French Rule Research Articles

Nation as neighborhood: how Bab al-Hara dramatized Syrian identity

This article discusses a popular Syrian television drama series, Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood Gate), which ran for five seasons (2006–10). It is part of a genre of television series called the “Damascene milieu,” which nostalgically dramatizes life in imagined Damascene neighborhoods in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. The narrative of Bab al-Hara focuses on how a Syrian community lived under and resisted French colonial rule and its local collaborators. The article argues that the strategic imagination of the past in the series reflects the Syrian regime’s project of national consolidation in Syria, a country sharply divided by class, sect, and local belonging and desperately seeking to bridge a gap between state authority and a national sense of belonging. However, within the context of the 2011 uprising, both regime and opposition discourses echoed themes and symbols from the series – demonstrating its political relevance. The article concludes that the series is a spectacular example of how popular culture, particularly in postcolonial and authoritarian contexts, contributes to the imagination of identity and memory in ways that are used by different national groups to bolster and contest political positions.

Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre by Jean-Claude Yon

Reviews 247 Yon, Jean-Claude. Une histoire du théâtre à Paris: de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7007-0188-3. Pp. 437. 29 a. Yon offers a valuable compendium of information about the underpinnings of nineteenth-century Parisian theater. This is a wonderfully informative book for those of us who have taught plays such as Hernani, La dame aux camélias, or La fille Élisa and longed to know more about the behind-the-scenes battles over censorship, theater construction and personnel, authors’ and actors’ rights, patronage, and the theatrical experience itself. This is not an histoire of Paris’s greatest theatrical works, but of its theaters. Yon adopts a resolutely historical approach, considering plays themselves as historical documents (259). He provides a comprehensive overview of the social and cultural forces that influenced theaters and their operation in nineteenth-century Paris.Although Yon uses the term théâtre largely to refer to state-sanctioned structures until 1864, he also discusses a variety of other spectacles including cafés-concerts, circuses, and sports, particularly in sections devoted to the Belle Époque. The book’s first section, “L’État face aux théâtres parisiens,” develops chronologically from 1791 to 1914, tracing theater’s fate in the hands of each political regime. The second, “Les structures de la vie théâtrale,” evokes the way theaters were laid out, operated, frequented , and supervised (fire laws for example), explains how authors and personnel collaborated to bring texts to the scene, describes the working conditions of performers and stage hands,and the experience of the theater-going public.The third part,“Répertoires et diversité des spectacles,” provides a thematic overview of different generic categories of the 32,000 pièces performed in Paris from 1800–1900 (259): they ranged from tragedy and opera to melodrama, vaudeville, dance, pantomime, panorama, circus, and sports.Yon’s conclusion describes the controversial droit des pauvres, the tax levied on theaters to support charitable activities, and interprets its unpopularity as symptomatic of the tenuous associations between theaters and their perceived social utility. Each section of Yon’s book draws upon a wealth of archival materials (letters from Haussmann to ministers, from the police to ministers, among writers and actors), to reveal the book’s overarching thesis: that nineteenth-century French theater was a dramatocratie, meaning that theater was at the heart of public life and informed public opinion (7). Indeed, he shows that all nineteenth-century French rulers were concerned by theatrical spectacles’ influence on the lower classes, and the threat that such a dramatocratie represented for the state. Even Third Republic leaders were concerned by the shape and form exerted by theater and struggled (ineffectually it would turn out) to control public spectacles. But Yon also perceives the Third Republic as the moment when theater lost this social privilege, when it morphed into one among many attractions in a developing société du spectacle (351). Yon’s work is thus not a neutral accounting of the development of bourgeois Parisian theaters, le grand théâtre, but a commentary on theater’s implications for nineteenth-century French society as a whole. This book will be a valuable resource for teachers and students alike. It is published in an affordable paperback edition, it is well-documented, contains a useful index,and is full of interesting excerpts from historical documents and correspondence. While sometimes a bit technical, it would make an excellent French-language historical resource for literature courses dedicated to nineteenth-century French theater and theatrical history. Montclair State University (NJ) Elizabeth Emery Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Beffa, Jean-Louis. La France doit choisir. Paris: Seuil, 2012. ISBN 978-2-02-106499-5. Pp. 287. 18 a. Ce choix crucial est celui du type de capitalisme que la France devrait adopter. Ex-PDG de Saint-Gobain (1996–2007) et conseiller politique actif, Beffa analyse clairement la mondialisation, dissèque le mal économique français, et propose des solutions. Il distingue entre les “métiers mondiaux [...] où la production d’un pays donné est en concurrence directe avec les productions d’un autre pays” (17), et les métiers régionaux o...

