French Influence Research Articles

Las patentes en la introducción del hormigón armado en España: caso de estudio de la Alhóndiga de Bilbao

Reinforced concrete structures are introduced in Spain mainly by French influence. This happens in the late nineteenth century, following the scheme operating through proprietary systems prevailing in Europe. Systems initially have poor scientific support reaching, even early twentieth century, an impediment to the development of concrete structures, due to the lack of knowledge shown, as well as due to a series of accidents. Therefore, from the end of the first decade of the past century are enacted a series of regulations in many countries, that will change the design and calculation of reinforced concrete structure. The knowledge of the environment of the patent systems, its beginnings and the circumstances of their application allow us to understand the constraints of the early concrete structures, as presented in the Bilbao wine store (1906).

Borderless sport? Imagining and organising bicycle racing in Belgium, 1869–1914: between transnational dynamics and national aspirations

From the 1860s onwards, the new sport of bicycle racing engendered transnational flows of ideas, practices and performers. However, national actors and sensitivities always remained present. In interaction with these transnational flows they shaped national identity in this sport, as the Belgian case shows. Belgium was a site of cross-border interaction for racing from early on. Nevertheless, actors like the Belgian cycling press or national cycling union also continuously tried to construct a ‘national’ racing culture. French and British influences were especially crucial here, as Belgian actors were continuously torn between both in determining their position in the amateur–professional question or in the International Cycling Association. France and Britain thus functioned as ‘significant others’ in the shaping of ‘national’ Belgian racing, a process often complicated by the transnational activities of other, commercially motivated actors like cycling tracks or racers themselves. In competition, too, the discourses of the Belgian press on racers Hubert Houben and Robert Protin celebrated their ‘small nation’ and its success against and differences from its bigger neighbours. The Belgian orientation on French racing eventually became dominant, and proved to be crucial to the resurrection of the sport in Belgium after a period of crisis around 1900.

The Overlooked French Influence on the Intellectual Property Clause

The “IP Clause” of the U.S. Constitution has long been a puzzle for courts and commentators. It authorizes Congress to secure exclusive rights for authors and inventors, but it does not use the terms “patent” or “copyright,” and its objects of “science” and “useful arts” do not cleanly map onto the subject matter of current intellectual property systems. As the Supreme Court has noted, under current popular usage of “arts” and “science,” one would expect patents to promote science and copyright to promote arts, yet we know from the historical record that it is exactly the opposite. Other terms, such as “progress” and “discoveries” remain contested. IP Clause interpretations to date rely exclusively on British legal and intellectual antecedents. I argue that the great French Encyclopedie project — a landmark of the mid - eighteenth century Enlightenment — provides crucial context. James Madison, a drafter of the IP Clause, owned and approvingly cited the work. Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were enthusiastic advocates of it. The Encyclopedie has as its two twin goals the promotion of progress in science and in mechanical (useful) arts. I argue that the reliance of early courts and commentators on British antecedents to interpret the federal patent and copyright statutes led to an improperly narrow sense of the context of the IP Clause. Using entries from the Encyclopedie on “Art,” “Science,” “Discoveries,” “Inventions,” “Writers/Authors,” and other relevant topics, I propose a new interpretation of the IP Clause that is more coherent and compelling than existing accounts.

Manifestations phonétiques de la dynamique des attributions ethnolinguistiques à Montreal

AbstractMontrealers are often categorized into three distinct groups: Anglophones, Francophones, and Allophones. However, within these groups there are individuals whose trajectories are complex, as reflected, for example, in their linguistic practices. Our interest lies in the relationship between these complex practices and the ethnolin-guistic attributions of the speakers. We concentrate on two groups of Francophones: those from Spanish-speaking families who have been in Quebec for one or two generations and those from Francophone families who have frequent English-speaking contacts. After summarizing the results of a perception test, in which Francophones from Quebec were asked to identify the ethnolinguistic affiliation of speakers of various origins based on short clips of their French, we analyze the usage of sociopho-netic variables reflecting the influence of French, Spanish, or English. The analysis indicates that phonetic variation stems from speakers’ sociosymbolic orientation, as well as certain other sociodemographic factors linked to identity construction as it relates to ethnicity.

The absent father of Sino-French cinema: contemporary Taiwanese cinema and 1950s French auteurs

In contemporary Sino-French cinema, father characters who are dead, long lost or geographically distant leave gaping holes in the lives of the offspring left behind. The absent fathers in Sino-French films by Taiwanese auteurs Cheng Yu-chieh, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang serve as metaphors for French auteurs. French New Wave films constitute the majority of the intertexts; however, early 1950s French cinema and even late nineteenth-century painting reflect the expansiveness of French influence. Despite the possibility of an orientalist dynamic, Taiwanese auteurs not only pay homage to their French ‘fathers’, and especially New Waver François Truffaut, but also strike out on their own, contributing innovative work to contemporary transnational cinemas.

