French Frontier Research Articles

Causes, Impacts, and Historical Analysis of the War of Vietnam

The Vietnam War was one of the most dubious and compelling military conflicts of the twentieth century. This article aims to give a top-to-bottom examination of the causes, effects, and history of the conflict that sawthed in Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. Utilizing essential and optional sources, the creator investigates different parts of the contention, including its set of experiences. the specific situation, the explanations for the episode of the conflict, and the expansive effects that keep on affecting local and worldwide issues right up to the present day. The verifiable setting of the Vietnam War can be traced back to the pioneering time when Vietnam was under French frontier rule. The craving for autonomy and solidarity turned into the focal subject that molded Vietnam’s public character and brought about the different enemies of pilgrim developments. Following the First Indochina War, which saw Vietnam split along the 17th parallel, there were more wars, which eventually turned into the Second Indochina War. The main drivers of the Vietnam War were multi-layered and complex. One of the principal factors is the philosophical hole between the socialist North and the non-socialist South. The Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union likewise assumed a significant role, with America supporting the South Vietnamese government to forestall the spread of socialism in Southeast Asia. Additionally, regional dynamics and nationalism play a role in the region’s growing hostility. This segment talks about significant occasions and defining moments during the Vietnam War, including the Inlet of Tonkin occurrence, the Tet Hostile, and the Paris Truce. These occurrences had a significant impact on the course of the conflict and influenced public opinion worldwide as well as in the countries involved

Persistence on the Edge: The Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb

Persistence on the EdgeThe Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb Robert B. Caldwell Like many other tribes in the US South, the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, located in western Louisiana, began organizing for self-determination in the 1970s. Influenced by the American Indian Civil Rights and Red Power movements,1 the community made no land claims to the Indian Claims Commission but requested federal acknowledgment and was recognized by the State of Louisiana as a tribe in 1978.2 Efforts by the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb to secure federal recognition offer insight into the importance that place plays in a people's history. In an essay in volume 12 of the Handbook of American Indians, Hiram F. Gregory suggests that Louisiana tribal communities persisted throughout the difficult nineteenth century in "refugia and isolation," living in marginal landscapes outside the cotton plantation corridors.3 This generalization may hold true, but certainly the various tribal communities have different lived experiences. This article begins a close examination of the construction and persistence of one isolated American Indian refuge close to the edge of other peoples' worlds. This investigation required the author to cross many boundaries: of language, geography, time, and identities, as well as disciplinary boundaries. Seeking a legal basis for the tribe to collectively interact with local and state officials, and complying with self-government provisions in the Indian Reorganization Act, leaders exchanged traditional forms of family- and clan-level leadership for an elected body, incorporating the Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb as a not-for-profit organization on August 18, 1977. Membership was limited to those having "1/16 degree or more of Indian blood" and "living within the territorial limits of Sabine Parish . . . more particularly those living in the unincorporated portion of Ward 5" or those who can "affirmatively establish their [End Page 190] family origin as belonging to the Ebarb area." Tribal citizenship was also extended to descendants of those persons duly enrolled.4 Today, as in 1977, tribal citizens continue to live in dispersed settlements throughout the western part of the parish. But nearly half of tribal members living in the parish live in, or within two miles of, the town of Zwolle (Ward 6). Outsiders invariably make reference to Zwolle (the nearest town) as the location of the tribe, but tribal members reject this town as the geographical or political center of the tribe. Why was the name "Ebarb" so important as to be included in the name of the tribe, and why did the articles of incorporation emphasize the unincorporated portions of Ward 5? Published regional histories do little to elucidate Choctaw-Apache territoriality. The first published histories of Sabine Parish claim that when Anglo-Americans arrived in the nineteenth century, they encountered nothing more than a "howling wilderness," a "no man's land."5 This twentieth-century whitewashing conveniently ignored not only the Spanish soldiers and French traders who had arrived one hundred years earlier but also the American Indians who had been in the region for thousands of years. The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana characterizes the Choctaw-Apache community as a synthesis of immigrant tribes.6 Ebarb elders understand that northwestern Louisiana is not the ancestral homeland for their Choctaw or Apache ancestors, yet their oral tradition stubbornly claims, "we have always been here." There is some truth to this widespread sentiment of primacy. Some of the tribe's ancestors were soldiers at the Spanish presidio at Los Adaes in the early nineteenth century and built strong fictive kinship relationships with local Caddoan tribes, especially the Hasinai confederation.7 More importantly, almost all Choctaw-Apache share a handful of common Adai ancestors, who historically inhabited lands between the Sabine and Red Rivers in northwest Louisiana. Prior to 1820, the community lived in dispersed extended-family settlements stretching one hundred miles between the Spanish and French frontier settlements of Nacogdoches, Texas, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, and sustained themselves through subsistence agriculture, hunting, and cattle raising.8 By 1795, Catholic missionaries had established a church at Las Cabezas de Vallecillo, near present-day Zwolle.9 Despite any Spanish administrative preference to keep Tejas and Luisiana separate, this population continued to live in the margins...

