French Liberalism Research Articles

Subjecting Pleasure

This article explores the threat posed by the Afro-Asian body in Claude McKay’s novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo’s narrative of transracial alliances converges onto the body of the Afro-Asian prostitute, whose positioning as a “conjunction” exposes contradictions surrounding immigration within French liberalism. Banana Bottom also maps a conflictual relationship between a licentious Afro-Asian coolie woman, and a Black subject who both wrestle with attaining national belonging within an idyllic Jamaica. While Banjo reveals McKay’s yearnings for transnational Black affiliations without the Afro-Asian woman, Banana Bottom reconciles the wrought relations between Black middle-class Jamaicans and the bastardized “coolie gal.”

Gay Marriage and the Limits of French Liberalism

Last spring the rights of same-sex couples gained recognition in a number of places throughout the world. In the United States, three states—Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island—legalized same-sex marriage, while supreme courts in two heavyweights on the international scene, Brazil and Germany, struck down statutes discriminating against homosexuals in the name of equality under the law. All these places have quite different social structures and legal systems, yet gay marriage did not stir much controversy in any of them.

Relire les Lettres d’Espagne de Mérimée by François Géal

evaluation is pessimistic: “Djebar interrogates the utility of autobiography both as a source of recapturing in the present an erased female past, and as a means of relating a text to a multiplicity of lives [...] what is the point, the writer seems to be asking, of writing the archive at all?” (86). Edwards’s case is thoroughly supported by her own close reading of each aspect of the novel, and her interpretation raises important questions about interpretations of Djebar’s literary project. The texts of the four writers Edwards has selected provide firm support for her conclusion that the “non-unitary subjectivity” she describes does not offer a solution to personal or societal problems, nor is it “a simple, cathartic or liberating mode of self-writing” (144). Yet, she contends, it “may indeed be a hallmark of contemporary women’s writing in French” (144). Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green GÉAL, FRANÇOIS. Relire les Lettres d’Espagne de Mérimée. Paris: Garnier, 2010. ISBN 978-2-8124-0195-4. Pp. 414. 54 a. With this study, Géal has authored the definitive work on Mérimée’s 1831 epistolary depiction of Spain. Following a recent trend, Géal, editor of Les lettres d’Espagne for the new edition of Mérimée’s Œuvres complètes, comes to Mérimée from a discipline outside French literary studies. Art historians, historians specializing in Spain, even museum curators, have recently published works on Mérimée, appropriately reflecting the diverse oeuvre of the author himself. Géal specializes in classical Spain and is therefore well trained to situate Mérimée’s Lettres in the context of Spanish studies and to bring a fresh perspective to them. French authors published some two hundred works on Spain from 1800–50 alone. In his introduction, Géal explains that this French fascination with the other side of the Pyrenees stems in part from the Spanish War of Independence (1808–14) that undoubtedly resonated with French liberals and their own revolutionary ideals. Géal carefully considers how Mérimée’s Lettres exploit or ignore the clichés of the récit de voyage and the stereotypes of a Romantic, savage, exotic Spain. He underscores that Mérimée is primarily concerned with “la contestation des hiérarchies traditionnelles au profit de valeurs plus authentiques incarnées par les hommes du peuple” (73). The book is organized into five chapters, each focusing on one of Mérimée’s letters. The chapter on Spanish bullfights situates Mérimée’s account in the contexts of the history of Spanish bullfighting, French travelers writing about the bullfight, and French and Spanish theater. I found Géal’s discussion of the corrida as carnival—where social hierarchies are erased and where good and evil are exchanged —particularly interesting. In the next chapter, analyzing Mérimée’s letter about a hanging in Valencia, Géal discusses Mérimée’s storytelling process, the likely connotations a hanging would have had for French readers in the 1830s, and the letter’s rejection of local color. But much of the chapter focuses on Mérimée’s marked preference for the people and his denigration of the upper class, implying the emergence of a political engagement on Mérimée’s part, in favor of the populace and against the bourgeoisie and civil authorities. Géal’s chapter on “Les voleurs” provides a great deal of background on both thieves in French travel narratives and on the geographic, political, and economic situations 824 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 in Andalusia that made thievery such an attractive option in the early nineteenth century. In what is possibly the book’s strongest chapter, Géal argues that the letter on “Les sorcières espagnoles” can be read as Mérimée’s attempt to undermine conventions of the récit de voyage and to attack the logic of Enlightenment Europe: “Les certitudes de l’homme du Nord cultivé, socialement et intellectuellement en position de force, vont peu à peu s’effriter” (263). Finally, Géal looks at Mérimée’s fifth letter, usually not included in editions...

