effects of glory rendered by the biblical text, but it also repeats at a distance a particular style of theology which, despite its theoretical sophistication, or precisely because of it, remains constantly in conversation with Scripture. For Venard, the figure of figures is none other than Thomas Aquinas. I will shortly provide a sketch of Venard's unusual figuration of Aquinas, but before I do, it is important to note that while it is true that Venard is anxious to establish the aesthetic register of Scripture and the copious theological production of Aquinas, he wishes to go a step further in speaking to both as forms of poetics: Scripture and the theology of Aquinas bear an analogy to each other in that both are forms of enunciation that brazenly deploy all available linguistic and rhetorical resources to render the Word which by definition represents the coincidence of the act of enunciation and the content. The newly published translation makes us appreciate even more than [End Page 695] one did in the French trilogy the level of sophistication displayed in Venard's hermeneutics. With regard to Scripture, the philological performance is a match for the very best that one can find in German, while being vastly more knowledgeable in the history of interpretation, Patristic and medieval as well as modern, as well as being considerably more theoretically adept in its mastery of semiotics, ancient, medieval, and post-Saussurean. Yet beyond its singularity, Venard never forgets that the finality of Scripture is transformation, and he dares to think that this is also the aim of the most intellectually rigorous forms of Christian theology of which Aquinas represents an exemplary instance. Venard is not remotely interested in coming across as an original. Thus, when we read him on either Aquinas or Scripture, he will also acquaint us in the notes—without burdening his main text—with all the available scholarship in all the main languages of commentary. Venard does the Anglo-intellectual world a particular service, however, by drawing attention to the marvelous French scholarship on both. He introduces us to biblical commentators such as François Martin, Jean Grosjean, and Oswald Ducrot, among a host of others. With regard to French scholarship on the Bible he draws particular attention to discussions on the relation between the Gospel of John and the Synoptic Gospels which appear to be on an entirely different level from similar discussions in the German and English literature in terms that the theoretical apparatus deployed. A similar phenomenon is observable in Venard's opening up of a treasure trove of French interpretation of Aquinas beyond the usual suspects of Chenu, Torrell, and more recently Gilles Emery. We are made aware of and come to appreciate Henri Paissac, Yves Floucat, Louis de Bonald, and Louis Lachance, who continue the ressourcement of the historical Aquinas, but in a new key. For these scholars, with whom Venard identifies himself, Aquinas is far more than a philosopher given to proofs of God's existence. He is even more than the theologian who gives functional priority to sacra divina, a stance that, indeed, has been taken in the past decades by English interpreters of Aquinas; he is more even than the theologian who is a medieval interpreter of John, Matthew, and Paul of the first order. The Aquinas that these French commentators prime for Venard is an Aquinas...

‘La maleureuse bataille’: fifteenth-century French reactions to Agincourt

Abstract This article examines the military and political impact of the battle of Agincourt in France and the way in which this defeat was remembered up until the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The English presented their victory as a sign of God’s support for Henry V and his claims in France, but the French preferred to understand their defeat as a divine punishment for their sins. This led to debate about who had incurred God’s wrath, as civilians blamed soldiers, soldiers blamed their aristocratic leaders, and partisans for the Armagnac and Burgundian factions blamed one another. But most French commentators attempted to bridge these divisions, or at least to minimize the damage by attributing the disaster to the actions of foolish young hot-heads and to cowards. This avoided the need to name and shame specific noblemen, but also meant that only the most traditional lessons were highlighted from this defeat.

“Moral Rubbish in Close Proximity”: Penal Colonization and Strategies of Distance in Australia and New Caledonia, c.1853–1897

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to thebagnein New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness. By Sam Bootle