Neology, Competing Authenticities, and the Lexicography of Regional Languages: The Case of Breton

Lexicographic practices when dealing with minoritized regional languages demonstrably differ in certain key respects from such practices with “big” languages like English or French. Prominent among such differences is the treatment of onomasiological gaps, common in small languages of limited currency, including the handling of neologisms and deliberate coinages. Here we propose a case study of Breton, the regional Celtic language of northwestern France, whose sociolinguistic history has divided intellectuals into two camps with competing visions of authenticity: a traditionalist camp focused on the dialectal speech of older, rural native speakers who have long filled lexical gaps by resorting to borrowing from French; and a modernist camp of younger, urban, well educated “Neo-Breton” speakers, whose standardized Breton eschews French lexical influence, looking rather to the Celtic roots of Breton, and even the closely related language Welsh, to fill lexical gaps. In this case study we examine a selection of quasi-technical terms in a corpus of twentieth- and twenty-first-century bilingual Breton lexicography. The study examines the issue of terminological variation attested for such words, their lexicological profile, and the extent to which their lexicographic handling reflects a position with respect to competing notions of authenticity.

The Union for the Mediterranean in the policy of France and Germany

The Union for the Mediterranean, established in 2008 by France, was intended to strengthen French influence in the region. After Germany intervened, this exclusively French project was expanded to encompass the entire European Union, which provided financial support from the European Neighbourhood Policy. The immense political, economic and social problems facing the south of the Mediterranean prevented the Union for the Mediterranean from operating efficiently there. Under the circumstances of the crisis in the euro zone, and after the Arab revolutions, France and Germany intend to continue to support the democratisation process in the region and they have come up with numerous initiatives, especially in the field of energy, cross-cultural dialogue and educational projects. They also support measures to combat terrorism and curb illegal immigration into the European Union.

Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate by Ernest P. Young

Reviewed by: Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate by Ernest P. Young Joseph Tse-Hei Lee Young, Ernest P. Ecclesiastical Colony: China's Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 408 pp. $74.00 (cloth). Ecclesiastical Colony is a long-awaited book that reinterprets the history of Catholicism in modern China through a critical study of the French Religious Protectorate, a secular institution implemented by France to monopolize Catholic missionary affairs under the mid-nineteenth-century unequal treaties. By historicizing the religious protectorate in different temporal and spatial settings, Ernest P. Young elucidates how France used this diplomatic mechanism to reshape the Chinese Catholic landscape, how this top-down approach affected the local Catholic communities, and how rival European diplomats and missionaries devised innovative strategies to expand or constrain the French influence. This book makes significant contributions to our understanding of Chinese Catholicism. First, Young has consulted an impressive range of new evidence from Chinese and European archives to illustrate the operation of the French Religious Protectorate. He builds on the latest studies of Catholic movements by Anthony E. Clark, Henrietta Harrison, and Eugenio Menegon to address the diplomatic context of the Catholic missionary expansion into China. The religious protectorate was, in fact, more central to the advancement of France's colonial ambitions than to the evangelistic concerns of Catholic missions. But elevating the protectorate over individual missionaries and non-French Catholic enterprises was fraught with contradictions. Under the Third Republic (1870–1940), Léon Gambetta (1838–1882) notoriously announced that anticlericalism was not an article for export. While the French government marginalized the Catholic Church at home, it protected missionaries abroad in order to put the Church in service of its imperialistic ambitions. Nevertheless, the religious protectorate weakened due to rivalries with other foreign nations. This external factor not only influenced France's monopoly on Catholic affairs in China, but also enabled Chinese officials and Catholic believers to pit one foreign power against another. In 1885, hostilities between France and the Vatican prompted the Holy See to deliver a papal message to the Chinese emperor, and the occasion inspired Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) to pursue direct diplomatic links with the Vatican, with a view toward undermining the religious protectorate (pp. 56-59). By the early twentieth century, the foundation of this imperialistic system was shaken by the broken alliance between France and the Vatican in late 1904 (p. 89). The French consulates in China worried so much about the erosion of the religious protectorate that they employed coercive and co-optative measures to pressure the European Catholic missionaries to defend their imperialistic interests. In addition, the conflicts involving the French Catholic missions had a strong property dimension even though the ostensible reasons given were different. The indemnities following the Boxer Uprising (1900–1901) transformed the Catholic Church into a powerful economic institution. But well-endowed Catholic churches turned out to be a double-edged sword. One example was the extensive network of the Jesuit institutions in Shanghai. The more prestigious educational, medical, and welfare programs the French Jesuits offered, the more appealing Catholicism was to the Chinese. This huge mission empire prompted the Jesuits to rely on dubious revenues for support, including rental incomes collected from a Chinese-run brothel on Jesuit premises (p. 90). Equally important were the diverse Chinese responses towards the religious protectorate, ranging from suspicion and indifference to hostility and confrontation. Most of the late imperial district and sub-district officials bitterly opposed French intervention into local resource disputes involving Catholic missionaries and Chinese converts, but some ambitious community leaders joined the Church to employ French diplomatic influence against their opponents in rural politics. Young draws a complicated picture of the local management of Catholic affairs. European missionaries often lost control of their flocks and were dragged into endless intra-/inter-community conflicts. At least in Jiangxi, Sichuan, and Guangdong provinces, the projection of French power through its religious protectorate was neither a complete nor a unidirectional process. Native Catholic agents occasionally appropriated this mechanism for their own empowerment and survival. Methodologically, two interpretative frameworks have dominated the historiography of Catholicism in China...

