French National Identity Research Articles

Making jazz French: music and modern life in interwar Paris

Between the world wars, Paris welcomed not only a number of glamorous American expatriates, including Josephine Baker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also a dynamic musical style emerging in the United States: jazz. Roaring through cabarets, music halls, and dance clubs, the upbeat, syncopated rhythms of jazz soon added to the allure of Paris as a center of international nightlife and cutting-edge modern culture. In Making Jazz French, Jeffrey H. Jackson examines not only how and why jazz became so widely performed in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s but also why it was so controversial. Drawing on memoirs, press accounts, and cultural criticism, Jackson uses the history of jazz in Paris to illuminate the challenges confounding French national identity during the interwar years. As he explains, many French people initially regarded jazz as alien because of its associations with America and Africa. Some reveled in its explosive energy and the exoticism of its racial connotations, while others saw it as a dangerous reversal of France’s most cherished notions of civilization. At the same time, many French musicians, though not threatened by jazz as a musical style, feared their jobs would vanish with the arrival of American performers. By the 1930s, however, a core group of French fans, critics, and musicians had incorporated jazz into the French entertainment tradition. Today it is an integral part of Parisian musical performance. In showing how jazz became French, Jackson reveals some of the ways a musical form created in the United States became an international phenomenon and acquired new meanings unique to the places where it was heard and performed.

Football in France: a cultural history

Contents List of Tables vii Acknowledgements ix Glossary xi 1 Introduction: Studying French Football 1 2 Establishing Football in the French National Consciousness 19 3 Towns and Cities: a Socio-economic Geography of French Football Clubs 47 4 Fans: a Sociology of French Club Football 77 5 Coaches: Building the Successes of French Teams 115 6 Players: 'les Bleus' and French National Identity 150 7 Television: Football as Spectacle and Commodity 179 8 Chairmen: Business, Politics, and Corruption 196 9 Conclusions: French Exceptionalism vs. Commodification 224 Appendix 244 Bibliography 247 Index

The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800

Using 18th-century France as a case study, David Bell offers an alternative argument about the origins of nationalism. Before the 18th century, the very idea of nation-building - a central component of nationalism - did not exist. During this period, leading French intellectual and political figures came to see perfect national unity as a critical priority, and so sought ways to endow all French people with the same language, laws, customs, and values. The period thus gave rise to the first large-scale nationalist programme in history. The revolutionaries hoped that patriotism and national sentiment would replace religion as the new binding force in public life. Yet paradoxically, the example of cultural remodeling they followed in their nation-building quest was that of the Catholic Church, in its ambitious Counter-Reformation efforts to evangelize the French peasantry. In the new era, the population would be bound together not in a single Church, but in a single French nation. In this work, Bell offers a comprehensive survey of patriotism and national sentiment in early modern France, and shows how the dialectical relationship between nationalism and religion left a complex legacy that still resonates in debates over French national identity today.

Human rights discourse and international relations: Le Monde's editorials on Russia

Editorials on Russia published by the French newspaper, Le Monde, during the first months of the second Chechen war (August 1999—March 2000) are analysed within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. A new linguistic model of analysis is proposed for the study of the various texts taken as an entity. Its application results in a three-dimensional synthesis of the editorials that brings to the fore their premises. It appears that Le Monde's discourse on human rights belongs to a discourse of French national identity whose roots can be found in the 18th century. Journalists from three Russian dailies ( Izvestija, Segodnja, Nezavisimaja Gazeta) seem to have perceived this discourse as a media war against their own national identity. The analysis explains how Le Monde's comments on the humanitarian situation in Chechnya could have resulted in such an intercultural impasse. The question of the role of human rights discourse in a `globalizing' world is raised.

Image (and) Nation: The Russian Exotic in 19th-Century French Travel Narratives

Drawing from a variety of nineteenth-century French travel narratives on Russia, the paper “Image (and) Nation: The Russian Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Travel Narratives” explores the idea of nation as a cultural construction and narrative. The paper attempts to address in particular the role of ``exotic othering'' in creating French national identity in the decades following the Revolution. Where post-Revolutionary France discovered a formidable political and military enemy in tsarist Russia, the French likewise viewed the continued enslavement of the Russian peasants as the example par excellence of tyrannical government. Russia thus appeared in the eyes of many a French traveler as the diametrical opposite of post-Revolutionary France founded on liberal Enlightenment ideals. In bringing to light both widely-read and lesser-known French accounts of travel to Russia, this paper suggests how a developing French national identity coalesced in part around the articulation of cultural difference from the Russian Other. Evoking the critical work of Homi K. Bhaba, Edward Said, Benedict Anderson and Lisa Lowe, the paper describes tropes of the exotic as they appear in these nineteenth-century French travel narratives on Russia and suggests how such narrative depictions of the Russian landscape, the Russian woman, and Russians in general established and reaffirmed – through an implicit cultural comparison – the idea of the French nation.