This is the first full-length study of Laforgue to be published in English since Anne Holmes’s Jules Laforgue and Poetic Innovation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). For all that anglophone scholarship has contributed in the intervening twenty-five years to the critical picture of a poet best known for his pioneering vers libre, it has lacked the sustained depth and breadth of attention that Sam Bootle’s excellent monograph offers. Its focus is Laforgue’s critical engagement with German philosophy, notably that of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, whose thought and idiom colour almost all aspects of the poet’s work: from the ‘vers philo.’ (p. 51) of his first, unpublished collection of verse Le Sanglot de la Terre (ultimately abandoned in 1882), to the novellas of Moralités légendaires, published a year before his untimely death in 1887, via his aesthetic writing, essays, and correspondence. Reading Laforgue inevitably means grappling, to some degree, with the idiosyncrasies of Schopenhauerian and Hartmannian metaphysics (especially the latter’s principle of the Unconscious); and this difficulty may go some way towards explaining why the poet is only occasionally drawn into undergraduate syllabi. Bootle shows just what can be gained, however, from tracking this particular crossing between philosophy and poetry: not only does he elucidate the concepts that Laforgue appropriates and transfigures, he also reveals the poet to be ‘a subtle and, at times, critical philosophical interlocutor’ (p. 2). What distinguishes Bootle’s approach most clearly from existing studies is his close attention to the rarely discussed contextual and ideological concerns that frame Laforgue’s harnessing of German pessimism (Chapter 1) — frequently likened by French commentators, especially in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, to a pernicious disease or epidemic fostering demographic decline. Against the backdrop of nationalist anxieties about health and virility, Bootle argues convincingly that Laforgue’s redeployment of the discourse of pathology, abstinence, and bodily suffering (Chapter 2), inherent to pessimist thought and its reception, constitutes ‘a form of political oppositionality’ (p. 13). More broadly, Bootle traces Laforgue’s fascination with what he terms the ‘otherness’ associated with Schopenhauer and Hartmann’s philosophy, which, first, is mapped onto Germany (in Chapter 3), where the poet spent most of his adult life (1881–86), and second, is extended to the Eastern thought, especially Buddhism, on which both German philosophers drew (Chapters 4 and 5). ‘Laforgue’s vision of a non-unitary self’, indeed, of the ‘illusion of selfhood’, is shown to be rooted in his engagement with Buddhist ideas (pp. 108, 102). There emerges from Bootle’s fine commentary a poet in search of an open and ‘dehierarchized relationship between cultures’ (p. 148), yet ever conscious of the exoticism his Eastward gaze might imply. Through its own openness to Laforgue’s intellectual eclecticism, this book offers a necessary and compelling account of a poet far more widely recognized for his formal experimentation than for his very particular brand of culture critique.

FRENCH POLITICAL THOUGHT ABOUT THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN MODEL OF EUROINTEGRATION

The primary focus of the paper is on the contemporary sociopolitical discussion in France about the problems of European integration. One of its key aspects, the debate among the eminent thinkers, philosophers and historians, is analyzed. The French intellectuals always emphasized the problem of the united Europe building considering the continent as the field for the France’s economic, political and cultural expansion. Since the second half of the XXth century the vision of the country’s future has been inherent in the European project’s realization. From the French thinkers’ point of view the European community turned into a kind of superstructure over the liberal democratic states that neutralized the risks of their interaction as well as opened the prospects for mutual development. At the same times these institutes were a sort of temporary construction. The French commentators point out that from the very beginning they had no the firm political foundation. This preconditioned the current crisis. The problem of the legitimacy of the European institutions turned out to be insoluble. The idea to construct them beyond the field of the common nationhood on the ground of latent economic integration removed the possibility to create a kind of superstate in the form of federation. The post-statist model based on the idea of European civil society remained nothing but the abstraction. The mechanisms of the redistribution that could help creating the united social field are absent. The choice in favor of the so called value legitimacy was made that to the French thinkers’ mind produced an illusion that the European institutions can be stabilized. In fact this laid the groundwork for their deconstruction in the future. The most of the French intellectuals are united in the pessimism as of the EU’s prospects. Their evaluations of the latest signs of the crisis only vary in what concerns the point of view on the problem.The eurooptimists remain in minority while the eurosceptics are debating the measures that should be taken in order to reconstruct the EU. Some of them come to conclusion that this question should be regarded as part of the reforming of the contemporary liberal democratic state as such.

Intimate Enemies: French and English Settlers and Commentators in Colonial St. Kitts

This article examines a variety of texts produced by the French and English colonists of the island of St Kitts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, the island was jointly settled by these two groups, a situation which created considerable tension and frequent hostilities between them. By placing these texts in dialogue with one another, we gain a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the extent to which these competing imperial projects resembled and differed from one another, allowing us a new perspective on European settlement in the Caribbean in the era of slavery.

Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.”

Texturen des Denkens: Nietzsches Inszenierung der Philosophie in “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.”

