French Expansion Research Articles

The canary in the mine: Mediterranean mines as indicators of the hold on territories and resources: French Pyrenees, Moroccan Middle Atlas, and Tunisian coastal mountains

Mediterranean mountains have been and continue to be used by human populations along an interweaving of numerous uses: agro-sylvo-pastoralism, trade, industry and mining have all gone hand in hand for several millennia. Mines are however a so important source of wealth that, by putting in contact external powers and mountain locals, it creates an imbalance of powers inducing structural violence and tensions. The 1830–1962 colonial era did change the magnitude of these imbalances and this affect all Mediterranean mountainous ranges. The French expansion did affect as a result the Moroccan Atlas, the Tunisia Coastal Mounts but also the French Pyrenees. The article explores the available archives regarding the history of three mines in each of these emblematic mountains with a shared mining and agro-sylvo-pastoral past and where mining were actually well-known: Sem-Rancié and Puymorens in the French Pyrenees, Mibladen and Zeïda in the Moroccan Middle Atlas and Jebel Ressass in Tunisia. These reconstructions show that the initial social and political situations, as diverse as they are, are of little importance in the trajectory of these mines: all of them see a rapid appropriation by economic powers that are more and more powerful and more and more distant as far as Paris, the common capital in colonial times, despite several revolts and tensions. The initial expansion then gave way to a structural crisis due to the competition with other mining sites until abandonment. The following powers, post-colonial in Morocco or Tunisia or decentralized in France, did not endorse any responsibility of this the post-mining environmental, social and economic legacy. For each of these sites, the mine could be seen as an indicator of the power balance evolution among activities and actors, a canary in the mine on which we propose a methodology for further investigations.

Decorative or didactic? Art à l’école and the ambivalent status of aesthetics and democracy in Belle Époque primary schools

ABSTRACT The Belle Époque quest for a modern beauty (an ‘art nouveau’) extended into France’s system of free primary schooling, established in the 1880s by the Third Republic to educate the popular masses. Design reformers’ belief in the underlying unity of the fine and applied arts, and their growing emphasis on the importance of individual initiative and creativity to the latter, suggested that integrating the right form of artistic education into public education, especially primary schools, would serve both economic and democratic ends. The quasi-official Société Nationale de l’Art à l’École (National Society for Art in School) was founded in 1907 to support this goal. An examination of its efforts nevertheless reveals that its distinction of didactic and aesthetic aims, as well as the parameters it imposed upon content and style, blunted their democratic, emancipatory potential in ways that echoed the broader limitations of the French expansion of education.

“Against Right and Reason”: The Bold but Smooth French Take-Over of Dutch Cayenne (1655–1664)

AbstractThe Dutch loss of Brazil in 1654 favoured the resettlement of Dutch merchants along the Wild Coast and in the Lesser Antilles and the establishment of new colonies. Cayenne Island was one of them. One WIC patent was handed to Jan Claes Langedijck, who settled at the former French fort of Cépérou, and another patent was given to David Nassy, who settled in the Anse de Rémire, situated at the opposite part of the former island. Both colonies were taken by the French in May 1664 as part of the imperial French expansion under King Louis XIV and Jean-Baptist Colbert. It is argued here that the main French goal was to gain control of the sugar plantations of the Sephardic community located there, and, to a lesser extent, the much-desired territorial control of this region as proposed by the newly established French West India Company. The Dutch were aware of the attack, but could not intervene as it was already too late to send support to the poorly defended Cayenne colony. Both parties negotiated the take-over and the majority of the Dutch settlers stayed under French rule, as was suggested by the Dutch government and hoped for by the French.