Uncivil war: intellectuals and identity politics during the decolonization of Algeria

Uncivil War is a provocative study of intellectuals who confronted loss of France's most prized overseas possession, colonial Algeria. Tracing intellectual history of one of most violent wars of European decolonization, James D. Le Sueur illustrates how such key figures as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Tillion, Jacques Soustelle, Raymond Aron, Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun, Jean Amrouche, and Pierre Bourdieu agonized over question. As Le Sueur argues, these and other individuals forged new notions of nation and nationalism, giving rise to a politics of identity that continues to influence debate around world. Indeed, French-Algerian War occupies a seminal place in colonial and contemporary history. How did these varied intellectuals-many of whom had been influential in either shaping or critiquing ideology of colonial enterprise-reconstruct French national identity during decolonization? How was Algerian national identity also reconceptualized, in both intellectual and political circles, French and Algerian, on both right and left? How was colonial notion of French universalism debated and, by many, invalidated? What has politically charged concept of the Other to do with Algeria's decolonization? Le Sueur turns to a wide array of public archives, previously unstudied private collections, interviews, and published works to examine dynamism of these inquiries. He investigates Franco-Muslim relations from reconciliation to rupture, a transition resulting from rise of anticolonialism, political radicalism, military extremism, and Algerian nationalism, as well as looming threat of civil war in France. As Le Sueur reveals, it was incumbent upon intellectuals of day to respond to these crises in public arena. Whether to celebrate decolonization or decry it as a turning point in French and North African history, intellectuals engaged fully in identity debates and, in so doing, attended to a variety of political, social, moral, and even their own professional concerns. An interdisciplinary work of first order, Uncivil War combines anthropology, history, critical theory, and postcolonial studies in an intimate look at a pivotal and highly contested moment in modern history.

Le problème de la conscription dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle

Bernard Vandeplas, The Problem of Conscription in the First Half of the XDP Century : a Rejection of National Identity ? The Example of Cantal. Both in terms of intensity and spread, military refusal in war or peace is characteristic of Auvergne and more especially of the department of Cantal from the Ancien Regime to the end of the Second Republic. What sense should we ascribe to this refusal ? A refusal of « modernity »? An absence of national identity in the countryside ? This seems unlikely. Indeed, refusal to serve in an area such as the Cantal stems more from an econo- nomic and social problem than from a political or ideological one. In fact, the weight of economic constraints explains in large part the high rate of refusal. Since conscription disturbs a certain economic and social equilibrium, the sacrifice deemed too heavy and destabilizing leads somehow to desertion and insubordination. That this implies a rejection of French national identity is thus by no means certain.

Fervaal, Parsifal, and French National Identity

This article is a discussion of Vincent d'Indy's opera Fervaal, which famously borrowed musical and dramatic ideas from Wagner's Parsifal. My purpose is, first, to provide a thick description of the nationalist contexts—cultural, intellectual, religious and ethnic—within which d'Indy's opera was composed and performed in the late 1890s; and, second, to show how these contexts contribute to a broader understanding of Wagner's influence in France.I begin by tracing connections between Fervaal and Parsifal, and by arguing that d'Indy's use of the Gregorian melody

Naturalization, ethnicity and national identity in France between the wars

This article aims to study French conceptions of their own and other national identities via the prism of naturalization ‐ the concession of citizenship. New, easy‐access nationality legislation introduced in the interwar period seems to provide evidence of the development of an inclusive, non‐ethnic concept of citizenship. However, a closer analysis shows that the insecurity of French national identity between the wars coloured the whole naturalization process. While a fear of population decline and military weakness forced officials towards the incorporation of immigrants, concerns over the contamination of the French nation by ‘undesirables’ led many others to advocate exclusion.

