French Provinces Research Articles

French Provinces “Considered Foreign”: Obstacles to Free Trade or Limits of Loyalty?

French Provinces “Considered Foreign”: Obstacles to Free Trade or Limits of Loyalty?

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

Reviewed by: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier Thomas Nolden LAURENT MAUVIGNIER The Birthday Party Trans. Daniel Levin Becker. Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2023. 444 pages. LAURENT MAUVIGNIER'S 444-pagelong novel is a painfully slow burn, and yet it provides for a most compulsive read. Mauvignier, the prolific French author of a dozen novels, has chosen a remote hamlet in the French provinces for the setting of his thriller, revisiting a setting of which French writers are quite fond. While Mathias Énard introduced the readers of his novel The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild to the quaint sides of country life, largely from the perspective of a young Parisian anthropologist striving to translate the mores of the provinces into a dissertation, Mauvignier's humorous depiction of life in the French boonies does so entirely without the wink of the eye. Instead, he pulls out the gun of psychological scrutiny and puts four inhabitants of a small hamlet into the crosshairs of a relentless tour de force of narrative reckoning. Mauvignier finds them in the geographical isolation of a few houses ominously called "Three Lone Girls"—a setting that slowly but surely will be revealed as a trap. Patrice Bergogne, an overweight and underappreciated farmer, tries to make a living off the little land he has inherited, lovingly devoted to his young daughter, Ida, and to his mystifyingly indifferent wife, Marion. With her fortieth birthday advancing, Marion for her part had never succeeded in reciprocating her husband's patient advances and innumerable attempts at creating a marital life that may meet even the lowest of expectations. The reader learns that Patrice's sexual and emotional frustration are hardly a recent twist in the story of their marriage. From the beginning of their relationship, Patrice was painfully yet acceptingly aware of the mismatch between him, the bumbling peasant, and his much more mundane wife who returns from her office jobs late in the evening. In contrast to her meek husband, Marion is not one to accept any crap from her male colleagues and supervisors at work. Instead, she calls them out for their misogynist attitudes and pursues them with an unrelenting drive, to the admiration of her female colleagues with whom she likes to party after work. Initially, the couple's neighbor, an older painter who had left Paris to resettle in the quietude of the Three Lone Girls, appears to be the narrative's target: Christine has been receiving threatening letters, which she reports, to little avail, to the police. The [End Page 73] artist is close to the young child of their busy neighbors, friendly with Patrice, and heedful of withdrawn and inaccessible Marion, who remains a mystery to her just as much as to the readers. With the pace, the persistence, and the sheer power of a cutterhead drilling a tunnel through the darkness of a mountain, Mauvignier penetrates the past and the present of his characters' private lives and feelings. The slow motion of his narrative may at first annoy his readers who, several chapters into the novel, have become most intimately acquainted with a set of characters without being afforded even a hunch of what this all will lead up to. Only when the preparations for Marion's fortieth birthday slowly but finally come into focus do they get a grasp of what's to come. Without increasing what students of cinema call the frames-per-second technique, Mauvignier has a new set of characters join the preparation for the celebration of Marion's birthday. With the unexpected arrival of three violent young men, the readers feel almost relieved as the portentous mood that has been evoked in an almost suffocating manner gets lifted at last. Of course, when the heavy clouds that have been hovering so low over the hamlet lift, it is not for the better. On the contrary. Following the meticulously prepared introduction of the setting and the characters, Mauvignier redirects the drill head of the novel to take aim at Marion's life before entering this marriage of unequals. Her past catches up with her in the form of three violent brothers who are out to get her, to get even...