New France and the Hudson Bay Watershed: Transatlantic Networks, Backcountry Specialists, and French Imperial Projects in Post-Utrecht North America, 1713–29

Examining communication and information networks during the period of the Régence (1715–23), this article argues that French metropolitan ministers, imperial planners, colonial administrators, and royal cartographers relied heavily upon backcountry specialists – coureurs de bois, runaway soldiers, and veteran voyageurs – to provide ethnographic, geographic, and strategic knowledge, which informed and shaped the policies of post-Utrecht French North America. Subsequently, colonial officials believed that these French frontier diplomats and negotiators were the key to consolidating imperial control over the geographic, political, and cultural landscapes of the Hudson Bay watershed. These backcountry specialists were embedded within Indigenous information networks that criss-crossed North America and were thus important intermediaries between the French state and Indigenous peoples at the edge of empire. Although coureurs de bois and voyageurs became pivotal informants, explorers, fur traders, and military leaders, they not only were unwavering agents of imperial power but also pursued their own agendas and exercised agency in the Hudson Bay watershed. Backcountry specialists initially made it possible for French colonialism to extend into the watershed, but their own ambivalent relationships with the French colonial government and its representatives also fragmented the imperial authority of the French Empire in North America.

University students’ plurilingual profiles in a French frontier city: Similarities and differences between more and less plurilingual students

AbstractPlurilingualism has been targeted as an objective of the European Commission and its deployment is naturally thought to originate in the education sector. A recent study of the Commission (

The Archaeology of French and Indian War frontier forts

The Archaeology of French and Indian War frontier forts

“The Elks Are Our Horses”: Animals and Domestication in the New France Borderlands

Historians have long overlooked the role played by animals in cross-cultural interactions in the American borderlands. Yet domesticated animals - and the social practices that accompanied them - were central both to the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonizers and to indigenous American resistance. This paper examines these themes within the context of the Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi region between 1670 and 1730. Drawing evidence from Algonquian and Iroquoian languages and cultural practices as well as from the accounts of French missionaries and voyageurs, I show that the indigenous peoples of the Pays d’en Haut rejected the positive connotations that domestication held for Europeans, and instead equated domestication with enslavement. The resulting conflicts between conceptions of nature, ownership and tameness had an enduring influence on European-Indian relations. Although this study examines specific patterns of interaction on the New French frontier, it also raises broad questions relating to environmental history and European-indigenous interactions throughout the New World.

Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic

At first glance this volume might seem to have limited interest and utility for historians of Latin America since only 2 of its 12 chapters deal directly with Spanish America and none with Brazil, but that would be a misleading conclusion for a number of reasons. The editors have brought together 12 scholars (5 historians and 7 literary specialists) to address the essential paradox of early modern empires that based their creation and expansion on supposed divine mandates, but that simultaneously provoked moral and ethical questioning of the violence and exploitation inherent in their creations. To varying degrees this was true of all the early modern Atlantic empires, Protestant and Catholic alike, and so their commonality and the variations between them provide numerous opportunities for comparison and contrast. Although a number of the articles included here do not actually attempt that task and are mostly limited to one imperial area, others specifically examine the contacts, interrelationships, and parallels between the English and Spanish empires.Two essays deal directly with the Spanish Empire. The content and argument of Rolena Adorno’s essay, which leads off the collection, are already well known to many HAHR readers, since this material was included in two chapters of her book Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (Yale University Press, 2007). Here, Adorno reviews the theological and juridical questions provoked by the papal bulls of 1493 and the well-known arguments of Francisco de Vitoria and the Salamanca Dominicans in defense of indigenous rights. She then provides a commentary on the debate between Sepúlveda and Las Casas on the questions of “just war,” the encomienda, and Castile’s rights to the Indies that emphasizes the mixture of philosophy, theology, and law mustered by both sides. Her point that these debates set the parameters of subsequent discussions of religion and empire is thus a useful starting point for this volume’s contributors. The imperial dimension of religion is the subject of Cornelius Conover’s study, “Catholic Saints in Spain’s Atlantic Empire.” Conover challenges William Christian’s argument about particular devotions as expressions of localism as well as Antonio Rubial’s emphasis on a growing criollismo in the choice of saints to honor. He argues instead that the crown’s control of the liturgical calendar reinforced the authority of the empire despite local pride in creole saints, and thus tied religion ever more closely to rule.A number of essays devoted to anglophone or francophone regions emphasize Spanish precedents and parallels and Spain’s continuing presence as a competing model of empire. These themes figure prominently, for example, in Carla Gardina Pestana’s demonstration of how Spanish cruelty and Catholicism were used to justify English opposition and rivalry, but she also demonstrates that these tropes could be manipulated to justify English opposition to the Protestant Dutch as well. Similarly, Barbara Fuchs examines sixteenth-century texts to show how the English used the opposition between their own perceived Protestant “temperance” and Spanish Catholic cupidity and greed as a way of creating a sense of difference that Elizabethans believed was fundamental to their imperial project. Katherine Ibbett shows how reading the Vida of Teresa of Ávila influenced the French Ursuline Marie Guyart, who sought martyrdom in the forests of New France and whose own biography published in the 1670s showed the popularity of a reinvigorated French frontier martyrology. Susan Juster presents a penetrating analysis of Protestant iconoclasm at its height in British North America in the late seventeenth century, at a time when on the northern and southern frontiers political realities facilitated Indian savagery to become linked to French and Spanish Catholic idolatry. The English responded to the threat with what Juster believes was an iconoclasm on churches and violence on Indian bodies.A number of chapters dealing with the missionary efforts in New France and British North America evoke natural comparisons with Latin America: Allan Greer studies the Jesuit Chaumonot in New France, whose command of Huron and Iroquois made him a particularly effective missionary and proto-ethnographer. Dominique Deslandres discusses the French missionaries’ attempt to control Native American dreams and the importance of a struggle over the subconscious as a locus of cultural shock. Kristina Bross examines the “praying Indians” of New England in the context of a number of English missionary texts, some of which saw the conversion of the heathen as an essential step in millenarian expectations, similar to the contemporaneous preaching of Antonio Vieira.As a whole, this well-organized volume challenges Latin Americanists to remember that not only Spanish and Portuguese monarchs and their subjects believed that God was on their side, nor were they alone in their efforts to catechize and integrate indigenous or colonial peoples into these Atlantic empires. Moreover, in all of them, Christian morality sometimes exercised a brake on the political, religious, and material designs of empire.

Innovative farm policies and their impact in a French frontier zone: reviving old conflicts in Guadeloupe (FWI)?