O séjour de D. Pedro I em Paris e a imprensa francesa: familiaridade e exotismo

A imagem de d. Pedro I na imprensa francesa, durante o período em que viveu em Paris (de agosto de 1831 a janeiro de 1832), foi fundamental para o sucesso que ele alcançou na busca de apoios para a expedição com que retomaria a coroa de D. Maria II usurpada por D. Miguel. Graças ao empenho de estudiosos do Brasil, já circulava na Europa um considerável volume de informações sobre o país. Ao caráter liberal que d. Pedro dera ao modelo político brasileiro que lhe garantiria o apoio dos liberais franceses, juntavam-se aspectos míticos de sua trajetória e do país onde vivera. A familiaridade com que d. Pedro tratava a todos, nobres e plebeus, também seria um fator importante para a conquista de adesões à causa de d. Maria.

K. STEVEN VINCENT. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism.

K. STEVEN VINCENT. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism.

Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism. By K. Steven Vincent. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Edited by Anthony J. La Vopa, Suzanne Marchand, and Javed Majeed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. viii+280. $85.00.

<i>Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism</i>. By K. Steven Vincent. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Edited by Anthony J. La Vopa, Suzanne Marchand, and Javed Majeed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. viii+280. $85.00.

Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism by K. Steven Vincent

favorable to him. When they in turn fell, he supported Napoléon Bonaparte, an option that his principles or his self-interest could not sustain to the end. He eventually engineered the return of the Bourbons, and later their departure. Meanwhile, his proverbial role at the Congress of Vienna demanded all his talents to restore the balance of power in which he firmly believed. Pflaum does not spare the details on Talleyrand’s personal life, especially the many women who became his mistresses and possibly the mothers of his children. Although only Charles de Flahaut can be documented with any certainty, three others may qualify. Talleyrand’s infatuation with Catherine Grand, his mistress and later his wife, was eclipsed by several other women, including his niece-in-law, Dorothée Courland, Duchess de Dino, whom he named his principal heir. Despite his questionable morals in many spheres, Talleyrand died reconciled to the Church, which he claimed to have served faithfully. This biography is quite readable and even gripping, assuming the proportions of a novel. Precise in detail and often poetic, it engages the reader throughout . However, the Ciceronian style sentences often separate the antecedent far from the pronoun, so that one needs to reread to follow the thread. In addition misprints (such as mis-en-scène, Mére, “principle” claim to fame) distract the reader. Louis XVI was crowned in 1775, not Louis XV (402). Inaccuracies, especially regarding religious matters, appear throughout. St-Lazare is the cathedral at Autun, not at Reims (13) where kings were crowned. Secular priests do not make vows at ordination, and the festivities of Mardi Gras are pre-Lenten, not postLenten (206). The Latin words of absolution are “Ego te absolvo,” not “absoudre” (430). While the bibliography lists most of the published literature on Talleyrand, the text does not contain any notes, with the exception of those documenting direct quotations. It is therefore impossible to trace any information. The author frequently states that current research has disproved a commonly-held belief, but unfortunately does not indicate the source. She indicates dates, but often omits years. A number of colored plates, all well-documented, complement the work, but there is no reference to them in the text. Despite these shortcomings, this biography does achieve its goal of presenting Talleyrand and his world. At the end the reader appreciates the many sides of a colorful personality that becomes an intriguing presence not easily forgotten. Chestnut Hill College (PA) Mary Helen Kashuba VINCENT, K. STEVEN. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-11009-0. Pp. 288. $85. The origins of French liberalism, and the variants into which it later evolved, are the topic of ongoing debates. Vincent’s innovative approach is to consider those authors who originated the use of the term libéral in a political context: “the first calls for a ‘liberal’ politics were offered in the 1790s” (2). The earliest specific expressions of political liberalism thus arose during the French Revolutionary period, more precisely in the aftermath of the Terreur (1793–94), when France seemed to be in danger of lurching from the worst excesses of Jacobinism to a vengeful aristocratic reaction. By contrast, political centrists or moderates were seeking to salvage what they saw as the positive legacy of the Revolution: Reviews 205 “Constant first labeled his position ‘liberal’ in 1795. He and Germaine de Staël were the first in France to use this term to define a political stance” (76). Vincent’s study correspondingly emphasizes the contributions of Constant (1767–1830)— partly in association with Staël—to the development of political liberalism in France (as opposed to other putative fathers of the liberal tradition, such as Guizot). Vincent also highlights Constant’s influence on, and affinities with, subsequent exponents of liberalism: “There are marked similarities [...] between Constant’s stance and that of his famous successor Alexis de Tocqueville” (63). Throughout his book, Vincent associates close readings of Constant’s voluminous political works (along with his famous novel, Adolphe) with the contextualization of his public and private life. In this perspective, the biographical details are not secondary. As a partial outsider...