Civil Solidarity or Fragmented Identities? The Politics of Sexuality and Citizenship in France

This article examines the development of the Pacte Civil de Solidarité (PACS) in France, a legal construct which provides recognition in law to a range of relationship forms, including same-sex couples. The PACS is used as a means of interrogating the continuing importance of republicanism in contemporary French political discourse. The PACS provides a microcosm of wider issues concerning citizenship, marriage, communitarianism, multiculturalism and the meaning of French national identity in the context of globalization and transnationalism. Finally, the article considers the role of republicanism in shaping the constitution of a gay identity in contemporary France, and the impact of the PACS on that identity.

Outside the Imagined Community: Basque Terrorism, Political Activism, and the Tour de France

Since its publication more than a decade ago, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has offered an enticing, if romantic, way of conceptualising nationalism. Fine-grained ethnographic analysis, however, of the ways in which local populations actually imagine their community raises some questions for the continuing viability of such a notion. In many places around the world, people consciously and conspicuously place themselves outside of the imagined community, and it is the social, cultural, and political consequences of such actions that this article seeks to explore. Drawing on a period of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in France in the mid-1990s, this article examines very public contestation and sabotage of the Tour de France by pro-Basque supporters. This specific case study of political activism through sport provides a compelling example of the ways in which a dominant symbol of French national identity is usurped and upstaged by a minority group so as to reinvent or re-imagine a new kind of community.

France and the cult of the Sacred Heart: an epic tale for modern times

In a richly layered and beautifully illustrated narrative, Raymond Jonas tells the fascinating and surprisingly little-known story of the Sacre-Coeur, or Sacred Heart. The highest point in Paris and a celebrated tourist destination, the white-domed basilica of Sacre-Coeur on Montmartre is a key monument both to French Catholicism and to French national identity. Jonas masterfully reconstructs the history of the devotion responsible for the basilica, beginning with the apparition of the Sacred Heart to Marguerite Marie Alacoque in the seventeenth century, through the French Revolution and its aftermath, to the construction of the monumental church that has loomed over Paris since the end of the nineteenth century. Jonas focuses on key moments in the development of the cult: the founding apparition, its invocation during the plague of Marseilles, its adaptation as a royalist symbol during the French Revolution, and its elevation to a central position in Catholic devotional and political life in the crisis surrounding the Franco-Prussian War. He draws on a wealth of archival sources to produce a learned yet accessible narrative that encompasses a remarkable sweep of French politics, history, architecture, and art.

Performing the carmagnole: Negotiating French national identity during France 98

(1999). Performing the carmagnole: Negotiating French national identity during France 98. Journal of European Area Studies: Vol. 7, Sport and Culture, pp. 211-225.

Muslim Girls and the 'Other France': An Examination of Identity Construction

National identity is the 'floating signifier' in the politics of culture and location among diasporic people residing in France. Constructed discursively as a precious, yet threatened, commodity, French national identity is a form of symbolic power that excludes in its very definition of inclusion by implicitly conflating constructs of culture with 'race'. Through this frame, I will examine the experiences of Muslim girls in secondary education who are asserting their national identity to negotiate the complex expectations of home, secular schools, and their 'cite' during a period in France when the notion of French identity itself is being transformed.Unlike the social movements of the 1980s that coalesced demands for citizenship with subjective, 'ethnic' representationsembedded in 'le droit a la difference' (the right to be different), this new generation is claiming additionally their ' francite '. However, being recognised as French is mediated by a set of relational conditions of which nationality is but one aspect. That is, having nationality is not the same as having one's national identity acknowledged socially when 'culture', recast as nationality, continues to dictate access to those trajectories leading toward social enfranchisement. This factor appears particularly relevant to first generation French Muslim girls of African descent whose experiences serve to broaden our understanding of young women in the Muslim diaspora.

What It Meant to Be "A Jew" in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation

In Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 a nos jours, Henry Rousso analyzes conflicted French collective memory of France and describes both attempts of French to flee responsibility for events that occurred during Occupation as well as their struggles to come to terms with them. Rousso defines the syndrome as a kind of collective complex or neurosis growing out of a particularly painful trauma. It is, in his words, the heterogeneous totality of symptoms and manifestations... which reveal existence of a trauma engendered by Occupation and in particular a trauma linked to internal divisions, one which has persisted and at times developed after end of war.1 The trauma and often bitter struggles over memory of it has produced have resulted in what Rousso calls a continuing Franco-French war over French national identity. As Steven Ungar aptly puts it in title of first chapter of Scandal and Aftereffect, which deals in part with Rousso's book, Vichy has become for French nothing less than paradigm of contested memory.

Luxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle‐Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France

Next article No AccessLuxury, Morality, and Social Change: Why There Was No Middle‐Class Consciousness in Prerevolutionary France*Sarah MazaSarah MazaNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author Northwestern UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 69, Number 2June 1997 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/245486 Views: 459Total views on this site Citations: 32Citations are reported from Crossref © 1997 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Matthew D'Auria The Shaping of French National Identity, 42 (Dec 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316423189Chetan Sinha Mood of the Consumer, (Jan 2019): 267–279.https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5690-9.ch012Elizabeth Heath Sugarcoated Slavery: Colonial Commodities and the Education of the Senses in Early Modern France, Critical Historical Studies 5, no.22 (Nov 2018): 169–207.https://doi.org/10.1086/699684Charles Walton Capitalism’s Alter Ego: The Birth of Reciprocity in Eighteenth-Century France, Critical Historical Studies 5, no.11 (Apr 2018): 1–43.https://doi.org/10.1086/697032 Bibliographie, (Sep 2014): 203–215.https://doi.org/10.3917/arco.legay.2014.01.0203Erika Vause Disciplining the Market: Debt Imprisonment, Public Credit, and the Construction of Commercial Personhood in Revolutionary France, Law and History Review 32, no.33 (Jun 2014): 647–682.https://doi.org/10.1017/S073824801400025X Credit and Old Regime Economies of Regard, (Jan 2013): 21–55.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-002 Critiques and Crises of the Credit System, (Jan 2013): 56–95.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-003 Incredible Style, (Jan 2013): 96–138.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-004 Credit in the Female Fashion Trades of Eighteenth-Century Paris, (Jan 2013): 139–194.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-005 Fashion Merchants, (Jan 2013): 195–245.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-006 Madame Déficit and Her Minister of Fashion, (Jan 2013): 246–282.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-007 Family Affairs, (Jan 2013): 283–315.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-008 Conclusion, (Jan 2013): 316–328.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-009 Notes, (Jan 2013): 329–382.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-010 Bibliography, (Jan 2013): 383–406.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377443-011Martin Hájek Morální normalita a sociální struktura současné společnosti, Sociální studia / Social Studies 9, no.44 (Oct 2012): 67.https://doi.org/10.5817/SOC2012-4-67Celso M. Villegas Revolution “from the middle”: historical events, narrative, and the making of the middle class in the contemporary developing world, (Mar 2015): 299–312.https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2010)0000021017 Varieties of European Experience, II, (Oct 2009): 271–370.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511816000.004John Berdell Interdependence and independence in Cantillon's Essai, The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 16, no.22 (Jun 2009): 221–249.https://doi.org/10.1080/09672560902890988Luis M. Pozo The roots of hegemony: The mechanisms of class accommodation and the emergence of the nation-people, Capital & Class 31, no.11 (Sep 2016): 55–88.https://doi.org/10.1177/030981680709100104Clare Haru Crowston La reine et sa “ministre des modes”, Travail, genre et sociétés N° 13, no.11 (Apr 2005): 75–94.https://doi.org/10.3917/tgs.013.0075 Henry Clark Grain Trade Information: Economic Conflict and Political Culture under Terray, 1770–1774 Clark, The Journal of Modern History 76, no.44 (Jul 2015): 793–834.https://doi.org/10.1086/427569David A. Bell Class, consciousness, and the fall of the bourgeois revolution, Critical Review 16, no.2-32-3 (Jan 2004): 323–351.https://doi.org/10.1080/08913810408443613Maxine Berg, Elizabeth Eger The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates, (Jan 2003): 7–27.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508279_2Dena Goodman Furnishing Discourses: Readings of a Writing Desk in Eighteenth-Century France, (Jan 2003): 71–88.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508279_6Alan M. Kraut Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible . By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 250 pp. $22.50, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no.44 (Apr 2001): 613–614.https://doi.org/10.1162/00221950151115106Sharon Kettering A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France . By Christine Adams (University Park, Penn State University Press, 2000) 292 pp. $65.00 cloth $19.95 paper, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31, no.44 (Apr 2001): 632–634.https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2001.31.4.632 George S. Williamson What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819 Williamson, The Journal of Modern History 72, no.44 (Jul 2015): 890–943.https://doi.org/10.1086/318549 William M. Reddy Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution Reddy, The Journal of Modern History 72, no.11 (Jul 2015): 109–152.https://doi.org/10.1086/315931David Andress Representing the Sovereign People in the Terror, (Jan 2000): 28–41.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403932747_3Jerrold Seigel Notes, (): 541–610.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139087377.020