Historical Research and Directions of French Royal Expansion in 16th — 17th Centuries

In the seventeenth century, the search for the “forgotten” rights of the king were an important aid in organizing French expansion, mainly in the eastern and northeastern directions. At the sovereign courts of Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté “chambers of annexations” (chambres d’annexion) were created in 1680 to organize search for archival documents supporting royal claims to neighboring lands. The idea of creating special institutions engaged in the search for documents revealing the precedents of relations with other countries and forgotten rights, that French king had supposedly enjoyed in those parts, was expressed back during the reign of Henry II. In 1556, Raoul Spifame, a lawyer at the Paris Parliament, published a book consisting of fictitious royal decrees, of which many would be implemented in the future. Among other things he ordered, on behalf of the king, the creation of thirty chambers, each specializing in the search for documents in the “treasury of charters” relating to a particular province. He had determined the composition of these chambers, the procedure for work and the form of reporting, — all this in order to arm the king with knowledge of his forgotten rights and the content of antique treaties and agreements. The nomenclature of “provincial chambers” is especially interesting, from the Chambers of Scotland and England to the Chamber of Tunisia and Africa, as well as the Chamber of Portugal and the New Lands. Much more attention was attracted by those lands to which a century later the French expansion would be directed: Franche-Comté, Artois and Flanders, Lorraine, the Duchy of Cleves. But more than half of chambers specialized in the Italian lands. This is not surprising, since in the 1550s France was entering the climax of the Italian Wars. Under Henry II (1547—1559) one of the four secretaries of state, Jean du Thier, was the person responsible for the southwestern direction of French policy. There is reason to believe that Spifame was associated with du Thier or with other members of the king’s “reform headquarters”. The large-scale transformations already at work were interrupted by the unexpected death of Henry II and the subsequent Wars of Religion. But continuity was inherent in the “spirit of the laws” of the Ancien Régime, so Spifame was able to predict future developments, including the creation of “chambers of annexation”.

Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen Mcshea

Reviewed by: Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen Mcshea Christopher M. Parsons Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France. By Bronwen McShea. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 360 pp. ISBN 978-1-4962-0890-3. $60.00 (hardcover). In Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France, Bronwen McShea has written a must read for scholars of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. Bringing wide reading in early modern French political and social history to the history of the Society of Jesus' missions to colonial French North America, McShea provides a necessary Atlantic perspective to what are often framed as American histories. When McShea explains in her introduction that "The Jesuits of New France, in short, were men planted knee-deep in an untidy world of politics, social pressures, and war" (p. xxvii), she succinctly announces the major thematic interests of Apostles of Empire. Indeed, as the book proceeds through chronological narrative of the Society of Jesus' mission to French North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, individual chapters highlight moments in the mission's history where the Jesuits' attention to the social and political contexts of metropolitan France directly shaped their missionary practice in the New World. In an early chapter "Rescuing the 'Poor Miserable Savage'," for example, McShea skillfully traces out the particularly French valences of the Jesuits' conception of poverty. Only [End Page 809] by understanding how Jesuits identified "a lack of infrastructure compared to urban France" can we make sense of their deep interest in native foods and housing (p. 37). Similarly, a later chapter "Crusading for Iroquois Country" reveals how scholarly focus on Jesuit celebration of suffering has overlooked "the missionaries' primarily positive—sometimes theologically validated—posture towards offensive, not only defensive, war again those seen as enemies of French expansion and Catholicism in America." (p. 130) The focus of the book weighs towards the seventeenth century, but by including a wide range of other printed and archival materials produced by the missionaries in the eighteenth century, McShea's work is able to provide a broader temporal overview than is often the case in histories of the Jesuit missions to North America. McShea writes commandingly and beautifully and it is this focus on a readable and engaging chronological narrative that makes Apostles of Empire such a success. As somebody who spent many of their Sundays as a child at a church named Canadian Martyrs staring at stained-glass depictions of Brébeuf and Jogues, I knew precisely what she meant when she states in her introduction that "the Jesuits of New France remain trapped in iconic tableaux." (p. xx) Since those days, I have read a lot of histories of New France and these missionaries in particular, and they have never come to life for me in the way that they do here. Paul Le Jeune, in particular, jumps from the page with personality and a social history that makes so much of what he accomplished as a missionary understandable. Apostles of Empire, and particularly its earliest chapters, would make a supremely teachable book and has real crossover appeal for a broader body of readers among an interested public. Nonetheless, this commitment to a readable narrative will limit its contributions to scholars of this period. Aside from a historiographical introduction and occasionally vague gestures to a academic debate throughout the text, readers will struggle to understand Apostles of Empire's historiographical context. Some of this likely results from McShea's summaries of existing literature that simplify complex fields and do little to highlight the unique contributions of her work. The claim that discussions of French Jesuits in North America manifest a "perduring Americentrism" (p. xxii) is not entirely wrong, but overlooks and undervalues the work of scholars such as Allan Greer and Dominique Deslandres—among others—who have made good faith efforts to write Atlantic histories of Jesuit thought and practice. If the author has legitimate critiques, she should state them clearly, but to simply deny their existence does her work and its readers a disservice. Now, not every book needs to have historiographical discussions in the [End Page 810] body of its text, but McShea...