Participle-object agreement in French and the theory of grammatical viruses

This paper looks at the French rule of the preceding direct object from a fresh perspective, that of Virus Theory. As is well known, the rule in question perplexes foreign learners and causes difficulty to native speakers of French. At the same time it is something of a cultural shibboleth and has attracted a quite surprising degree of interest from theoretical linguists (including Chomsky). Based on an examination of the phenomenon in terms of five signature properties, the present paper proposes that the rule is in fact a grammatical virus; that is, an epiphenomenon of language pedagogy rather than a genuine component of the French grammar. From that perspective it is similar to such constructs as the English rule which, in prestige speech, converts accusative me to nominative I after the word and. Linguists should thus be wary of using the paradigm of avoir-related participle agreement for theory construction as it appears to be something of an empirical red herring.

The Claims of Culture at Empire's End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule

The Claims of Culture at Empire's End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule

De Gouden Eeuw als ijkpunt van de nationale identiteit. Het beeld van de Gouden Eeuw in verzetsliteratuur tussen 1806 en 1813

In tracing the conceptualisation of the Dutch Golden Age to its historical roots, the Napoleonic period (1806-813) can be understood to have played a pivotal role. Key writers of this era, such as Loosjes, Helmers, Tollens, and Siegenbeek, considered the Golden Age to have been instrumental in laying the foundations of Dutch culture and establishing a benchmark for Dutch identity formation. Their representations of the nation's history might be interpreted not merely as attempts at flaunting chauvinistic sentiments, but also as articulations of Dutch resistance against French rule. The dynamics of this relationship between 'foreign' and 'native' can be elucidated by an analysis of the ways in which Amsterdam and Vondel feature in early nineteenth-century literature and literary historiography: both city and poet served not only as potent symbols of a thriving nation, but also as beacons of resistance.

Vietnam. Imperial heights: Dalat and the making and undoing of French Indochina. By Eric Jennings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Maps, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Vietnam Imperial heights: Dalat and the making and undoing of French Indochina By ERIC JENNINGS Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Maps, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index. As with his earlier work on the history of the French empire, Eric Jennings' recently published history of Da Lat will likely prove to be an inspiration to historians interested in reconsidering European imperialism by delving deeply into the local social and cultural history of the colonial encounter. His previous studies on colonial life under Vichy and on the colonial experience of hydrotherapy did not pioneer historical enquiry into these topics. These studies did, however, spur on scholars of empire in taking them seriously, both in the history of France and of its empire. Very much a part of the so-called 'new imperial history', his examination of Da Lat's history from its colonial genesis to its postcolonial growth tells a story of the contingencies that hampered the best-laid imperial plans for creating an oasis in the central highlands of Vietnam. Based largely on colonial archival sources, Jennings argues that the realities of the colonial political economy deeply affected repeated attempts to realise imperial visions of an ideal Da Lat and, thus of an ideal Indochina. Even before French rule was secure, the military and, later, civilian administrators of Indochina had resolved to equip the colony with centres of convalescence that approximated a temperate European climate. Governor-General Paul Doumer seconded personnel to scout for a location at an altitude that matched the science of contemporary notions of the most beneficial spot for a hill station. Alexandre Yersin stumbled upon the plateau that was to support Da Lat and thus began the erratic rise of the city in the hills. For every fervent supporter of the hill station in the colonial administration there was another who more soberly assessed the scientific efficacy, the profligacy or the political imprudence of the Da Lat cause. Despite being captive to the caprices of colonial politics and society, the hill station nonetheless grew. Promoters continued to champion visions of Da Lat as the apotheosis of the colonial racial and social order, while it slowly grew as more and more came to the hill station, despite its critics and despite its seeming inability to live up to expectations. People came for work and for holidays, temporarily and permanently, until Dat Lat finally achieved its colonial zenith during the early 1940s. In telling the story of the vicissitudes and tribulations of the city, its promoters and detractors as well as its inhabitants, Jennings' history of colonial Da Lat exemplifies the new imperial history both in its achievements and its shortcomings. It provides a sustained examination of the contradictions inherent in the imperial discourses of race and tropicality that lay at its origin and shaped its haphazard development. He importantly stresses the 'brutal methods' of forced labour, compelled migration and racial segregation that formed the basis for this colonial 'utopia' (p. 59). By telling Da Lat's story across that suppositious divide separating colonial from postcolonial, Jennings' study also points to the lingering vestiges of imperial visions in contemporary Da Lat. While he asserts that 'the effects on Indochinese cultures remain to be seen' (p. 93), Imperial heights will provide fodder for those seeking to understand how the colonial order has enduringly affected the societies of the colonised. Breaking with his own earlier work and with the standard fare of imperial history, Jennings also makes more use of Vietnamese sources in attempting to account more fully for the place of Indochinese in their own histories. …