Social Injustice

Social Injustice

COOKING ALBUM AS A “MEMORY BOX” IN “FIVE QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE” NOVEL BY JOANNE HARRIS

The article is devoted to the actualization of memory studies in Ukrainian literary criticism. In particular, it is about expanding the working tools of this humanitarian field by introducing new terminological definitions («memory box», memory map, «wounds of time»). These terms were transferred from the research of Aleida Assmann and used in the analysis and reconstruction of the architecture of memory based on the material of a particular work. The object of analysis is the novel of the modern British writer Joanne Harris “Five Quarters of the Orange” (2001), which is the final one in the so-called French cycle (novels “Chocolat”, “Blackberry Wine” and “Five Quarters of the Orange” that are united by the topos of the French province of Brittany). The purpose of the article is to reveal the conditional architecture of memory of Joanne Harris’s novel «Five Quarters of the Orange». This is a reconstruction of a conditional memory map, which is primarily associated with the tragic events of the Second World War. The outlined «wound of time» is directly connected with the relationship between the Dartigen family and the German soldier Thomas Leibniz. Individual memories of past events are encrypted in an old cooking album, which in its turn is identical to a “memory box” – the portable repository of memories or the ark. The article implements several tasks that made it possible to achieve the main goal. It is primarily about discovering and exploring the mechanisms of memory that are inherent in both narrative structures of the text: both Mirabelle’s notes on the margins of her cooking album and the memories of the main character Framboise are analyzed in terms of correlation of individual memories and collective flashback of the past. The influence of trauma and traumatic experience of the Dartigen family in general on the formation of memory architecture in the novel is also outlined. Illness of mother, early loss of father, which the children are going through, seen murder (Franboise was the witness); expulsion from home and forced expulsion of painful memories for the sake of continued existence are all conditional points on the memory map that are recreated by Fraumboise in her story, which simulates oral storytelling. Finally, several symbols are researched that also correspond to certain points on the memory map. They are aimed at actualization of reader’s attention and focus on the significance of certain events in the life of the family and Les Laveuses (cooking album of Mirabelle; orange encrypted in the title of the novel; Observatory, Standing Stones, Loire River, where the Hunt for the Old Mother was and who finally took away Thomas Leibniz). The conditional architecture of memory in Joanne Harris’s novel “Five Quarters of the Orange”, in fact, results in deciphering the cooking album (“memory box”) and presents the author’s message of forgiveness and understanding, as well as affirms the anti-war message that is extremely relevant today.

Volver (se) escritura (en) el viaje: Notas sobre latinoamericanas en tránsito (Francisca Espínola y la condesa de Merlín)

En este trabajo me interesa interrogar dos relatos disímiles, realizados por mujeres que proyectan lugares de enunciación antitéticos: uno, el regreso de una letrada desde una metrópoli europea a un enclave colonial americano, el de Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Montalvo y, otro, el que realiza una viajera (no-escritora), Francisca Espínola, entre dos periferias geoculturales desde la provincia de Buenos Aires a la comuna francesa de Sète. De ambos recorridos se derivan diferencias sustantivas en la escritura de los textos Viaje a La Habana y Memoria de un viaje a Francia de una argentina de la provincia de Buenos Aires. La narración de este último –entre Buenos Aires, Sète y Marsella– reviste particular interés para mi artículo ya que se trata de un texto casi desconocido y de iniciación literaria (acaso ocasional) que expone diversos dispositivos y tretas de construcción del lugar de «la mujer que escribe» y que busca su diferenciación. En mi hipótesis, estos textos exhiben un modo peculiar de escritura donde la distancia territorial opera como un catalizador de los vínculos entre nación, letra y género.

Myocardial Infarction incidence during national lockdown in two French provinces unevenly affected by COVID-19 outbreak: An observational study.