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave, pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.

From Science to Religion: Justifying French Pacific Voyaging and Expansion in the Period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy

What explains the generous state sponsorship of the French Pacific voyages of scientific exploration in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy, and what links did these voyages have with the beginnings of a French Pacific empire from 1842? While it is argued that the early voyages owed much to state advancement of science, this goal receded as a reviving France became increasingly imperial minded. In justifying imperial expansion into the Pacific, the French monarchy turned increasingly to another source of national identity and global influence: the activities of French missionaries. Though the promotion of French missions did not constitute a primary goal of French Pacific expeditions, their reports helped to strengthen the alliance between French missions and an increasingly expansionist state. Ironically it was the voyagers’ attention to religion rather than science that was to be more directly linked with the foundations of a French Pacific empire.

Between fanaticism and loyalty: Algerian prisoners within the French Mediterranean Empire

The violent military method of colonisation embraced by French governors general such as Thomas Bugeaud and the violent resistance espoused by local leaders such as ʿAbd al-Qādir have received the lion's share of attention in the existing scholarship on the first two decades of French rule in Algeria. Although some scholars have emphasised that a number of Algerians had become an integral part of the French army and fought on the French side in many important battles, indigenous notables' ideas on French imperialism, the civilising mission and their sense of loyalty remain opaque. This article examines the writings of a number of influential Algerian leaders who experienced captivity in the colonial prison in southern France during the 1840s and redefined their sense of loyalty as a result of that experience. Most of them jettisoned ʿAbd al-Qādir's ideology of violent resistance and attempted to prove their loyalty to France by pointing to their military service and their belief in the benefits of the French civilising mission, which they interpreted as the uniform extension of the French system of justice in Algeria. In addition, some of them attempted to harmonise the French monarchy with Islam by presenting the French conquest as a divinely ordained and thus legitimate event. By analysing the ideas of Algerian notables who adopted a new sense of patriotism, this article underscores the importance of re-examining the existing narratives of French imperial expansion in North Africa in order to recover the key role that indigenous collaboration played in that development.

In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World ed. by Owen White and J. P. Daughton, and: Des missionnaires plongés dans la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Lettres des Missions étrangères de Paris ed. by Paul Christophe (review)

