French Provinces Research Articles

Les registres des consistoires des Églises réformées de France - XVIe–XVIIe siècles: un inventaire par Raymond A. Mentzer

chapter is devoted to a particular historic or cultural event, famous person, or aspect of society. After providing detailed information about these facts and events, Ledda reveals how they appeared in Romantic literature. Recounting the life and career of the infamous chief of police, Eugène-François Vidocq, for example, Ledda shows how he was Balzac’s inspiration for Vautrin in La comédie humaine and for Hugo’s characters Valjean and Javert in Les misérables. Places, as well as trends like the Tuileries gardens and “la vie de bohème,” are also central in works by Musset, Balzac, and Dumas. This account of a broad range of phenomena of the period makes for fascinating reading— from flaneurs strolling in Parisian parks, dandyism, the boulevards, the cholera epidemic, miserable living conditions in poor districts, the construction of barricades, and famous crimes and criminals. Ledda’s study is realistic while at the same time nostalgic—aptly recreating a lost era in the history of the capital. The book unfortunately lacks a map of Paris as well as a bibliography and an index. Ledda’s work goes beyond a historic description of Paris to provide a view of Paris, found in literature and in reality, true to its subtitle, Tableaux d’une ville disparue. Texas Christian University (TX) Sharon L. Fairchild Mentzer, Raymond A. Les registres des consistoires des Églises réformées de France – XVIe –XVIIe siècles: un inventaire. Genève: Droz, 2014. ISBN 978-2-600-01786-2. Pp. 170. 60 CHF. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French Reform consistories, local church councils uniting pastors, church elders and deacons, met regularly to oversee the ecclesiastical,liturgical,and financial workings of each church.As Mentzer explains, the registers of French Reform church consistories offer a range of valuable documents to the historian, including information on the exercise of worship, the dates and manière of prayers and preaching, the finances of the church, the administration of aid to the poor and needy, and the teaching of the catechism. Until recently, however, many of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French Reform consistories had been inaccessible, making scholarship on the subject unsystematic and incomplete. Unlike Switzerland, where the registers of Jean Calvin were conserved in their entirety, in France, officers of the Court of Louis XIV destroyed many consistory registers following the 1685 Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes. Additionally, the French Reform registers that did escape destruction were often hidden in unknown locations, and in inadequate storage conditions. Mentzer’s inventory of these important historical documents provides a significant contribution to more thorough and comprehensive study and analysis. The inventory required more than ten years of research, during which Mentzer visited all of the libraries and archives in France that could house a register of a consistory. He identified 309 registers in Paris and in the French provinces. 290 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 291 These registers record data from 156 different French Reform churches and are currently housed in Paris in the National Archives, the Library of French Protestantism, and the National Library, as well as in churches, regional archives, and city halls throughout France.A number of registers remain in private hands. Mentzer’s book is divided into two main sections—three “introductory” chapters (“L’organisation et le fonctionnement du consistoire réformé aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” “Archives et registres du consistoire,”and“Historiographie et voies de recherche”), followed by an inventory of manuscripts of consistory registers, which includes the location and contents of registers throughout France.As Mentzer notes, the organization and content of Reform consistory registers is inconsistent. His summary of differences in the content of specific registers will help guide historians to the most appropriate sources for their particular areas of interest. Mentzer’s chapters on the archives and registers, as well as a historiography of scholarship on consistories, include discerning suggestions for future research. In addition to providing valuable information on the functioning of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French Reform churches, many consistory registers include records that offer insights into the lives of women, the illiterate, and others less frequently represented in historical documents. Whereas most of the manuscripts...

Between the Workshop and the Laboratory: Lavoisier's Network of Instrument Makers.

Throughout his career, Lavoisier paid particular attention to the apparatuses he intended to use in his experimental pursuits. Lavoisier engaged many instrument makers in Paris, the French provinces, and abroad, and he made several efforts, more or less successful, to design a new environment for chemical experimentation. In addition to working with famous instrument makers such as Fortin, Mégnié, and Ramsden, Lavoisier had his instruments made by more than seventy other different makers. In this essay, I outline their contributions and make a preliminary attempt to establish their role in the design of Lavoisier's instruments and in the changes that occurred in chemical experimentation.