Una filosofia prima della filosofia: Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin

Focusing on the debate with conservative counterrevolution on the one hand and the revolutionary philosophy of the subject on the other, French liberalism in the first half of the XIX century (Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin) proposed not a philosophy of politics but, rather, a politics of philosophy with a view to stabilizing postrevolutionary society. In reconstructing this politics of philosophy, the Author concentrates on the rehabilitation of philosophy as rational discourse (against the counterrevolution), on the recovery of the networks of social knowledge produced by common sense (against the philosophy of the Revolution) and, above all, on the theory of impersonal reason developed at the Sorbonne after its reopening at the beginning of the Restauration. The philosophy of the doctrinarians is presented as a crucial moment in the strategy of a «governmental liberalism» of the kind that French liberals were aiming for.

A 200th Anniversary of Academic Psychiatry

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article PerspectivesFull AccessA 200th Anniversary of Academic PsychiatryHolger Steinberg, M.D.Holger SteinbergSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Oct 2011https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.11010024AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Official announcement of Heinroth's appointment as Associate Professor for Mental Therapy at the University of Leipzig on Oct. 21, 1811.October 21 is a birthday for academic psychiatry (1, 2). On that date in 1811, the administration of King Frederick August I in Saxony ruled that an associate professorship for “mental therapy” would be established at the kingdom's university in Leipzig and that Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843) would be appointed, as declared in the document displayed here (Leipzig University School of Medicine archives, A IV 14, volume 2).Because of its profitable mining and textile industry, Saxony was one of the economically most advanced areas in central Europe. Moreover, since 1806, French liberalism had nurtured cultural, scientific, and political ambitions for social reforms. In 1810, young professors succeeded in demanding better career opportunities, which led to realignment of existing professorships in medicine at Leipzig University and establishment of new ones. The new chair for mental therapy hence was part of a larger project supervised by minister Gottlob Adolph Ernst von Nostitz und Jänkendorf, responsible for the Saxon penal, social, and health care institutions (3). He was the head of a social conservative philanthropic movement aimed especially at reforming mental health care. He also initiated the first two Saxon mental asylums, established at Sonnenstein and Waldheim in 1811. To secure specialist training for the future doctors at these institutions, the minister regarded it necessary to establish a chair in Leipzig dedicated particularly to the complex issues of mental illness and specialized cures and treatments for the insane. Owing to the Napoleonic Wars, which affected Leipzig in the Battle of the Nations, the chair could not be supplemented by the erection of a university psychiatric hospital. Also, establishment of a chair dedicated especially to psychiatry did not act as a model for other universities at that time. Chairs for psychiatry were not set up there before the 1840s. The distinction between academic psychiatry on the one hand, regarded as elitist, and institutions for mental health care on the other, which is manifest in Germany until the present day, emerged.In Leipzig, neurological and psychiatric issues had been taught more or less regularly since the 1750s, but not before 1806 had this constancy been