Rethinking the Fascist Aesthetic: Mass Gymnastics, Political Spectacle and the Stadium in 1930s France

This article explores two features of cultural life in France during the era of the Popular Front, with a special focus on the Paris world’s fair of 1937 – mass gymnastics and large stadium projects designed to host both sporting and political spectacles. These developments are considered in the light of both transnational exchange, and the widespread unease expressed in interwar France towards spectator sport on the one hand and ‘totalitarian’ political mobilization on the other hand. It is argued that a ‘double attitude’ towards spectacle emerged, where disdain for commercial spectator sport sat alongside an often grudging admiration for large-scale political spectacle. The article examines the reception in France both of the Bohemian Sokol physical culture movement and the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, showing how French commentators across the political spectrum negotiated their sense of the value of spectacles – normally by reclaiming them for identifiably ‘French’ democratic traditions and by blurring the distinction between spectatorship and participation. In doing so, the article takes issue with the reductionist nature of the notion of a ‘fascist aesthetic’, stressing that the wide purchase of both mass gymnastics and monumental neo-classical stadium design suggests that the political meaning of such things lies in their use and not their form.

Remembering and Forgetting the Great Famine in France and Ireland

Remembering and Forgetting the Great Famine in France and Ireland Grace Neville The columnist and critic Fintan O'Toole posed a characteristically provocative question in the Irish Times on August 5, 1997, when, in the course of discussing the scarcity of artistic responses to the seminal event in modern Irish history, he asked "Whatever happened to the Famine?"1 The Great Famine of the 1840s is often seen as a lieu de mémoire, or site of memory, but also as a locus of forgetting in Irish history. Despite the seismic shift that it set off across Irish society, the Famine was frequently shrouded in silence throughout succeeding generations. One might wonder, therefore, what was known of it elsewhere—for instance, in Ireland's nearest continental European neighbor and age-old ally, France? A great deal, it would seem. To date, I have identified more than two thousand French texts from the nineteenth century that refer briefly or at length to the Famine. The French commentators include journalists, priests, poets, playwrights, satirists, statisticians, scientists, lawyers, horticulturalists, botanists, epidemiologists, postgraduates, aristocrats and proletarians, conservatives and revolutionaries. They published mainly in Paris but also in provincial cities like Grenoble and Clermont, and even further afield—for instance, in Montréal. Yet, even as they set pen to paper, the French observers repeatedly question the very aim of their work as they cast doubt on the ability of mere words to capture a catastrophe so huge as the Irish famine. Decades after the event, Ernest Fournier de Flaix wondered, "Comment écrire sur l'histoire de cette famine? Des milliers, des dizaines de milliers, des centaines de milliers d'hommes et de femmes périrent. Elle a couté plus de vies que l'Angleterre n'en a perdu dans aucune de ses guerres depuis Hastings jusqu'à Waterloo" ("How can the story of this famine be written? Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men and [End Page 80] women perished. It cost England more lives than any of its wars from Hastings down to Waterloo.").2 Their reactions range from empathy and searing passion to clinical detachment: in an 1862 study, the editor-in-chief of L'Economiste français, Jules Duval, actually put a positive gloss on the mass emigration triggered by famine in Ireland: "Thus, Ireland's excess population was happily drained and the country was led into a state of prosperity that it had never heretofore known."3 One surprising finding, in surveying the French literature, is the extent to which Ireland and potatoes were already linked in French minds. Writing at the height of the Famine in 1846, Balzac describes in his novel La Cousine Bette a typical impoverished Parisian who "eats potatoes like the Irish, but fried in rat fat." Elsewhere, his praise of a restaurant in the Quartier Latin, Flicoteaux, depicts Ireland as the land par excellence of the potato: "potatoes are always on the menu [in Flicoteaux' restaurant]. Even if there were no potatoes in Ireland, even if they were in short supply everywhere, you would still find them in Flicoteaux."4 However, more than the equation that "Ireland equals potatoes," the French had long made the connection that "Ireland equals famine." From at least the late seventeenth century onward, French commentators depict Ireland not as a land of famine but of famines. The Famine of the 1840s is thus contextualized as just one of countless such events, albeit admittedly the worst. In an award-winning 1827 study on the death penalty, a lawyer at the royal court in Paris, Adolphe Garnier, refers to "Ireland where, through poor administration, entire families sleep in cellars and on the streets, beset by fever and hunger."5 Elsewhere, the eminent traveller Gustave de Beaumont—who had visited Ireland along with his friend, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s—comments, "Every year, nearly at the same season, the commencement of a famine is announced in Ireland, its progress, its ravages, its decline. . . . When Bishop Doyle was asked, in 1832, what was the state of the population in the west, he replied, 'The people are perishing as usual'."6 De Beaumont concludes by quoting the Commission for Inquiry into the State...

Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy

This essay explores the role of cross-national and cross-cultural comparison within the race and multicultural debates as they play across various national and cultural zones—most notably U.S.-American, French, and Brazilian. Rather than "do" comparison, it analyzes the variegated modalities of comparison itself. The essay deploys a relational and transnational method that seeks, ultimately, to compare comparisons, eludicating the insights and blindspots of different comparative approaches and frameworks, as well as the limitations of comparison itself. The essay discusses the ways that asymmetries of power impact the discourse and rhetoric of comparison, making them reciprocal or unilateral, dialogic or monologic. The essay explores as well the ways nation-states define themselves with and against other nations in a diacritical process of identity formation, partially through a rhetoric of (sometimes invidious) comparison. Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons, the essay argues, serve myriad purposes. Negotiating constantly between the facile universalism, which denies difference ("we're all human beings!") and the bellicose stigmatization of difference (good versus evil; us-versus-them), comparison at its best can trigger a salutary deprovincialization and mutual illumination. A particularly invidious kind of comparison, however, takes the form of civilizational ranking. Nationalist and pan-ethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in hand with an especially invidious form of comparison: ranking. In Hegel's The Philosophy of History, for example, every attribute of Hegel's personal and national identity becomes associated with supreme rank. The methodological problem with comparison is the reciprocal reification of differences and the erasure of commonalities. "Ideal type" generalities homogenize very complex and variegated national formations, while denying common features. In a bipolar method of comparison, all individuals line up in conformity with a set of a priori characteristics. Roberto DaMatta's comparisons of the United States and Brazil, for example, leave both Brazilians and inhabitants of the United States locked up in a prison of identity in which there is no room for contradictions and anomalies, resulting in the "ontologization" of cultural difference. The essay then explores the variations in comparative method in three French commentators on Brazil: Jean de Lery, Levi-Strauss, and Roger Bastide. It concludes with metaphors and proposals that bring us beyond comparison through metaphors that lead to Atlanticist and diasporic approaches that bypass the nation state as frame.

The French Sources between the Young Kazantzakis and Nietzsche

<p>Kazantzakis wrote in 1909 a dissertation on Nietzsche's philosophy, in view of a career at the University of Athens. He based this dissertation mainly on studies by French scholars, which provided him not only with most of its content, but also with its very structure. The description of the meaning of Greece to Nietzsche, for example, and the references to ancient Greek authors are indebted to these French commentators, rather than to a direct reading of the primary source. Even more importantly, some of the concepts that Kazantzakis attributes to Nietzsche, and which play an essential role in his own thinking, up to the period of his great post-World War II novels, appear to be based on a mistaken interpretation of Nietzsche by Lichtenberger, according to which man is a particle of the divine substance, the eternal Will. For the real Nietzsche, the mysteries of sexuality constitute the only form of eternal life.</p>

André Siegfried and the Complexities of French Anti-Americanism

Though it is generally agreed that André Siegfried (1875-1959) was one of the most enduring and influential French commentators on the United States between the 1920s and the 1950s, scholars do not agree on the extent to which he should be considered anti-American. This article concludes that while Siegfried found the American social model to be profoundly unsettling, and that his views of the country's population were consistently informed by racist assumptions, he also evinced some admiration for its economic dynamism and regarded it as a necessary if problematic partner. Moreover, for much of his career many American commentators regarded Siegfried as a perceptive and fair-minded observer of their country, though by the 1950s his racist views drew increasing criticism. Siegfried's career thus illustrates the complexities of French intellectual anti-Americanism.