La capacidad de poder de los gobiernos locales en el campo del desarrollo: un análisis de la posición de Minas Gerais a partir de 2003

This paper explores how recipients of development cooperation can leverage the benefits of international agreements with international organizations and OECD nations. Departing from the dichotomy «donors-beneficiaries», which has long dominated the system of international cooperation for development, this paper argues that the higher the level of professionalization of the beneficiary, the greater its ability to influence the terms of the cooperation in accordance with its own needs. The case of Minas Gerais reveals that a well-oriented development strategy together with a mature organizational structure were crucial to establishing an active partnership with the World Bank and the French province of Nord-Pas de Calais.

Les historiens «méridionaux» et la Croisade des albigeois

The southern Historians and the Albigensian Crusade The first historians of the southern French provinces (a Midi which includes both Provence and Languedoc) between the XVIth century and XVIIIth centuries cannot avoid putting the question of medieval heresies, Catharism in Languedoc and Waldensianism in Provence. These are often confused because of the political consequences which their repression brought in its train for the futures of their respective provinces. It is interesting to see how these historians deal with the problem : how they describe the heresies, what concrete knowledge they have about them, and how they judge the actors in the conflict. One can see, although between the end of the XVIth century and the XVIIIth century progress in scholarship allows better understanding of heretical doctrines, nevertheless many errors and prejudices survive. One can recognise also that the principal political consequence of the crusade, the annexation of Languedoc by France, does not pose any problem for these loyal subjects of the king, despite their local patriotism. However, within their denunciation of medieval heresy, one can catch a glimpse of a denunciation of a heresy of much more topical interest for them, namely Protestantism.

Geography after Babel – a view from the French province

In this short intervention, we argue that, during the last third of the twentieth century, Francophone human geography may well have constituted a provincial subsystem, that is, a relatively closed space within the discipline. Following Wismann, we also point to some of the challenges and - crucially - advantages of practicing a multilingual geography and "thinking in-­‐between languages."

Murals By Pierre Puvis de Chavannes in French Museums

New buildings for art museums mushroomed in the French provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. These secular institutions helped frame a city's image, signal its importance, and assert its cultural standing. More than any other artist, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) was responsible for the mural cycles and their programs in these grand civic buildings — at Amiens, Marseilles, Lyons, and Rouen. While many of his monumental museum murals may seem simply to represent timeless landscapes inhabited by classicizing figures, they increasingly contained telling references to the specific municipalities and regions in which the museums for which they were made were located. They touted local interests, industries, and regional commerce; heralded public policies and concerns; and came to serve as virtual billboards to advertise the respective cities, making pointed reference to and suitable for the municipality and region and the specific histories, culture, and collections embraced by the institution.

The postcolonial provinces

If Paris is constantly being reinvented as a (post)colonial métropole, doing so inevitably adds to the historical conflation of Paris with France. Using examples from contemporary literature and film, this article calls for a remapping of France's postcolonial geography which would take into account the significance of the French provinces: those regions which are not part of Paris or its (in)famous banlieues. Thus, looking away from the nation's capital and into French regional specificities, this article insists on the necessity to reassess the representation of postcolonial France, not only to add depth and texture to the ways in which we understand experiences of migration and postcolonial identity, but also to reflect on the potential postcoloniality of the French regions as they contribute to the ever-evolving definition of Frenchness.

‘Til Death Parts Us: Women’s Domestic Partnerships in Eighteenth-Century Brittany

This article investigates the legal provision for two adult, unmarried women to create a “perpetual society” with one another found in the customary code of 1725 for the French province of Brittany. This arrangement allowed women who shared a household to designate one another as primary heir and to protect their community property from the claims of others. Evidence of this arrangement demonstrates that single women in some places had options outside of marriage and the convent. The contracts filed by the women also reveal the extent to which this arrangement went beyond considerations of property to express both affection and loyalty. Available to siblings as well as to pairs of unrelated women, this union is likely not the equivalent of same-sex marriage. It does however broaden our knowledge of the meaning of marriage, partnership, and kin in early modern Europe.