Society now expects agriculture to fulfil new functions to improve quality of life. This requirement has been reinforced by recent crises. The 1999 French Agricultural Framework Law (LOA) formalised agricultural multifunctionality and included payments to farmers for new practices, which satisfy both social and environmental functions, in addition to economic ones. A voluntary territorial farm contract (CTE) sets out the respective commitments made by farmers and government services. In Guadeloupe (French West Indies, FWI), the recognition of agricultural multifunctionality challenges the export- and production-oriented agricultural models. Our research on the innovations that resulted from the CTEs has shown that the LOA was applied to these models in order to improve existing situations, contrary to the changes that were recommended. Paradoxically, however, the tensions between the requirements set out by the LOA and the actual achievements have helped improve the rural stakeholders’ representation. Such tensions should help to reconcile development with agriculture’s multifunctional nature, as well as satisfy society’s expectations for sustainable rural development.

ANDRÉ MAGINOT

The Great War impressed upon André Maginot the necessity of defending the French frontier. He worked tirelessly to secure the funding that would build the line of fortifications that stretched along the Franco-German border. Although France fell in 1940 to the German blitzkrieg, Maginot, like the fortifications he gave his name to, deserves a fairer appraisal.

The French Frontier of Settlement in Louisiana : Some Observations on Cultural Change in Mamou Prairie

Changes in Cajun culture of the Southwestem Prairies of Louisiana can best be explained through the ethnohistorical study of pre-1952 cotton sharecropping communities, and the subsequent displacement of the tenant farmers to service centres. Isolation of the sharecroppers was culturally-reinforced by a strong egalitarian ideology. From this milieu, Cajun music emerged as a marker of an indigenous Louisiana francophone society. The decline of cotton cultivation reversed the demographic balance between countryside and village and favoured the emergence of merchant and service strata composed of former farmers. The new bourgeoisie sought means of cultural revival through the reinterpretation of rural culture in a town context. Using radio, newspapers and the strong external support of folk "purists" they selectively cultivated ethnic differences. French was strengthened in a public context even though it continued to decline in private and familial contexts. The response to this transformation differs among occupation groups. Retired sharecroppers in Mamou, the most "Cajun" in their everyday retention of "traditional" social and linguistic behaviour, are the least likely to advocate the survival of that culture and its transmission to another generation.

From the Moselle to the Pyrenees

Memory debates in the twentieth century were determined very largely by war and the aftermath of conflict. The analysis of commemorative practice in historically problematic French frontier territories after 1918 offers insight into the way collective memory is constructed in a context of local-national tension which also impinges on, and is influenced by, what is commonly understood to be ‘cultural memory’. Post-1945, the impact of immigration and exile created the conditions for the emergence of new communities whose claims to a ‘duty of memory’ have shaped commemorative agendas in the last three decades.

Techniques for hazard analysis and their use at CERN.

CERN, The European Organisation for Nuclear Research is situated near Geneva and has its accelerators and experimental facilities astride the Swiss and French frontiers attracting physicists from all over the world to this unique laboratory. The main accelerator is situated in a 27 km underground ring and the experiments take place in huge underground caverns in order to detect the fragments resulting from the collision of subatomic particles at speeds approaching that of light. These detectors contain many hundreds of tons of flammable materials, mainly plastics in cables and structural components, flammable gases in the detectors themselves, and cryogenic fluids such as helium and argon. The experiments consume high amounts of electrical power, thus the dangers involved have necessitated the use of analytical techniques to identify the hazards and quantify the risks to personnel and the infrastructure. The techniques described in the paper have been developed in the process industries where they have been to be of great value. They have been successfully applied to CERN industrial and experimental installations and, in some cases, have been instrumental in changing the philosophy of the experimentalists and their detectors.

Cross-border use of health care: A survey of frontier workers' knowledge, attitudes and use

This study examined the impact of enlarging access to health care to residents of frontier zones in northern France and Belgium. A postal survey was carried out on representative samples of French frontier workers (n=176) and Belgian frontier workers (n=366). The survey explored the level of awareness of the arrangements for double access to health care, the patterns of cross-border use of health care and the obstacles and incentives to use cross-border health care. The results showed that approximately one-fifth of the respondents were unaware of their eligibility and this was particularly pronounced about their dependants' entitlement. Frontier workers tended to use cross-border care for the purchase of medications, the use of hospital care and the use of specialized care. There was an increased flow of consumption from Belgium to France which might be explained by the higher proportion of Belgian workers being of French nationality or having dual nationality.