In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World. Edited by Owen White and J. P. Daughton. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 324. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-539644-7.) Des missionnaires plonges dans la Grande Guerre, 1914-1918: Lettres des Missions etrangeres de Paris. Edited by Paul Christophe. [L'Histoire vif.] (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. 2012. Pp. 367. euro27,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2204-09688-1.)French Catholicism in the modern period is heavily influenced by church-state tensions, beginning with the attacks of the French Revolution and culminating in the Law of Separation in 1905.The importance of this context is unavoidable and is competently considered by scholars of the period. One aspect of the French Church that has only recently seen increased scholarly attention is that of French missionary activity. Two recent works examine the complexities faced by French missionaries in the light of church-state issues at home as well as other factors, both positive and negative, that shaped their work.The first work, In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World, is collection of essays edited by Owen White and J. P. Daughton that examines the situation of French missionaries across the globe. It contains twelve original essays that are bookended by an introduction from the editors and an afterword that compares the French and British missionary experiences.The essays are divided into four parts: Atlantic World; Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Middle East; East and Southeast Asia; and Africa and Oceania. This wide geographical scope is further augmented by chronological range that treats topics from the aftermath of the French Revolution through the mid-twentieth century. It is therefore work that should be of interest to many scholars, particularly specialists in non-European areas who are interested in colonialism, empire, and the possible relationship of missionary activity to these issues.Several tensions are present in this engaging work, major theme of which is that comprehensive examination of French missionary activity resists any neat characterizations and indeed often appears shaped primarily by the particulars of unique local situations rather than any overarching forces that emerged during modern colonial expansion. One tension faced by all missionaries was the relationship between their faith and their country. Were they first Catholic or French? The answer to this question might appear obvious when posed about those whose work was dedicated to spreading the gospel, but circumstances sometimes made their primary role murky. For example, the Lazarist Jean-Bap tiste Etienne served as an official representative of the French government in the Middle East during the 1840s. Furthermore, to the extent that missionary goals overlapped with or aided the expansion of empire, government support of the missions often resulted in situations where the missionaries served dual roles on behalf of the Church and France. Charles Lavigerie, cardinal-archbishop of Algiers and founder of the White Fathers, played prominent role in the establishment of protectorate in Tunisia as well as other African missions founded in conjunction with French expansion. The editors describe his efforts as type of synergy that advanced the interests of both Church and state.A peaceful cooperation was not always present, however, an unsurprising fact during time of anticlericalism and growing French secularization. Chapters on missionaries in Vietnam and Cameroon demonstrate clashing of outlooks that also occurred at times, resulting in government attempts to thwart missionary goals. Jennifer Dueck's description of this relationship in her chapter on Syria and Lebanon during the Mandate Rule as a combination of affinity, opportunism and mistrust (p. 164) is apt for several of the cases examined in this work.The contribution of this collection goes beyond the church-state dynamic and includes examinations of missionary interactions in Muslim lands that yielded both positive and negative outcomes, and the work of missionaries beyond the borders of the French empire. …

Poets and Princes: The Panegyric Poetry of Johannes Michael Nagonius by Paul Gwynne (review)