The End of a Political Identity: French Intellectuals and the State

Starting with a discussion of the crisis of French national identity that became fully apparent in the 1980s, this article examines the historical paradigm that conditioned the birth of French universalism and ultimately spelt its demise. Identifying as the determining experience the reification/deification of power performed by monarchical absolutism, it examines the evolution of what can be termed after Marcel Gauchet the French `political-intellectual system', with its exclusive emphasis on the ideological legitimacy of power, and highlights the crucial role played by intellectuals in its formation, be it on an oppositional mode. Looking back to the 17th century, it thus identifies in Montaigne's essays and their complex dialectic of order and revolt the fundamental paradox within which French intellectual culture evolved right up to post-structuralism, which, whilst it attempted a most radical critique of the French intellectual mystique, ultimately remained prisoner to its underlying statism. Post-structuralism is thus to be seen as the first manifestation of a profound crisis of French intellectual culture, triggered in the 1970s by the crisis of French republicanism, in the wake of the worldwide decline of national sovereignty. What characterized French political and intellectual culture from its inception was indeed the reductive absorption of the notion of society into that of state, and the concomitant belief in a rational vanguard. However, whilst post-structuralism belongs to a tradition of resistance to the republican legacy of the French Enlightenment, it remains deeply conditioned by the pessimism of its distant Augustinian and Jansenist origins: unable to conceive of any effective social action outside of the state, it condemns itself to the marginality of counter-culture. Rather than a total deconstruction of French universalism, post-structuralism must thus be identified as its last, contradictory manifestation.

The transformation of France's armed forces

National service and the idea of a conscript army has been a key‐stone of French national identity and a firmly political issue since the Revolution of 1789. Even then, the advantages and disad‐vantages of mass conscription were recognised, with the debated of conscript vs. professional forces couched in terms of the domestic political agenda. Presi‐dent Chirac has now taken a fundamental step away from the citizen army in announcing the end_of compulsory military service by 2002 as part of the overall restructuring of France's defence planning. Beatrice Heuser presents a discussion of this transformation of France's armed forces within its historical context, discussing the impact of this dramatic change, including the reduction of bases both at home and abroad, the issue of overseas commitments, and the power levels will fluctuate, they, overall quality of a full time pro‐grammes to introduce new forms of national service ensure the maintenance of the idea of civic involvement and the political function played by the concept of military services.

Proust's Poetics of Recontextualization

Proust's Poetics of Recontextualization John S. LaRose In the twentieth century, the weakening of the nation-state and of the community as viable structures serving to legitimize group and i n d i v i d u a l identity has often been and continues to be at the heart of many unsettling and often bloody conflicts. People everywhere feel themselves threatened w i t h dispersal or assimila­ tion, w i t h the loss of their specificity as groups and as individuals. The forces that threaten the integrity of the self are perhaps at the root of the violence to be seen i n the w o r l d today. French novelists of this century, beginning w i t h Marcel Proust, have reflected this anxiety and violence i n the instability and fragmentation of their narrative voices, i n the ways i n which traditional narrative forms are disrupted from w i t h i n by a language which continually calls into question its o w n premises. Proust's great novel could well be described as the exploration of a loss of identity brought about by the failure of traditional bastions of meaning, not the least of which was the threat to French national identity. W o r l d War I not only provides a central theme to Proust's novel, it gives it its structure. It was the advent of the War which caused the postponement of final publication, thus giving Proust the opportunity to expand and complicate his origi­ nal framework of temps perdu and temps retrouve, by continual revisions and embellishments. The end product remains a w o r k i n progress a n d i m p l i e s w h a t I w i l l t e r m a poetics of recontextualization. The war i n Proust only serves to accelerate and aggravate a process already at w o r k in French society since w e l l before the time of the Revolution, and the comparisons of life i n Paris i n 1916 to the Directoire (in Le Temps retrouve) bear this out: it is a city i n which the arrivistes Madame Verdurin and Madame Bontemps reign as queens. The demise of the aristocracy is traced i n the Recherche as the demise of the proper name, that is to say the demise of the name of the father. Identity as the legitimization of the self through the strict linearity of patriarchal descent has been displaced, has always already been displaced, from w i t h i n , by what Derrida might call the inflation of the signif ier. What better example of this

French National Identity and the Literary Politics of Exclusion: the Jeanne Hyvrard Case

French National Identity and the Literary Politics of Exclusion: the Jeanne Hyvrard Case