BackgroundA reduction of admission for MI has been reported in most countries affected by COVID-19. No clear explanation has been provided.MethodsTo report the incidence of myocardial infarction (MI) admission during COVID-19 pandemic and in particular during national lockdown in two unequally affected French provinces (10-million inhabitants) with a different media strategy, and to describe the magnitude of MI incidence changes relative to the incidence of COVID-19-related deaths. A longitudinal study to collect all MIs from January 1 until May 17, 2020 (study period) and from the identical time period in 2019 (control period) was conducted in all centers with PCI-facilities in northern “Hauts-de-France” province and western “Pays-de-la-Loire” Province. The incidence of COVID-19 fatalities was also collected.FindingsIn “Hauts-de-France”, during lockdown (March 18–May 10), 1500 COVID-19-related deaths were observed. A 23% decrease in MI-IR (IRR=0.77;95%CI:0.71–0.84, p<0.001) was observed for a loss of 272 MIs (95%CI:−363,−181), representing 18% of COVID-19-related deaths. In “Pays-de-la-Loire”, 382 COVID-19-related deaths were observed. A 19% decrease in MI-IR (IRR=0.81; 95%CI=0.73–0.90, p<0.001) was observed for a loss of 138 MIs (95%CI:−210,−66), representing 36% of COVID-19-related deaths. While in “Hauts-de-France” the MI decline started before lockdown and recovered 3 weeks before its end, in “Pays-de-la-Loire”, it started after lockdown and recovered only by its end. In-hospital mortality of MI patients was increased during lockdown in both provinces (5.0% vs 3.4%, p=0.02).InterpretationIt highlights one of the potential collateral damages of COVID-19 outbreak on cardiovascular health with a dramatic reduction of MI incidence. It advocates for a careful and weighted communication strategy in pandemic crises.FundingThe study was conducted without external funding.

“Money can’t buy me love”: radical right-wing populism in French romantic comedies of the 2010s

ABSTRACTThis article surveys developments in the French romantic comedy of the 2010s from a cultural studies perspective. Specifically, it considers how the particularities identifiable in the French genre following its emergence in the 1990s and consolidation by the end of the 2000s have evolved during the next decade. It argues that the most striking new trend comprises a more domestically circumscribed orbit for the genre, with notably fewer export successes, paralleled by the increased prominence of nationalistically inflected and/or otherwise broadly retreatist themes, notably in relation to 'globalizing’ conformist (neo-liberal) values. These traits manifest themselves through elements such as explicit celebrations of French culture, especially that of the northern French provinces that are the historical heartland of the right; obsessive representations and validations of heterosexual family structures, including through homophobic elements; a marked accentuation of bromance and other misogynistic elements in the genre; and a parodic if not mocking attitude towards generic and cultural values coded as North American – albeit one typically embedded in layers of ‘self-reflexive’ postmodern irony. I argue that this last tendency, constituting one of the complexities of the hybrid French genre à l’américaine, is useful for interrogating the very concept of radical ideology – and its antithesis, conformity – for their different meanings in diverse geo-cultural contexts.

Zakłady (dépôts) dla emigrantów polskich w Châteauroux i departamencie Indre w latach 1831–1833

Refugee depots for Polish emigrants in Châteauroux and Indre department in the years 1831–1833 In the article the author presents the setting up and operation of refugee depots (Fr. dépôts) in the Indre department for Polish emigrants who arrived in France after the fall of the November Uprising. The refugee depot in Châteauroux was one of the several depots founded by the French government. It was intended for civil exiles. The other camps for military refugees were set up in Avignon, Lunel, Besançon, Bourges, Lons-le-Saunier, Salins and Dijon. From the beginning of August 1832 till August 1833, the French authorities directed civilians to cities of Indre: Châteauroux – the capital of the department, as well as Issoudun, Levroux, La Chatre, Argenton, Buzançais, Chatillon, Saint Benoit, and La Blanc. The author establishes that in that period of time, 634 Polish refugees went through the camps of the Indre department. Most of them were students (from the Vilnius University), young officials and members of free professions. They came from the pre-partition areas of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Lithuania, Volhynia and Podolia). Despite the restrictive policy of the administration and the fact that they stayed in the French province, the Poles engaged in the social and political life of emigration. They participated actively in democratic and educational organizations of the Great Emigration. In many cases, by their own determination, they went to study and obtained aducation at French universities and technical universities. The article is based on sources from the Indre Department Archives in Châteauroux, archives of the Defense Historical Service in Vincennes, the National Archives in Paris, the Polish Library in Paris, the Princes Czartoryski Library in Krakow, and academic studies.