Reviewed by: Poets and Princes: The Panegyric Poetry of Johannes Michael Nagonius by Paul Gwynne Frances Muecke Gwynne, Paul , Poets and Princes: The Panegyric Poetry of Johannes Michael Nagonius (Courts: Medieval and Renaissance Court Cultures, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2012; cloth; pp. xxiv, 544; 30 b/w illustrations, 8 colour plates; R.R.P. €150.00; ISBN 9782503531601. Some years ago, searching for Latin topographical poetry on Rome c. 1468-1513, I was fascinated and frustrated alike by BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1682, a luxurious vellum manuscript dedicated to Julius II. Originally covered in red velvet, it contains eight books of Nagonius's poems, not to mention a magnificent frontispiece in red, green, and lapis lazuli, and an illuminated depiction of Julius II and his nephew in a triumphal chariot all'antica (Plates 7 and 6). I found my long passage of topographical verse in the three-book epic with which the manuscript begins, but did not get very far in understanding its context. Not much has been known about Nagonius for a long time. If I had then been able to consult Paul Gwynne's Warburg Institute PhD thesis (1990), the basis of this excellent book, I would have learned that the topographical description had been included in many earlier versions of the epic, the first surviving being for Maximilian I (1494). The aim of Gwynne's study is to understand Nagonius's work in multiple contexts: literary, historical, and political. In Part I, he attempts to reconstruct the poet's career, for which there is very little independent evidence, and some deliberate disinformation (the invention, in the later part of the sixteenth century, of a fictitious rival, 'Pingonius'). Part II (in eight chapters) treats the works in chronological order: that is, the eleven versions of the epic from 1494 to 1509 presented to a range of eminent dedicatees, and some other compositions. Part III contains edited excerpts with translations, commentary, and explanatory notes from these works (sadly for me, no topography) and a detailed Catalogue of manuscripts and printed books by Nagonius. None of Nagonius's works was printed in his lifetime, and none seems to have circulated independently. Tailored for the specific occasions of their presentation, in both appearance and content, once accepted, his carmina were lodged in the dedicatees' libraries and some 'have remained part of the library of the court for which they were intended' (p. 14, n. 7; cf. p. 60, n. 75). This partly explains how Nagonius was able to recycle his mini-epic (it gradually grew from one to three books) and other verses to make them fit the series of different dedicatees who received them. For example, Maximilian, the hero of the 1494 version dedicated to the same, becomes the exemplary villain of that dedicated in 1497 to Vladislav II, King of Bohemia and Hungary. The manuscript presented in person to Henry VII in London in 1496 belongs to a diplomatic effort to bolster resistance to French expansion in Italy under Charles VIII but, after Charles's death and the accession of Louis XII in 1499, Nagonius expanded his narrative to celebrate Louis's expedition [End Page 196] against Milan. Gwynne comments: 'These manuscripts were never intended to be compared' (p. 138). It appears that from the early 1490s, Nagonius's ability to compose competent Latin verse in the manner, and sometimes the very words, of the ancient poets provided him with a career. But what sort of a career? Though he proudly signs himself poeta laureatus, he was not remembered as a poet (he is missing from L. G. Giraldi's Modern Poets (1551), for example). The reason is not that he wrote panegyric. His contemporaries understood panegyric. Indeed one of the strengths of Gwynne's book is his running 'apology' for panegyric (esp. Chapter 2), usefully presented as occasional poetry tied to the events it describes and celebrates, 'an important ceremonial genre' (p. 59). Not a poet but a pen in search of a patron? Or one in the service of high diplomacy? Raising the question, Gwynne can point to an association with Cardinal Todeschini-Piccolomini (later Pius III) but there is little evidence, and Nagonius never mentions a papal...

Russia as the “Western Other” in Southeast Asia: Encounters of Russian Travelers in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

This article explores an intriguing and unexplored angle of the evolution of Russia's Asian Mission in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal increased Russian shipping to the Far East and brought more Russian travelers to Southeast Asia where in an interesting coincidence of local interests and imperial views they interacted with the local rulers, officials in the region. As scholars, naval officers or government officials/advisors they wrote literary accounts or reports of their journeys and sometimes gave public presentations on their experiences which informed the Russian public and government about British and French expansion in the region and the local perception of Russia as a European power. One of these travelers included the heir to the throne and future tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and his mentor E. E. Ukhtomskii, later a prominent exponent of Russia's Asian mission. By examining the contact of Russian travelers with the rulers and officials of Burma and Siam this article reveals how the interpenetration of Russia's imperial myth of an Asian Mission with an Occidental view of Russia in Burma and Siam helped confirm the empire's notion of a “civilizing mission” and its claim of moral and cultural superiority to other Western powers.

REPUBLICANISM, RAILWAY IMPERIALISM, AND THE FRENCH EMPIRE IN AFRICA, 1879–1889

ABSTRACTThis article questions accepted views of French expansion as a largely autonomous process, reflecting new attitudes towards Africa among policy-makers. It argues that the African railway schemes of 1879 were the outcome of an understanding between powerful railway interests and mainstream elements of the newly victorious republican parties. The ambitions of the railway companies were restricted in scope, however, being confined mainly to existing French possessions, while their sponsorship of imperial expansion was little more than a tactical expedient. It was only when the opportunities created for expansion were taken up by locally based pressure-groups or became caught up in international rivalries that empire began to take root in the Soudan and the Congo. By the time the anti-colonial reaction of the mid-1880s took hold, railway imperialism, a product of the short-lived economic boom, had already run its course. Government now had an opportunity and an incentive to put its imperial house in order. Nevertheless, the resulting equilibrium remained vulnerable to a re-emergence of the forces that had first set France on the road to empire in tropical Africa.