Ancient warriors on modern soil: French military reform and American military images in eighteenth-century France

The American Revolution made idealized characteristics of ancient militaries seem like actual possibilities in France. Roger Chartier recognized that a change occurred in French thinking that had made certain revolutionary ideas ‘conceivable’ by 1789. When French adulation of ancient militaries intermingled with the reports of the early American Revolution, against a backdrop of the urgent need for French military reform, the abstract met the concrete, and the idealized characteristics of effective ancient militaries become practical possibilities. In addition to the potential for a more disciplined, patriotic army reminiscent of the Greeks and Romans, press representations of the American army and militia further introduced more concrete ideas about republican government and a more merit-based society. To old regime France, these ideas were revolutionary indeed. French perceptions of the American military gave new power to old ideas; through the lens of ‘classical republican discourse’ French commentators began to visualize a future revolution.

Jean Paulhan and the Nouvelle Revue française: Modernist Editor, Modernist Review?

The Nouvelle Revue francaise: a Modernist Review? Jason Harding, the opening pages of his book on T.S. Eliot's The Criterion, the review created by the poet 1922, writes: in common with Nouvelle Revue francaise, whom it resembled appearance, was set inside the case of a great European review. (1) This provides a clear example of the ready assumption that the French monthly review La Nouvelle Revue francaise constituted a clear and unambiguous model for Eliot to emulate his quest to propagate his own brand of experimental The fact that the NRF had been founded Paris by writers around Andre Gide, late 1908 and into 1909, a pivotal moment the history of European was sufficient for an Anglo-American writer and critic such as Eliot to recognize the NRF as a beacon of European modernism. Moreover, the Columbia University professor Justin O'Brien, his introduction to a book of translated extracts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the review's foundation, wrote that no other periodical symbolized the modern European twentieth century better than the NRF. (2) Eliot, celebrated since as a paragon of European paid tribute to the NRF by basing his own periodical on the French review, to which he himself submitted three Lettres d'Angleterre May and December 1922, and again November 1923. One may--and should--challenge Harding's assertion, because the words experimental beg many questions. Modernism is a word charged with different emphases, nuances or meanings. But let us continue for a moment. In the words of the critic Michael Levenson, If we look for a mark of modernism's coming of age, the founding of the Criterion 1922 may prove a better instance than The Waste Land, better even than Ulysses, because it exemplifies the of the movement, the accession to legitimacy. (3) Once again, as Harding himself asserts, much of this sentence is problematic. Apart from the chronological assumptions, the terms institutionalization and cultural legitimacy invite debate. It is true that relativism represents an underlying problem here, which may be exemplified by a point raised by Michel Beaujour at the conference New York and reported Le Monde. Why should the history of the NRF be conceived according to American critical canons, especially that of modernism, asked Beaujour. It is precisely because the Anglo-Saxon world [sic] looked specifically to Paris and at some of the reviews published there, to keep abreast of modernist trends. (4) In spite of the problematic nature of this relativism, differences which have led some French commentators to avoid the word modernisme altogether and to prefer the word modernite, let us consider it within the context of European as does Walter Gobbers his bilingual introduction to a voluminous collection of work on the question. (5) Here Gobbers draws a distinction between the and modernism which is helpful for our discussion of the NRF: Cette opposition entre modernite/modernisme et avant-garde permet evidemment d'accentuer davantage les nuances, voire les differences entre les deux : l'avant-garde se distinguerait alors par son extremisme et son nihilisme radical, par le caractere absolu de son experimentalisme et surtout par le progressisme de son engagement et de sa contestation socio-politique ; la litterature moderniste, par contre, serait plus intellectualiste, plus rationnelle et plus psychologisante que celle de l'avant-garde. (6) So if, by 1922, the NRF is recognized by Eliot as a significant arbiter and mediator of the modern, or of as we shall see it also retained conservative, traditional, even anti-modernist elements (one example of this is the space given to Julien Benda (7)). …

Richard II from Donkey to Royal Martyr: Perceptions of Eustache Deschamps and Contemporary French Writers

The transition of Richard II from lethargic English monarch to royal martyr, as viewed by various French commentators and chroniclers, is examined in three significant aspects: the political prophecy, the interlacing of marriage and peace-making, and the tragedy of deposition and death, on which rests Richard's posthumous reputation as a literary exemplum. Relevant writings of Eustache Deschamps and Philippe de Mézières are examined in greater detail than previously, with the added testimony of other contemporaries. These writers' reactions to Richard's fate varied, but they largely blamed his people for causing his death by foul play.