‘Christian Patriotism’ and Physical Education in Pre-Revolutionary France: The Royal Military School in Sorèze in the Eighteenth Century

The Ecole Royale Militaire of Soreze (Royal Military School) was located in the French province of Languedoc. On the eve of the 1789 Revolution it was still a religious institution run by the Benedictine monks, known for having broken with certain traditional models. The establishment offered special forms of instruction, stressing certain scientific and literary disciplines, and also physical education (fencing, dancing, horse riding, and equestrianism). Pupils’ best results were also recorded in swimming. At the end of every school year, all the results were confirmed by public examinations, labelled Exercices publics, and recorded in the Cahiers d’exercices. These materials enable the reconstruction the evolution of the school’s programmes over a period of more than a century. The incalculable richness of Sorèze’s programmes, by distinguishing the elements already present in the military training of the period from the pedagogical innovations that were introduced, demonstrate the special place that was reserved for physical exercise. This Catholic institution was thus able to develop a total coherence of the scholarly programme, considered as a source of ‘Christian Patriotism’, in pre-Revolutionary France.

Doing Memory. Parisian Hotels’ Portraits with Old Migrants

Parisian hôtels meublés are traditionally short-term accommodation where migrants, first from French provinces, then from abroad – especially Maghreb, and more specifically Algeria – where living in poor conditions. From the ‘golden age’ in the interwar period where they housed around 11% of the Parisian population until current times, the sector has decreased, and become more and more stigmatised. Nevertheless, they can be considered as post-colonial ‘milieu de mémoireʼ of migrations belonging to different generations, contexts and origins. Thanks to a composite approach, ethnographic (observation and interviews) and literary (study of a large corpus of novels related to hotels meublés), the chapter shows that those places are emblematic of specific regimes of memories, both dominated and unconventional, suffering and creative. The first part is dedicated to describing the hotels as ambiguous and complex places, where the subtle hierarchy of spaces makes the co-habitation possible, and can be considered as support for memories. The second part deals more precisely with ‘doing memoryʼ: Both oral histories and literary works are embraced as interpretative constructions reformulating experiences. The last part shows categories and assignments at work in the hotels, where narratives are calling for both a right to the city and a certain acknowledgment of the subalterns beyond disruptions, displacements and silences.

Templar provincial chapters in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries

By the later thirteenth century Templar provincial chapters in the West were being held annually, usually in the spring or early summer. In the French province they were always convened in Paris, but in some other provinces meetings took place in various convents. Those who attended were mostly heads of convents, and it seems that those present usually totalled some forty to fifty brothers: in many provinces the majority were sergeants. Provincial masters normally presided, but occasionally the grand master or visitor had charge. Heads of convents were expected to pay their responsions at the chapter and present a statement about the condition of their houses. There seems, however, to have been no general review of appointments. Moreover, the chapter also acted as a chapter of faults. Yet any current business could also be raised at a meeting, although little is known about the process of decision-making. Provincial chapters appear to have lasted for only a few days, whereas at other Times in the year provincial masters tended to seek counsel from smaller groups of commanders.

Ancestral bodies dancing snow

Abstract This article with artist pages is a self-reflection on danced engagements with land and lineage. In performing with elemental nature and at historical sites, I met my own broken memories of colonized land and severed ties to ancestral lands. These pages feature images of two performance series taking place in and near Montréal city, a cosmopolitan hub of the French province of Québec, Canada. Wise words from storytellers, artists and scholars in the field of Indigenous knowledge (Sto:lo and Anishinaabe nations) guide my textual narrative, and issues of ethical ethnography compel its performative embodied inquiry.