Diana K. Davis Resurrecting the granary of Rome: Environmental history and French colonial expansion in North Africa Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007,XV-296p.

Diana K. Davis Resurrecting the granary of Rome: Environmental history and French colonial expansion in North Africa Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007,XV-296p.

Heroes and Villains: an Algerian Review of Tocqueville and Emir Abd al-Qadir

The history of Algeria’s colonization by France is closely linked to resistance (from 1832 to 1847) led by the Algerian hero Emir Abd al-Qadir (1808–1883), and to the ideology of the French agent Alexis de Tocqueville concerning the means by which France could dominate the country. The colonization of Algeria divided the French political sphere into three approaches: Those who demanded the retreat of French troops, those calling for a limited occupation, and finally those in favour of extending domination and the colonization of the occupied territories. Among the last, let us highlight the chief advocate, Marechal Guizot, and his military accomplices (generals Cavaignac, Pelissier, Saint-Arnaud, Montagnac, and others led by general Bugeaud). Working with them was Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), a fervent defender of colonization at any cost. He was to be their ideologist, a theoretician of colonialism who would legitimize French expansion in Algeria.

Images of the East and French fin-de-sicle spiritual pursuits

The chief motivation behind this article is to investigate the spiritual context behind the second French expansion in the latter part of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth as reflected in painted representations of the colonized East. It arises from a simple curiosity regarding the impact if any of the new and by then politically dominant concept of Lacit on French representations of colonized territories. This context ought to set the second French expansion apart from other colonial ventures, such as the first French expansion, under the staunchly Catholic rule of the absolute monarchy, but also from the moral justifications for empire invoked by other expansionist Western (Christian) powers. The investigation is conducted here through the study and contextualization of painted representations of the time, some of which are usually labelled Orientalist, whilst others have been recognized as forming part of the French aesthetic canon. The outcome is shown to be a clash between an aestheticism inspired by the mystical East in painters of exotic themes and the increasingly secularist mentality of the time. This clash stands to reason, but has rarely been emphasized in studies of French colonialism. The article highlights a number of complexities, tensions and paradoxes prompted by examples drawn from the painted work of the time, from J.-L. Grme to Etienne Dinet.

Rocky Rapids and Sinking Hopes: River Travel, Commercial Rivalries, and Political Divides in Oskar Lenz’s Gabon Voyages, 1874-77

German geographer Oskar Lenz visited Gabon from 1874 to 1877, just as French expansion into the Gabonese interior began in earnest under the leadership of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. Canoe workers from communities known for slave trading along the Ogooue River, particularly those from the Adouma and Okande clans, sought to gain commercial rights and reopen trade links through their service to Lenz. These workers recognized the value of their labour, and employed sabotage of canoes and strikes to force Lenz to raise salaries and support their goals. Younger Adouma and Okande men made partnerships with Lenz to enrich themselves and challenge older leaders during this time of political and economic change at the very end of the Atlantic slave trade in Gabon. This essay demonstrates how canoe workers asserted their economic rights and made the transition from slave trading to employment with Europeans at the opening of European colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century.

The globalisation of France: Provincial cities and French expansion c. 1500–1800

This study of port cities, focusing on those on the Atlantic facade of France, argues that their economic significance cannot be understood within the canons of an insular French, or even European history. They were often case studies of the more general phenomenon of the early globalisation of Europe. In particular, navigation, fishing, trade, and colonisation, depended not only on the seas and the port but also on the agrarian hinterlands. They were often determinative of national imperial expansion. Thus, the success of exports and imports were not necessarily judged on Atlantic crossings but rather on the supply and demand of national or European economies. Commerce did not end on the seashore, in a port, or even in a contraband network, but often deep within a nation’s hinterlands.