Bengal: The French connection

Abstract The subject of this article is the relationship between France and Bengal. It concentrates on the specific characteristics that distinguish the French connection with Bengal from that of other French territories in India. It briefly traces the history of the French presence in Chandernagore, before focusing on the early twentieth century and the important role that Chandernagore played in the Indian independence movement. It examines the practical effects on this struggle of the presence of the French in this part of India. Beyond these, it questions the extent of French influence on the political theory and practice of the Bengali revolutionaries. It ends more broadly by assessing the French legacy in Bengal today. Cet article traite des rapports entre la France et le Bengale. Il souligne les aspects spécifiques qui relèvent de la situation particulière de Chandernagore et qui sont à distinguer de ceux qui touchent d’autres territoires français, comme Pondicherry. Après avoir tracé rapidement l’histoire de la présence française à Chandernagore, il examine le rôle important que cette ville a pu jouer dans le mouvement indépendantiste de l’Inde, surtout au début du XXe siècle. Il s’agit des effets pratiques sur cette lutte de l’existence de ce territoire français tout proche de Calcutta et, au-delà, de la possibilité d’une influence française sur la théorie et la pratique politique des révolutionnaires bengalais. L’article se termine par une évaluation de l’héritage culturel de la France au Bengale contemporain.

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

Césaire at the Crossroads in Haiti: Correspondence with Henri Seyrig

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

“This receipt is as safe as the Bank”: Reading Irish Culinary Manuscripts

Towards a Structured Approach to Reading Historic Cookbooks

Towards a Structured Approach to Reading Historic Cookbooks

Text for Dinner: ‘Plain’ Food in Colonial Australia … Or, Was It?

Text for Dinner: ‘Plain’ Food in Colonial Australia … Or, Was It?

Planning the Federal Capital

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, the countdown to securing a city plan for Australia's national capital took many twists and turns. The major narratives are now fairly well documented: defining the parameters for the ideal site, identifying and acquiring a suitable location on the Limestone Plains, devising an acceptable procedure for securing a plan and selecting the best on offer. However, the broader influences propelling all of these processes towards something approaching international best practice were many and varied and are less well understood. This paper examines some of the key events with connections to French urbanist thought. In particular, it revisits five key junctures: the 1901 Federal Capital Congress in Melbourne; the 1906 visit to Paris by Joseph Davis on behalf of the Commonwealth Government; the 1910 International Town Planning Conference in London; the international design competition of 1911–1912 and the third prize entry of Alfred Agache; and the winning plan by Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin. While the French influence in the constructed city is muted, the genealogical connection to precedents such as Versailles and Paris can still be traced through the extant historical record to enrich our appreciation of Canberra's planning heritage.

The Political Offence and the Safeguarding of the Nation State: Constitutional Ideals, French Legal Standards and Belgian Legal Practice, 1830–70

Both the French Constitutional Charter (1830) and the Belgian Constitution (1831) stated that a jury was required to judge press offences and political offences. While the latter was a terminological novelty in the Western legal discourse, no precise definition of its legal meaning was given. The French law of 8 October 1830 provided a non-delimiting list of all offences that were considered political, but the Belgian legislature gave barely any indication. In this paper, after stressing a number of similarities in the conception of the political offence as a key element in political thought, a comparison is made between the French legal standards and Belgian legal practice. Despite the obvious French influence, there were substantial differences in Belgium, especially where Church-State relationships were involved. This clearly reveals the pragmatic approach of the Belgian judiciary towards the safeguarding of the young nation state.