LA CONTINUITÀ SPEZZATA. IL RISO SECONDO BERGSON (E FREUD)

The famous essay Le Rire (1900) by Henri Bergson should not be considered as a deviation in his thought or as an isolated work. In fact, he began to deal with the study of laughter when he was a young school teacher in the French province, and he continued to theorize on it also after the publication of his famous book. In the present article we will try to give an overview of the interpretation of the laughter and humour by the French philosopher. We will put it in relation with the central idea of duree , and we will analyse what he meant by mecanisation de la vie along with the idea of the comic as an adult prosecution of children games. Furthermore, is laughter the other face of crying? Probably it is, and certainly it reflects the human need to escape from the constraints, as stated by Freud, the other great explorer of the unconscious, who absorbed many suggestions from both Darwin’s and Bergson’s works.

Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France by Christopher Semk

Reviewed by: Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France by Christopher Semk Katherine Ibbett Christopher Semk. Playing the Martyr: Theater and Theology in Early Modern France BUCKNELL UP, 2017. 172 PP. CHRISTOPHER SEMK'S ADMIRABLE NEW BOOK puts sacramental theology at the heart of an evolution in French neoclassical poetics, drawing on the test case of a set of seventeenth-century dramas about Christian Martyrdom. The sudden appearance and disappearance of these Martyr plays on the French stage is often read as an exploration of secular sovereignty and political power. In contrast, Semk's work seeks to account for the innovations of this theatrical mode by placing it firmly within the context of contemporary theological debates. If the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole worried that the writers of Martyr dramas made their leading roles rather more like ancient Roman heroes than saints, Semk suggests that such a jibe underestimates the rich and nuanced ways in which Martyr drama engaged theological questions. In so doing, he argues compellingly for the significance of religious belief to the elaboration of poetics in the French context. Semk's account insists on the theater as a place where things happen: even before we get to his chapter on the actor-Martyr Genesius, he asks "not what Martyrological theater is, but rather what Martyrological theater does" (xviii). Questions about the place of belief and faith in the theatrical experiment permeate his work, and the most refreshing parts of the book, for this reader, come when a sense of faith's wondrous difficulties bolsters his investigations. Semk gives real insights into particular dramatic debates of the period, arguing persuasively that the test case of the Martyrological theater brought Aristotelian poetics up against its limits. But the real strength of the book is that it allows for a broader understanding of the place of the religious within a rapidly professionalizing theatrical scene. Chapter 1 takes up a broad account of relations between church and stage in the period. In echoing today's debates about established religion, its title, "The Separation of Church and Stage," suggests something of what is at stake in taking religion seriously as a cultural matrix for the theater. Semk's opening pages are stirring. He begins with the most concrete of material evidence: a stone escutcheon representing the Passion that, for much of the seventeenth [End Page 171] century, stood over the doorway of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the leading theater of the day. Semk reads this sacred representation—a remnant of the time before the confraternity who owned the theater had been blocked from performing religious plays—as a "haunting" of the new-model French stage by an older and more openly sacred corpus. From this arresting beginning, he goes on to investigate the complex imbrications of the sacred and the theatrical. This allows him to explore a broader range of representations than those usually encountered in scholarly work on the theater; Semk takes seriously a range of plays from the French provinces—I was especially struck by the examples he draws from François d'Avre's 1668 Dipné, Infante d'Irlande, since one of the virtues of Semk's approach is that it allows us to think more about French theater's relations to non-French textual traditions. This chapter gives a firmly useful overview of seventeenth-century religious responses to the theater, both for and against it, and, most importantly, gives us a more complex picture of the role of faith and belief in debates about fictiveness and poetics. Chapter 2 takes up the question of the place of spectacle within Martyrological theater. In accounting for the success of stories that privilege the Martyr's suffering body at a time when such bodies were largely excluded from the stage, Semk digs into a complex tradition of reading spectacle. Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition, he inquires into the relations between pathos and opsis, often taking issue with translators or scholars today who have not allowed for sufficient nuance in their understanding of that framework. Semk's careful work sets the context for a persuasive reading of the various staged accounts of the death of Saint Eustache, and...

Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900 by Jonathan Simon

Reviewed by: Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900 by Jonathan Simon Anne Hardy Jonathan Simon. Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900. Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017. x + 156 pp. Ill. $90.00 (978-1-4985-3147-4). The two key words in the title of this book, "technological" and "philosophical," should not discourage readers interested in infectious disease, public health, [End Page 393] immunization, pharmacy, and the political aspects of medicine from adding it to their reading. Although Simon's approach is avowedly drawn from the philosophy of technology, his study enriches our historical understanding of the history of the diphtheria antiserum in refreshing and unexpected ways. In their effect on human bodies, medicines are, after all, as much technological objects as scalpels and syringes, and this understanding gives Simon's study originality and message. From his account of how the serum was made using the blood of specially selected and cared-for horses, through to his masterly analysis of how the serum was inserted into France's political economy as an instrument of revenge on German medical science for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, this is no standard history of drug development, a genre that Simon describes as being "close to the model of biographies for living historical figures" (p. 142). The first three chapters deal with the making of the serum itself, from the stable and laboratory through the process by which the serum passed from generic substance to recognition as a legal medicine, to the forging of an international consensus on the effectiveness of the drug. It was indicative of the degree to which medicine had already become scientific that the doctors in the 1890s were not content simply to accept the effectiveness of the preparation—they wanted to know why and how it worked. The later chapters focus on how this technology operated to shape late nineteenth-century French society and was simultaneously shaped by it. Chapter 5 considers medical practice—how the drug was administered, the emergence of bacteriological diagnosis of diphtheria and its links to serotherapy, and the existing surgical remedies, tracheotomy and intubation, in France, although Simon admits to omitting to examine key considerations needed for understanding the role of serum in "a specific historical, political and national context" (p. 70). He goes on to consider how the serum was "branded," and became not only a triumph of modernizing medicine for the Pasteur Institute, but also a transformative modernizing agent for the French medical profession, even though there were medicos who remained unconvinced. A large part of the cultural and medical significance of the antiserum lay in the fact that diphtheria was perceived as a dangerous disease of small children, and children in France were of particular importance at this period, since the country's population growth was very small compared to substantially rising populations in Britain and Germany. This demographic concern has escaped Simon, but he is good on the gendered aspects of the serum story, on the importance of women as mothers on the one hand and, on the other, in the manufacture of the serum (a woman's job), and in nursing roles supporting the male medical administration of treatment. The contemporary impact of the antiserum on France was further illustrated by Roux's elevation to Pasteurian status as a national hero, although he was eclipsed as such by Pasteur in the later twentieth century. The final chapter in this book, "Serum and French Politics," is perhaps the most intriguing, turning as it does on the political aspects of the serum, not just internationally, in the antagonism toward Germany, but also internally, in the complex and historic regional resentments against the power of Paris that motivated the French provinces. Diphtheria antiserum became the means by which [End Page 394] towns and cities across France set out to produce and supply serum locally, and so contributed significantly to improved medical education in provincial France. Anne Hardy London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

“Must the Arts Suffer from the Progress of Reason?” Four Slave Statues, the 1790 Place des Victoires Debate, and the Urban Monument in Early Revolutionary France

Abstract In June 1790, the Assemblée nationale decided that the statues of slaves surrounding the monument to Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires were offensive to the inhabitants of some French provinces, and should be removed. This triggered a wide-ranging debate in the Parisian press, with calls for the conservation of the monument or for the use of the statues in a new setting. The discussion dealt with the monument’s iconography, but also with its aesthetic and historical significance, and reflected wider debates on slavery and on the (un)popularity of the monarchy. The article analyses these arguments, points out the importance of public monuments in Parisians’ relation to their city, and shows how the removal of these statues was part of a climate of construction, rather than destruction.