A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras by Carol Symes (review)

REVIEWS 329 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene. Book Six and the Mutabilitie, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Abraham Stoll (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co. 2007) 239 pp. The last in Hackett Publishing’s series of paperback volumes of sections of The Faerie Queene, this comes a year after the first four volumes. The introduction is thoughtful and informative, outlining both how the concept of courtesy is a particularly “complex and contradictory” (vii) virtue, even in comparison to the virtues which rubricate Spenser’s previous books. The editors provide a welcome guide to the enjoyment of the text, pointing out, for example, how Calidore “often appears as a comic figure,” and that his “interventions are invariably clumsy and ill timed, and frequently disastrous” (x). While the introductions to other volumes in this series are more firmly assertive about what the respective section means, or more focused on identifying zones of ambiguity, here the introduction asserts a well-informed reading of the book, while allowing for some acknowledgment of critical debate—often through a list of names taken to mark critical positions. Though this is better than no acknowledgment at all, one might hope for a bit more explanation of how exactly, for example, Williams, Cain, and Bernard differ on the meaning of Calidore’s pastoral experience (ix). At these times and others, the introduction seems rushed. For example, it includes a subsection on “violence” and another on “savagery”; it seems that these concepts, though not the same, need to be discussed together. Hadfield and Stoll skillfully negotiate the complicated tension between (ir)resolution and autobiography at the end of Book Six. The section on the Mutabilitie Cantos is particularly alert to the tension between a mythopeic reading and a political one. One might, however, have wished for more attention to prosody and form, especially since those issues are crucial to Spenser generally and these texts in particular. Like the other volumes in the Hackett series, this edition includes, in addition to the standard apparatus, Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh ,” an index of characters, and a guide to further reading. Though the explicatory footnotes are erudite, they are, at times, overcrammed and overdeterminative of reading and analysis; they seem more like marginal notes that would lead to a fascinating lecture than restrained exegetical assistance. The advantage of this is that the reader is not only guided through the literal meaning of the text, but also continually reminded of the stress that key words experience, such as instances of “courteously” (6.7.4.1) and “cowherd” (6.6.26.6). The disadvantage is that Spenser relies upon and rewards a reader who makes mistakes, corrections, revisions, associations and interpretations as they go along. Though perhaps some of the analysis presented in footnotes would have worked better in a longer and more developed introduction , they are undeniably insightful and informed by recent work in Spenser. This carefully presented and useful volume certainly demonstrates a strong enthusiasm for these tricky texts, which as the editors claim (speaking of Book Six), serve to “unravel the project Spenser outlined in the earlier books” (vii). MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2007) xvi + 335 pp. Carol Symes analyzes five of Europe’s earliest vernacular plays created in the REVIEWS 330 medieval town of Arras, a rich cloth trade town on the border of the kingdom of France and Flanders. Symes entertains and educates in this most revealing book, making interesting connections between the public sphere and the creation and performance of plays. The assortment of plays includes a wide variety of subjects and mores. The Jeu de saint Nicholas (The Play of Saint Nicholas) has at its heart the French expansion into Flanders in 1191. The Courtois d’Arras (The Courtly Lad of Arras) follows the story of the Prodigal Son, if he lived in the year 1228. Le garçon et l’aveugle (The Boy and the Blind Man), dating from around 1265, is a satire that was preformed for hundred of years to come. There are also two plays by Adam de la Halle, the Jeu de la feuillée (The Play...

Nineteenth-Century French Women, the Home, and the Colonial Vision: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique Wallpaper