guaranteed—by Heinroth (2), one of the “cadre of ambitious, able people aiming to make a…career and a name” through psychiatry, as Porter described them for the time before and around 1800 (4). Heinroth may have chosen to become a medical pastor to integrate a calling for theology into medicine. The issue of whether madness was a philosophical, pedagogical, theological, or medical problem was ended around 1800, when the first dedicated mental asylums were placed in medical custody. These doctors for the insane followed two different approaches, which fought each other fiercely, especially in Germany. There was the moral, psychosocial approach, most prominently represented by Heinroth, who connected mental illness with sin (5), versus the brain-anatomical, organic approach (6).Heinroth's associate professorship was never upgraded to full professorship. Although he repeatedly tried to achieve that, in 1819 he was made full professor only of medicine in general, not of “mental therapy” (Landesregierung Geheime Kanzlei 6111, volumes V–VII, Saxon State Archive, Dresden, Germany). Supported by the medical faculty, he also became doctor in charge at the town's largest care institution in 1813. This housed mentally ill inmates, whom he used for clinical demonstrations for the maximum benefit of his students. Heinroth became known through his Lehrbuch der Störungen des Seelenlebens oder der Seelenstörungen und ihre Behandlung (Textbooks of the Disturbances of Mental Life) (7), which became a reference work in psychiatry in the first half of the 19th century.Address correspondence to Dr. Steinberg (holger.[email protected]uni-leipzig.de).The announcement is reproduced by permission of the Archives of the Leipzig University School of Medicine. Image accepted for publication March 2011.

Benjamin Constant and the birth of French liberalism

Benjamin Constant and the birth of French liberalism

Book Review: Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 2009; 317 pp.; 9780801446696, $45.00 (hbk)

Book Review: Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism, Cornell University Press: Ithaca NY, 2009; 317 pp.; 9780801446696, $45.00 (hbk)

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism – By Andrew Jainchill

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism – By Andrew Jainchill

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

French Liberal Governance and the Emancipation of Algeria's Jews

French officials' treatment of Algeria's Jews under three different political regimes (1830–70) demonstrates the extent to which basic liberal practices and values had become part of French governance. French officials consistently treated Jews differently from Muslims and showed the former a solicitude that can best be explained in terms of their identification with liberal governance and arguably even a desire to draw a line in the sand in the altogether illiberal context of a colonial war of conquest. France's treatment of Jews also demonstrates the ambiguities of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism and its capacity to accommodate itself to empire. Le traitement des juifs d'Algérie par les fonctionnaires de trois régimes politiques différents (la Monarchie de juillet, la Seconde République, le Second Empire) illustre à quel point les pratiques et valeurs libérales s'étaient enracinées dans la manière française de gouverner. Les fonctionnaires privilégiaient les juifs aux musulmans, faisant preuve d'une sollicitude envers les premiers qui ne peut être expliquée que par une internalisation des pratiques et valeurs libérales et même un souci de les défendre dans le contexte non libéral de guerre coloniale et de conquête. Le traitement des juifs par la France relève aussi les ambiguïtés du libéralisme du dix-neuvième siècle et sa capacité de s'accommoder au colonialisme.