French neo-classical artists and their collections

Artists in modern times have often also been prolific collectors of note. We sometimes fix upon the more famous, such as Reynolds or Degas, perhaps in order to illustrate the subtleties of their own art. But what of a cohort or school of artists, some famous, others less well known? Can anything new be learned about an artistic style or artistic practices from the study of their shared collecting habits? More fundamentally, what does collecting at this level reveal about the ‘commerce’ of artworks in a given historical period? The following essay uses sales catalogues and other supporting evidence to examine the collections of French neo-classical artists working in Paris and in the French provinces in the period roughly from 1780 to 1830, in part to understand the daily realities of artistic life in late-eighteenth-century France, and in part to shed light on the inner history of that historical style. The period is a critical one in the history of Western art, as many of the characteristically modern features of the public sphere – auctions, criticism, museums, and so on – were intimately connected with the fate of the neo-classical movement.

Anthropometric history of the French Revolution in the Province of Orleans

We estimate the trend in average height of the population of the French province Orleans from 1715 to the beginning of the 19th century using data on recruits who were drafted either through a lottery system or through general conscription. After controlling for age, residence, and occupation, we find a general decline in the biological standard of living in the decades before the French Revolution. The results support a Ricardian–Malthusian interpretation of the causes of the French Revolution. In the debate ‘Revolution de la misère ou de la prospérité’ our findings support the side which argues that the French Revolution was a culmination of a long-lasting economic malaise during the final phases of the Ancien Régime.

Following insects around: tools and techniques of eighteenth-century natural history

This paper examines the movement of the materials, ideas and practices that went into the construction of natural-historical observations in Paris and the French provinces--in particular, observations of insects. The paired notions of circulation and locality expose the complex dynamic at play in the production of knowledge about these mundane creatures. I show how the movement of things and people problematizes the notion of a single 'centre of calculation', even where a dominant figure like Réaumur was managing collections and producing authoritative texts. Réaumur was indeed managing the flow of observations, letters and specimens from his privileged vantage point in Paris, but he was not the only one doing the processing, and the objects and knowledge flowed in all directions. The paper uses correspondence among eighteenth-century naturalists of various sorts to get at the dynamics of circulation, tracing the movements of insects, bits of text or narrative, drawings, letters, questions, apparatus, books and people. My title refers to the activities of naturalists, who had to follow insects around in order to observe them, and to my own activity in following the insects in their movement through letters, conversations, specimen jars, drawings and texts. My research depends on the accumulation of details about experimental and observational practice, culled from the masses of letters that moved continually around Europe, much as the science of insects depended on the accumulation of details about insects--their physiology, habits, metamorphosis and place in the human economy and the economy of nature.

Mother-Child and Father-Child Interactional Synchrony in Dyadic and Triadic Interactions

Patterns of interactional synchrony were compared in mother-child and father-child dyads during dyadic and triadic interactions. Forty-two dual-earner families from the French province of Quebec, Canada, participated in the study with their 32 months-old child. Parent–child interactions were coded using a taxonomy including the social partners’ physical proximity, visual and body orientation, and dyadic involvement. Analyses show similar patterns of interactional synchrony in mother-child and father-child dyads in the dyadic context while father-child dyads presented less interactional synchrony than mother-child dyads when interacting in triad. Discussion focuses on the impact of the context and on the factors that could explain the changes in father-child patterns of interaction from one context to another.

The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright: Race, Animality, and Mimicry in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Native Son