Dorothy Day's social Catholicism: the formative French influences

The French thinkers who influenced the American social activist Dorothy Day through Peter Maurin are representative of French progressive thought connected with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and its 1931 successor, Quadragesimo Anno. This article discusses the influence of Kropotkin, de Foucauld, Maritain and Mounier on Day. In France itself, this thought was often frustrated but Day provides an example of the implementation of Roman Catholic Personalism in the American setting. Day was both a popularising journalist and a tireless practitioner of the threefold platform deriving from Maurin's philosophy of Roundtable Discussion, Farming Communes and Houses of Hospitality. By the early 1950s, the tangential nature of Day's interest in the worker priest movement, when the question of its suppression had global prominence, shows that Maurin had been successful not in interesting her in his French influences for their own sake but in bequeathing to her a workable synthesis as a framework for her own efforts.

Tai-Burmese-Lao Buddhisms in the ‘Modernizing’ of Ban Thawai (Bangkok): The Dynamic Interaction Between Ethnic Minority Religion and British–Siamese Centralization in the Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Centuries

Drawing on extensive Thai literary and oral history sources this article sets out to explain the complex social, political, ethnic and religious framework within which the opening by ‘the Irish Buddhist’ U Dhammaloka of a free, bilingual and multi-ethnic Buddhist school at Wat Ban Thawai, Bangkok in May 1903 acquires a broader and deeper significance. The article documents the mutual relationships between the local Buddhisms of Tai, Burmese and Lao ethnic minorities and the politics of British-Siamese alliance in the period before and during the First World War. It examines the British-Siamese support of these Buddhist communities in Bangkok and explores the British-Siamese use of their diplomatic relationship with the Tai, Burmese and Lao ethnic minorities in Ban Thawai and elsewhere (i.e. across the borders between Siam and Burma) in order to centralize power. It also discusses the anomalous effect of British and French influence in Ban Thawai which allowed local resistance to Siamese centralization and saṅgha reform.

France and the Arab Upheavals

The consequences of the upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa since December 2010 have posed a significant foreign-policy challenge to France, which has historically distinguished itself from other major Western powers by maintaining a closer relationship with the Arab states, and its former colonies, in this region. Despite this familiarity, however, the incoherence of the French response under President Sarkozy to the turbulence that unfolded early in 2011 suggests that it was caught unawares and, despite apparent success in Libya, Sarkozy's successor Hollande continues to grapple with the impact on French influence in the region.

An anthropological genetic perspective on creolization in the anglophone caribbean

Variable socio-cultural influences developed in the colonial Caribbean as a result of competing European hegemonic rule. In this study, we examine how colonial regulations regarding social hierarchies and mate choice worked to influence the genetic landscape of contemporary African Caribbean populations. To this end, 420 individuals from Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, St. Vincent, Jamaica, and Trinidad were genotyped for 105 autosomal ancestry informative markers. Based on these data, population substructure and admixture were assessed using an exact test, a model-based clustering method, and principal components analysis. On average, individual admixture estimates of the pooled African Caribbean sample were 77% (SD ± 18%) West African, 15% (SD ± 15%) European, and 7.7% (SD ± 8%) Native American. In general, ancestry estimates were significantly different between Dominica and all other islands. Genetic structure analyses indicated subdivision into two subpopulations on most islands. Finally, unlike all of the other Caribbean populations that clustered adjacent to African populations, the Dominican population was more intermediate between the three parental groups in the principal components plot. As a result of the significant French influence throughout Dominican history, Dominica did not have the same cultural influences that typified other Anglophone colonies. Consequently, there were different social hierarchies and resulting mate choices on Dominica compared with the other considered islands. This study highlights the complex socio-cultural history of a broad region of the Caribbean and attests to the interplay between social and biological factors in shaping the genetic diversity present in present-day communities.

The Commission Contract in Comparative Law

In the legislation of countries in the system of ″common law″, the commission contract is brought under regulation differently, depending on the principle that has been adopted, regarding the extent to which it is permitted the establishment of certain legal effects in the relationships between the principal and a third party. Given this criterion, the following legislations were defined: the legislations of countries in the common law″ system, the legislations of French influence and those who have completed the merger of commercial law and civil law (Italian Civil Code of 1942 and the Swiss Code of Obligations). Through this work we tried to achieve a comparative study on the effects of the commission contract from the perspective of the legislations of countries belonging to the ″common law″ system and the French influence legislation.