Régions frontalières, télévision et communication électronique

Border regions, television and electronic communication Having recalled the reader's attention to several significant elements in the scientific literature which deals with the frontier (and the boundary) and the rapport between the frontier and the regional territory, this article evaluates the quality of French frontier practices principally in the realms of electronic communication, television and the new technologies of information and communication. It concludes that there is a quasi absence of any real public policy, of any vigorous contractual actions and of any models, and thus that no "social uses" have ever been set up. However, it shows the existence of formulas for co-operation, allying the formal and the informal, capable of leading, finally and in another context, to the form of more ambitious structural apparatuses.

L'atelier monétaire d'Amiens 1578 à 1772

Abstract — In 1578, Henri Ш opened a new mint in Amiens with a view to improving the coinage in circulation in the frontier province of Picardy. Under Louis XIV, the French frontier shifted further north and the mint gradually declined until its output ceased de facto around 1755. Coin production stopped for good in 1772 and only the mint's legal function was maintained up until the Revolution. A detailed study of the various surviving archives makes it possible to gain a better understanding of the life and issues of the mint between 1578 and 1772.

Re Boedecker and Ronski.

States as international persons — Composite and dependent States and territories — Dependent States — Feudal fiefs — Andorra — Status of — Whether possessing international personality — The law of France.The individual in international law — Extradition — Conditions of — Extraditable crimes — Andorra — Request by Federal German Government to France for extradition of German nationals in Andorra — Deportation by French authorities in Andorra for purpose of arrest at French frontier — Whether irregular extradition from Andorra — Double criminality rule — Application to offences of theft, fraud and embezzlement — Application of French extradition legislation in absence of extradition agreement — The law of France.

Re Lothringer.

States as international persons — Composite and dependent States and territories — Dependent States — Feudal fiefs — Andorra — Status of — Whether possessing international personality — The law of France.The individual in international law — Extradition — Conditions of extradition — Extraditable crimes — Andorra — Request by United States Government to France for extradition of United States national from Andorra — Deportation by French authorities in Andorra for arrest at French frontier — Whether constituting irregular extradition from Andorra — Double criminality rule — Franco-United States Extradition Agreement, 1909 — Application to crimes of abortion and first degree murder — Whether procedural requirements of Extradition Agreement complied with — The law of France.

Repeat Performance: A Psychohistorical Study of Leopold III and Belgian Neutrality

The neutrality proclaimed by Belgium in 1936 and guaranteed by Belgium's big neighbors in 1937 was a precondition for Nazi Germany's bloodless, then bloody, victories of 1938-1940. For neutral Belgium shielded Germany against a prospective French invasion, in that the French high command regarded the Rhineland bordering Belgium as vulnerable, but was pessimistic about assaulting Germany's fortified French frontier. The upshot was that Hitler conquered Czechoslovakia without a battle and that the German armies subjugated Poland, then Denmark and Norway, while fighting only a phony war in their rear. Meanwhile the French, having undertaken to defend Belgium, could not very well entrench themselves Maginot-style along their Belgian frontier. But neither could the French and British meet a German offensive through Belgium to good advantage if called in only after it was already underway; they failed catastrophically in May 1940. In short, Belgium's neutrality of 1936-1940 played entirely and perhaps decisively into Hitler's hands.

L'interpretation de l'arc des Alpes occidentales

Abstract The Alpine chain extends 700 kilometers from Vienna westward to Leman, then in a 350 kilometers arc the direction changes to the Maritime Alps in southeastern France. Rocks in the zone between Vienna and the French frontier are intensely deformed, but the zone disappears in France. The deformation seems not to be inherent in the zone itself but to have resulted from outside tectonic forces. Northward displacement of the eastern and central Alps, pushing the sedimentary cover in front of them, appears to be the cause of the deformation of the zone east of the French frontier. A northward displacement of the Provencal tectonic block is proposed as the cause of the observed deformation pattern.

The Fortification of the French and Belgian Frontiers

The Fortification of the French and Belgian Frontiers