The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright:Race, Animality, and Mimicry in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Native Son Christopher Peterson (bio) "Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!" —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Can an animal be held accountable for its actions? No matter how counterintuitive, this question follows inevitably from the revelation that an orangutan is the agent behind the horrific deeds perpetrated in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."1 As Akira Mizuta Lippit suggests, "perhaps there has been no crime at the house on Rue Morgue, after all—only death."2 Accountability implies the capacity to reason, to comprehend right and wrong, to think causally in order to connect deeds to an authorial subject. It presupposes, in other words, a consciousness that humans have historically denied to animals. In his "Discourse on the Method," for instance, René Descartes characterized animals as automatons, machines that can sometimes imitate humans—as do parrots who learn to mimic human speech—but nevertheless lack the faculties of reason that elevate humans above all other organisms.3 Notwithstanding the Cartesian division between animal reaction and human response, the premodern legal practice of prosecuting and exterminating animals for their crimes presumed precisely this capacity for accountability. In The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E. P. Evans catalogued a number of such cases from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries, including one in the early sixteenth century that involved an unspecified number of rats who destroyed the barley crop of a French province.4 When the defendants failed to appear in court, their attorney explained their absence by citing the "serious perils" that accompanied their journey, "owing to the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats" (19). For Evans, this practice reads not only as a symptom of anthropomorphism, but [End Page 151] as characteristic of a legal system that "ignored the origin [of crimes] altogether. . . . The overt act alone was assumed to constitute the crime" (200). The law criminalized animals not so much because they were understood as culpable, but because the effects of their actions were harmful. Whereas premodern jurisprudence appeared to treat animals as humans, modern law often portrays humans as animals, "acting automatically or under an insane and irresistible impulse to evil" (193). Modern law thus evaluates human accountability by weighing "gradations of culpability" and calculating "delicate differences in the psychical texture and spiritual quality of deeds" (194). This construction of the human criminal as animal is often traced to Cesare Lombroso's Criminal Man, first published in 1876, which lamented the traditional legal focus on the crime rather than the criminal.5 Lombroso developed a theory of criminality based on the supposedly atavistic characteristics of human criminals, and in the third edition of Criminal Man (1884) went so far as to assert that human criminality owes its origins to the criminal transgressions of animals and even plants. Carnivorous plants, for instance, "release the victim once dead and partially digested, thanks to an acid that is similar to our own pepsin" (167). Eschewing the presumption of free will, Lombroso contends that "crime, from its first manifestations in the lower species, is a product of any organism's physical constitution" (174). Ironically, Lombroso's emphasis on the criminal rather than the crime does not posit the criminal agent as the origin of his or her actions. Rather, human criminals recapitulate the animalistic impulses of their progenitors in a deterministic fashion. Similarly to Lombroso, in the Genealogy of Morals Friedrich Nietzsche seeks to reverse a culturally imposed "sundering from" our "animal past."6 According to Nietzsche, "we modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia" (95). As Walter Kaufmann notes, the original German employs the term Tierquälerei, or "animal torture," which implies a violent mortification of the animality that resides within the human. Although Nietzsche does not subscribe to Lombroso's biological determinism, he does seek to problematize the construction of the human as a calculable, volitional, causal agent. Against the strict Cartesian division between human and animal, Nietzsche characterizes humans as precisely animals who have been bred...

High-density SNP genotyping detects homogeneity of Spanish and French Basques, and confirms their genomic distinctiveness from other European populations

A recent study reported that Basques do not constitute a genetically distinct population, and that Basques from Spanish and French provinces do not show significant genetic similarity. These conclusions disagree with numerous previous studies, and are not consistent with the historical and linguistic evidence that supports the distinctiveness of Basques. In order to further investigate this controversy, we have genotyped 83 Spanish Basque individuals and used these data to infer population structure based on more than 60,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms of several European populations. Here, we present the first high-throughput analysis including Basques from Spanish and French provinces, and show that all Basques constitute a homogeneous group that can be clearly differentiated from other European populations.

Patrick Chamoiseau and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Resistance

It would seem paradoxical to situate work of Patrick Chamoiseau, militant Martinican writer, in context of French regionalism, a conservative cultural movement in France that defended languages and traditions from French provinces. First, a long period separates French regionalism from creolite movement, French Caribbean literary movement that emerged in wake of publication of Chamoiseau's 1986 groundbreaking work Chronique des sept miseres. As a literary movement, French regionalism was known for its patriotism and its aim to celebrate customs, landscape, and languages of regions. Its heyday, which extended from belle epoque to entre-deux-guerres, roughly from 1920s to 1930s, came some forty years before creolite. Seemingly, no historical continuity can be drawn between these two literary movements. Arguably, it would be equally difficult to draw any intellectual continuity between these liter - ary schools. The underlying ideology of French regionalism and creolite could not, on face of it, be more different. The former expressed desire to purify and renew nation by grounding French identity in soil (terroir). It found literary inspiration in rural space of heartland (petit pays), in ancestral way of life, or in psychology of popular classes. For French regionalist writers, true Frenchness could be found only in old moral values and untarnished local traditions of people of France. The emphasis on native traditions was so strong in regional- ism that many considered it to be the official doctrine of National Revolution, cultural reform of France undertaken by reactionary Vichy Regime led by Marechal Philippe Petain.