Nineteenth-Century French Women, the Home, and the Colonial Vision:Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique Wallpaper Christin J. Mamiya (bio) Early scholarship on the history of European colonialism was predicated on the assumption of male agency—that men were responsible for constructing the premises and methods of colonialism and for implementing those imperatives (i.e., colonizing other lands). In recent years, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to women's engagement with the sites, rhetoric, and premises of colonization. These gender-specific studies have dealt primarily with the presence of Western women in the various colonies.1 But what of Western women who remained at home? What was their engagement with colonialism? Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique. Joseph Dufour (printer), Jean Gabriel-Charvet (designer), ca. 1805. Block print on paper. Overall size: 6'2" x 34'11". Honolulu Academy of Art. Gift of Anna Rice Cooke, 1928 (2692), Conservation treatment supported by Mr. and Mrs. Christian H. Aall. This essay investigates these questions by focusing on a popular panoramic wallpaper produced by Joseph Dufour et Cie. in 1804 titled Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (Savages of the Pacific Ocean) (Fig. 1). Depicting a wide range of Oceanic peoples and marketed in the years immediately following French expansion into the Pacific, this wallpaper raises the intriguing question, how [End Page 100] might this particular wallpaper have contributed to early-nineteenth-century French women's understanding of colonial practices? This question is predicated on the notion that wallpaper, as an element of interior décor, can serve as a social agent. Relatively few substantive social histories of interior decoration exist; most publications on furniture and wall treatment focus on issues of style, taste, and production. Recently, scholars have begun to produce in-depth social histories that serve as models in exploring the question of how interior décor functioned socially and historically.2 These histories are based on the belief that in addition to the dynamics of use, the various elements that constituted interior decoration were part of the visual rhetoric that helped to convey class and identity. As literary scholar Andrea Kaston Tange notes, the cultural meaning of home depended "heavily on the visual as both a tangible image and a metaphor."3 Although her study focuses on the Victorian middle-class home, Tange's central concept—that decorating a home involved the management of social signifiers—applies to homes of the emerging middle class in early nineteenth-century France as well. Especially in light of the social upheaval caused by the French Revolution just two decades earlier and the establishment of the Napoleonic empire in 1804 (concurrently with the production of this wallpaper), social identity around the turn of the century in France was a fragile and no doubt carefully negotiated entity. Anything (e.g., clothing, social circles, professions, home décor) that contributed to that identity would have been chosen with care and deliberation. Further, as the middle-class home became increasingly delimited as private domestic space (in contrast to the workplace), women spent more time there than did males, who left during the day for work or school. Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that although this wallpaper was not designed for a [End Page 101] female audience, middle- and upper-class women would have been among its primary viewers. Dufour acknowledged this in a published brochure that accompanied Les Sauvages, suggesting the uses to which this wallpaper could be put: "A mother will give effortless lessons in history and geography to her eager, inquisitive and intelligent daughter."4 Answering this question of how Les Sauvages contributed to nineteenth-century French women's understanding of colonialism thus entails consideration of a number of factors: European incursions into the Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century, notions of domesticity and the home, and the physical viewing dynamic (i.e., the nature of spectatorship and how viewers interacted with the wallpaper) that was encouraged by this panoramic wallpaper. It is my contention that Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique visually duplicated the incipient colonial rhetoric, thereby presenting visual justification for the colonial imperative to middle- and upper...

FRENCH ABSOLUTISM, MARSEILLAIS CIVIC HUMANISM, AND THE LANGUAGES OF PUBLIC GOOD

This article contributes to current historical knowledge on the relationship between Crown and local municipal power in Old Regime France. In particular, it examines the political language of bien public mobilized by Marseillais elites and royal administrators between 1660 and 1700 in the context of French commercial expansion. Traditionally, ‘public good’ could be understood in two distinct ways. Derived from royal absolutist doctrine, public good was what the king willed to preserve the state, a collection of diverse, corporate bodies held together by royal justice and reason. Derived from civic humanistic, municipal traditions, public good was the united will of the civic community. Investigating three moments where these two definitions of public good converged and collided – during Marseille's urban expansion (1666), in the local justification of modern commerce, and in the deliberations at the Council of Commerce (1700) – this article points to several mutations in the language of public good at the end of the seventeenth century. Pointing to the convergence of civic humanistic and absolutist traditions, this article demonstrates that centralization under Louis XIV, rather than obscuring local traditions, allowed for the intensification of civic humanistic, republican sensibilities.