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism, by Andrew Jainchill.

<i>Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism</i>, by Andrew Jainchill.

Reimagining politics after the Terror: the republican origins of French liberalism

Reimagining politics after the Terror: the republican origins of French liberalism

THE HARD BIRTH OF FRENCH LIBERALISM

Last year, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson published a brief, bold book on a topic from which historians of political thought have tended to shy away, curiously enough—the relations between republicanism and liberalism as political ideologies in the age of the American and French Revolutions.Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Modernsis relentlessly polemical, blaming this neglect on the historians and theorists responsible for resurrecting the early modern republican tradition over the last few decades. Pocock, Skinner, Wood, Petit, and more are assailed for having indulged in what Kalyvas and Katznelson call “republican nostalgia”—that is, for having wrongly presented republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism, rather than its parent and precursor. Instead, the authors ofLiberal Beginningsset out to show the ways in which republicanism evolved into liberalism, in and through the works of a set of leading thinkers—Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, Staël, and Constant. Their story has a happy ending. Whatever was valuable and actual in republicanism was smoothly incorporated into early liberalism, for which they turn the dictionary inside out in search of approbative adjectives—“situated,” “thick,” “sturdy,” “confident,” “open,” “immanent,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic.” How persuasive is their account? Not a few readers will detect a hint of protesting too much in this kind of cheerleading. “Thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” are surely not the first terms to spring to mind in regard to this gallery of thinkers, Staël and Constant least of all. It also seems clear that Kalyvas's and Katznelson's coverage of French thought, confined almost entirely to that pair, is too cursory to sustain their case. At one end, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the titans who together defined republicanism for the revolutionary generation, make only the most fleeting of appearances inLiberal Beginnings. At the other, Tocqueville, acknowledged on all sides as the master thinker of French liberalism, is missing altogether. Nevertheless, the attempt at treating anglophone and French thinkers within a single interpretative framework is in itself a virtually unprecedented feat, for which Kalyvas and Katznelson should be congratulated. For who could doubt that they are on exactly the right path in chasing their prey onto French soil?

Origins of Menger’s thought in French liberal economists

Carl Menger, who became regarded as the founder of the Austrian School, did not only confront the German Historical School and criticize British Classical Political Economy, he also read the French Liberal economists. The link between Say and Menger has already been asserted, but on an intuitive basis. It seemed necessary to give substantial proof of its true extent, as well as to document it with proper archival work—that is done in the present article. Menger’s reading of other French authors: Count Pellegrino Rossi, who succeeded Say at the College de France, Michel Chevalier, a major name of the French Industrialization, Frederic Bastiat, the famous defender of free-trade, is less known. It is also documented here, bringing to light first-hand material, mainly from the Menger Collection located in Japan, and the Perkins Library at Duke University. Thus are acknowledged the origins of Menger’s thought in French liberal economists.

Sacred Ground: The Liberation of Alsace-Lorraine, 1944-1946

Alsace-Lorraine, a region annexed from France by Germany in 1871 and recovered by France in 1918, was reannexed by Germany once more following the fall of France in 1940. In 1944 French liberation forces embarked on an intense campaign to regain what it considered "sacred ground," and the French media projected an image of an Alsatian population enthusiastically endorsing this effort to be reunited with the rest of the country. A careful reading of documentary evidence, however, suggests that the process of liberation and the reintegration of the region into France did not proceed smoothly. The demands the liberation forces placed on the civilian population to join the military campaign against the Nazis, combined with the delicate issue of collaboration, the mutual distrust, the strenuous efforts to "re-Francocize" the region following four years of Nazification (a process which had included indoctrination, service in the Wehrmacht, the installation of extermination camps in the territory, and collaboration), generated an ambiguous relationship between Charles de Gaulle's government and Alsatians. Official French policy in the region, which deviated from that practiced in the rest of France, reflected the circumstances peculiar to Alsace-Lorraine.