Brittany: A Concise History

This book is part of a new series that aims to provide introductions to the histories of regions of Europe that do not have ‘their own present-day independent nation state or have only recently gained such a state’ (p. vii), and thus this volume on Brittany joins earlier ones on Catalonia, Cornwall and Galicia. Gwenno Piette's concise but remarkably detailed and careful account of the westernmost province of France traces how Brittany first became an entity under Nominoé in the ninth century, and then how, over the centuries, its fate became so intertwined with that of France as to be almost totally assimilated. At the same time, she charts the attempts by Bretons to swim against the tide of homogenization, which have ensured the survival of Brittany's cultural and linguistic difference into the twenty-first century. Opening with Carnac's standing stones, the work includes discussion of Romanization, British colonizers, Nominoé, the French Revolution and ‘chouannerie’, Brittany's nineteenth-century cultural revival, or ‘le bretonisme’, the gradual politicization of the Breton movement in the course of the twentieth century, and the effects of two world wars. The portrait of Brittany that emerges is broad, and includes attention to the economics, agriculture, fishing, manufacturing and demographics of the region, as well as to cultural and political landmarks. Particularly welcome is the unbiased account of collaboration by a minority of Breton activists during the Second World War; just as in her discussion of ‘chouannerie’, Piette states the facts, briefly juxtaposes the situation in Brittany with that in other regions of France, and moves on. Similarly, she admits that the Breton movement only ever involved ‘a small minority of the population’ (p. 1), but argues that the activities of this group warrant study because they have ‘played a part in preventing the country from simply evolving into a completely assimilated French province’ (p. 1). The series is aimed at the general reader (indeed it contains no notes, and but the briefest of bibliographies), but this volume will nevertheless be an extremely useful starting point for anyone interested in the development of regional and national identities in Europe, and is especially suited to students of France or of other Celtic cultures. It also provides groundwork that would allow for a fresh approach to European culture that moves beyond disagreements over the stretching of the word ‘post-colonial’, to embrace new case-studies of cultural complexity such as that of modern-day Brittany.

X‐ray Diffraction Determination of Minerals Carrying Trace Elements in Soil: Application to the French Soil Quality Monitoring Network

Trace elements (TE) occurring naturally in soils derive from the parent materials from which the soils were developed. We propose a feasibility study of the x‐ray diffraction determination of TE carriers of a natural origin applied to 28 samples collected from soil 30–50 cm deep in the French Soil Quality Monitoring Network from two French provinces. Three main pedogeological families were studied. Results show that mineralogical analysis permits the determination of several potential TE carriers. They also explain the highest concentrations of certain TEs in soils. Such knowledge of carriers is useful for understanding and evaluating the risks of TE transfer in ecosystems. Nevertheless, it is also shown that the use of mineralogical soil analyses for an understanding of the total TE contents can be variable, depending upon which TE or which soil type is considered.

War and Government in the French Provinces. Picardy 1470-1560

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Notes on transcriptions of documents, units of money and measures Introduction 1. Return to allegiance: Picardy and the Franco-Burgundian Wars, 1470-93 2. The provincial governors and politics 3. The governors' staff and household 4. The Picard nobility and royal service 5. Military organisation in Picardy during the Habsburg-Valois wars 6. 'Les fruictz que la guerre rapporte': the effects of war on the Picard countryside, 1521-60 7. War, taxation and the towns 8. Peace negotiations and the formation of the frontier in Picardy, 1521-60 Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index.

Social Interactions of Migrants and Trade Outcomes

This paper investigates the interactions performed by immigrants in France. A framework for immigrant's choice of location is based on recent studies on non-market interactions which explains how migrants concentrate. Applying data on the distribution of immigrants in 95 French provinces, the interactions are subsequently estimated. This social component of migration is then tested on international trade, providing a direct measure of the impact of networks on the economy.

La mélancolie pied-noire. Transmission transgénérationnelle

In July 1962, the five French provinces ( départements) of Algeria in North Africa became an independent state. A million French people (the Pieds-noirs) were suddenly uprooted and repatriated. They then had to rebuild their lives in France. Most of them suffered from psychological trauma and depression. This is a study of the second and third generations of these families. Most of the descendants of these families adapted to their new surroundings but in a minority of them we have tracked a transgenerational transmission of melancholia and of psychological scars. The study also includes a comparison with identical situations and problems amongst other displaced people.