LIP: a workers’ community facing globalization

The aim of this article is to show how at the beginning of the 1970s a community of workers in Besançon in France reacted to globalization. It deals with the culture of the working class in a French province, the level of organization of the community and how it reacted when ‘its’ factory was taken over by a multinational company. In seeking to understand this transformation and how the workers perceived it, it is crucial to investigate the changing role of the state. All these aspects will be developed in the sections below with the aim of better understanding the meaning of the strategy of workers’ resistance in the face of a change that affected the community, the sector of production, the region and, ultimately, the working class within the Western societies.

French Folk Songs and the Invention of History

A favorite project of scholars in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France was to collect folk songs from various French provinces and to add new harmonic accompaniments before publishing them. This folk-song project, like so many others, has obvious nationalist undertones: gathering songs from every French province and celebrating an essential and enduring French spirit. Yet the nuances of this project and its broader context suggest a diverse set of concerns. An examination of the rhetoric around folk-song collection shows how French scholars of the period conflated history and geography: they made the provinces the place of history. Collecting songs from the provinces thus became a way of recovering France's past. Paired with contemporary discussions of musical progress and especially those related to harmony, the addition of piano accompaniments to monophonic songs now reads as a form of history writing. In this article, I argue that French music scholars of the fin de siècle acted out their preferred narratives of music history through folk-song harmonizations. What seemed like a unanimously motivated nationalist project actually reveals the development and contestation of the discipline of music history.

Le tombeau de la paix. Une histoire des édits de pacification 1560–1572

Jérémie Foa’s excellent and highly readable Le tombeau de la paix is the published version of his doctoral thesis, supervised by Olivier Christin at Lumière Lyons 2. It is a study of the commissioners of the edicts of pacification, royal judges sent by the Crown into the French provinces to make peace after the civil wars of 1562–3 and 1567–70, responsible for implementing the edicts of Amboise (1563) and Saint-Germain (1570). The commissioners’ failure to achieve peace in the early wars of religion has resulted in their relative neglect, but Foa argues that the nature of their work and its results were ultimately very important in the evolution of the French royal state. Foa’s intention is to ‘follow them on the uneasy roads of the kingdom’, to listen to their discourses of pacification, to observe their acts of reconciliation and arbitration, and their attempts to impose a durable peace by finding ways for Catholics and Protestants to live together. By moving armed conflict into the judicial sphere, and through a rich use of symbolism, the commissioners attempted to move regional politics away from conflict into co-existence. Foa uses extensive primary sources, from central and regional archives. The strength of the work is its interweaving of high political context with issues and events on the ground, based on detailed local case studies. It complements the recent study of the edicts of pacification by Penny Roberts, Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars c.1560–1600, which was published after Foa’s book went to press and so is not discussed in the work.

Enshrining the Mission: The Bishop Sheehan Memorial Museum and Vincentian Visions of China

In 1923, the Western Province of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) began to send missionaries to Jiangxi Province in China at the behest of a French Province no longer in position to continue with its China Mission following World War I. As the years progressed, the China Mission came to hold a significant role in sustaining a community stretching from the missionaries’ home seminary of St. Mary’s of the Barrens in Perryville, Missouri to their vicariate in China. In 1935 the Vincentians established a museum at St. Mary’s to honor the memory of Bishop Edward T. Sheehan, the first American Vincentian bishop in Jiangxi. This museum performed an important role in maintaining the connections between the seminarians in Missouri and the missionaries in Jiangxi as the China Mission became more important within the Vincentian community. It was a shared physical space that housed evidence of Vincentian achievement in China while both educating seminarians and allowing them to participate in the celebration of that achievement; a nexus between coexisting and connected Vincentian communities of the midwestern United States and southern China that sustained an overarching social group identity that ignored geographic separation.