En marge du décret Crémieux. Les Juifs naturalisés français en Algérie (1865 - 1919)

The Cremieux Decree, which was promulgated on September 24 1870, is a key moment in the history of the Jews of Algeria because it recognized them collectively as French citizens. It was thought to be an answer to the failure of the previous legislation, the 1865 senatus-consulte which defined the status of natives, both Muslims or Jews as “French without citizenship,” but allowed individuals from these groups to ask for citizenship through naturalization, which only a very few did. The historiography has therefore neglected the Jewish dimension of the naturalizations that occurred in Algeria. However, the Cremieux Decree did not concern all the Algerian Jews. In particular, the Jews from the M’zab, conquered in 1882, and even more importantly, Tunisian and Moroccan migrant Jews were excluded from this assimilation. As this article demonstrates, however, the study and analysis of the naturalization of these Jews is extremely instructive, and demonstrates the diversity of the Algerian Jewish population under French rule.

RETHINKING POLITICS IN THE COLONY: THEMÉTISOF SENEGAL AND URBAN POLITICS IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

ABSTRACTSenegal was unique in French West Africa for the nature and extent of electoral institutions that operated in its colonial towns. In the 1870s, Third Republic France elaborated on earlier short-lived policies by re-establishing local assemblies and a legislative seat for Senegal in Paris. Although histories of modern politics focus on Blaise Diagne's 1914 election to the French National Assembly, a local assembly called the General Council held greater power over economic and political matters affecting the colony between 1870 and 1920. This article reconsiders the history of urban politics in colonial Senegal by examining the ways that themétis(mixed race population) used the General Council as their field of engagement with French officials, sometimes facilitating the consolidation of French rule but at other times contesting colonial practice.

TREASON OR CHARITY? CHRISTIAN MISSIONS ON TRIAL AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF ALGERIA

AbstractThis article explores the role that Christianity played in the decolonization of Algeria and in particular how the complex relationship between Christianity and colonialism under French rule shaped the rhetoric and actions of Christians during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Using the case of a 1957 trial in the military tribunal of Algiers in which twelve Europeans were charged with crimes ranging from distributing propaganda for the National Liberation Front to sheltering suspected communist and nationalist militants, I demonstrate how “Christian” rhetoric became one of the major means through which the conduct of the war and the defense of French Algeria were debated. While conservative defenders of French Algeria claimed that actions such as those of the Christians on trial led to the erasure of Christianity in North Africa, I argue that such actions and moral positions allowed for the continued presence of Christianity in Algeria after independence.

Haiti: the aftershocks of history

Even before the recent earthquake destroyed much of the country, Haiti was known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption. Maligned and misunderstood, the nation has long been blamed by many for its own wretchedness. But as acclaimed historian Laurent Dubois demonstrates, Haiti's troubles owe more to a legacy of international punishment for the original sin of staging the only successful slave revolt in the world. Dubois vividly depicts the isolation and impoverishment that followed the 1804 rebellion: the crushing indemnities imposed by the former French rulers, which initiated a cycle of debt; the multiple interventions by the U.S. armed forces, including a twenty-year occupation; and the internal divisions and political chaos that are the inevitable consequences of centuries of subversion. At the same time, he also explores Haiti's overlooked successes, as its revolution created a resilient culture insistent on autonomy and equality.

Reading the image, reviewing the text — on the reception of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Voyage à l'Ile de France (1773)

Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s first book, Voyage à l’Ile de France (1773), published anonymously and with illustrations by Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, has often been hailed as an ‘abolitionist manifesto’, yet the author devotes only a modest portion of the text to the condition of black slaves in Mauritius, under French colonial rule. To explain the predominantly abolitionist readings of Voyage à l’Ile de France, I propose to turn to the hitherto understudied period reception of the book, in order to posit that the original illustrations and the interaction between these and the text may have played an important part in orienting the interpretation of the work. In addition to addressing a lacuna in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre criticism, the following reflections on the reception of Voyage à l’Ile de France as an imagetext may also be viewed as a case study, making a contribution to the broader area of research into modes of reception of illustrated books in the Eighteenth century.

Rethinking Moroccan nationalism, 1930–44

Historians and social scientists studying the French protectorate era in Morocco have suggested that nationalist resistance began by the 1930s, if not earlier. Accordingly, the efforts to reform French rule in the 1930s have been called ‘proto-nationalism’ or ‘early nationalism’ in histories that portray nationalism as an evolutionary process, one that grows in a linear, unidirectional fashion. This article explores the tensions between nationalist and reformist demands, and stresses the distinctiveness of these mobilisation platforms. It argues against subsuming calls for reform into the nationalist narrative, proposing instead that calls for reform constituted an alternative to nationalist demands for independence. Proponents of reform emphasised equality and opposed the authoritarian nature of French rule. In contrast, the Independence Party, founded in 1944, challenged the foreign nature of imperial rule. Attention to these differences points to the diversity of responses to French rule. Moroccan anti-colonialism took multiple forms and did not always espouse nationalist goals. Labelling all opposition ‘nationalist’ inhibits our understanding of how actors come to seek national independence. Further, recognising that activists espoused different goals over time is important because it helps make sense of the different visions of the post-colonial order that elites espoused in the years after independence.

The biological standard of living and mortality in Central Italy at the beginning of the 19th century

The biological standard of living in Central Italy at the beginning of the 19th century is analyzed using newly collected data on the height of recruits in the army of the Papal States. The results reveal a decline in height for the cohorts born under French rule (1796–1815). Although this trend was common to many parts of Europe, the estimated magnitude of the decline suggests a worsening of the biological standard of living of the working classes in the Papal States even relative to that of other countries. Despite the differences in the economic systems within the Papal States, no significant geographical variation in height has been found: even the most dynamic and advanced regions experienced a dramatic height decline. Mortality also increased during the period under consideration.

Haiti, Free Soil, and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic

IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world. Set in the Caribbean Sea, a short sail from some of the principal American colonies of Britain and Spain, in the 1780s it produced about half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas. It was, in the nomenclature of the time, the “Pearl of the Antilles,” the “Eden of the Western World.” It was there, in late August 1791, that the colony’s enslaved rose up, eventually declaring war against the regime of slavery at its seat of most extreme and opulent power. Within a month, the rebel slaves numbered in the tens of thousands, and the property destroyed amounted to more than a thousand sugar and coffee farms. With this event—the largest and best-coordinated slave rebellion the world had ever seen—the enslaved of Saint-Domingue forced the issue of slavery upon the French Revolution and the world. By August 1793, colonial authorities began decreeing abolition, and in February 1794, the National Convention in Paris ended slavery in France’s colonies, in a sense ratifying what enslaved rebels had already made real on the ground in many parts of Saint-Domingue. A decade later, those same rebels declared themselves free not only from slavery, but also from French rule. On January 1, 1804, the independent nation of Haiti was proclaimed—the second independent state in the Western Hemisphere, and the only one ever founded by former slaves and without slavery.1 The Haitian Revolution—the name by which we now know these events—commanded the attention of everyone in the region and beyond. But surely few followed

The Claims of Culture at Empire's End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule

The Claims of Culture at Empire's End: Syria and Lebanon under French Rule

Michel Ecochard in Lebanon and Syria (1956–1968). The spread of Modernism, the building of the independent states and the rise of local professionals of planning

The architect and planner Michel Ecochard has had a long career in developing countries, from its first works in Syria under the French rule, until the 1970s. He represented the modernist and functionalist approach to planning in a time of modernization. In this article, we concentrate on his work in Lebanon and Syria between the end of the 1950s and the 1960s. He prepared the master plans of Beirut and of Damascus. Those works represented the end of an era rooted in colonial planning. It was also the beginning of a new time, with the local planners taking on, sometimes sharing, sometimes contesting Ecochard's visions. Building on recent scholarship on the circulation of planning ideas, we focus on the reception of Ecochard's proposals. Though most political elites and planning professionals shared most of Ecochard's views, the political circumstances and the changing social conditions led to adjustments and reorientations. The new planning framework was also a major factor of change.

Testing old theories in new surroundings: The timing of first social security laws in Africa

AbstractThis article examines the timing of the introduction of four major social security programmes — work accident insurance, sickness benefits, pensions, and family allowances — in 43 African countries. Further, it explores whether legislative structure, dominant religion or the colonial past of the country is of importance when we control for year of independence, prosperity, degree of democracy, government stability, industrialization and the size and ethnic homogeneity of the population. On the basis of Cox hazard rate modelling it is concluded that industrialized, homogeneous and rather populous countries that were under French rule tend to be pioneers in African social security legislation.

Racial myth, colonial reform, and the invention of customary law in Morocco, 1912–1930

Throughout the period of French indirect rule in Morocco (1912–56), colonial scholars and administrators generated a mass of literature to explain the perceived differences between Arab and so-called Berber (Amazeeri) societies. In the minds of many colonial enthusiasts, objective ethnic difference translated into a series of clear social, cultural, and political traits that had divided the indigenous populations for centuries. Historians of the period have highlighted this ethnographic focus as one of the preeminent justifications for French reforms in Morocco. The reform and institutionalisation of customary Berber law, which provoked the most widespread urban protest in nearly two decades, has long been understood as an example of legislative overreaching: the vibrant popular reactions to the so-called Berber dahir of 1930 signalled to many contemporary actors and subsequent historians the veritable birth of the Moroccan nationalist movement, as urban populations protested the what they saw as the diminution of the sultan's jurisdiction and the attenuation of shari‘a in many rural areas. Implicit in this narrative is the idea that by 1930 the otherwise cautious and informed process of ethnically specific reform somehow went awry. This article seeks to demonstrate that the French legal reform program was, from its inception, founded upon vague, contested understandings of Berber social and political organisation that colonial administrators mobilised for very specific political ends. The so-called reform of Berber customary law was rather an invention of a system that French administrators used to remove the Berber population from the influence of the Arab makhzan, to marginalise religious law in favour of secular European values, and ultimately to fracture the network of social, cultural, and political relationships between the sultan and his people. Understanding the manipulative bases of legal reform sheds light on the relationship between the human sciences and colonial policy – specifically the complicated strength and malleability of scholarly mythmaking – and underscores the paradoxes of the French ‘civilising mission’.

The view from the border: a comparative study of autonomism in Alsace and the Moselle, 1918–29

This article offers a comparative analysis of the origins and development of autonomism in interwar Alsace and the Moselle. Upon the liberation of the provinces in November 1918, the local populations of Alsace and the Moselle enthusiastically welcomed French troops. For President Raymond Poincare´ this enthusiasm constituted a clear ‘plebiscite’. But, in light of perceived heavy-handedness on the part of the new French rulers, this enthusiasm proved short-lived and rapidly gave way to a widespread malaise. In response to local fears for the preservation of their distinctive social, linguistic and religious traditions, Autonomist organisations emerged to oppose the loss of what they perceived to be the soul and character of Alsace and the Moselle. They rapidly became a pervasive force in local politics, cutting across ideological and class barriers and dividing parties. For the French government, autonomism represented a serious threat to national unity. For local autonomists, however, it represented an attempt to preserve local socio-economic structures and linguistic and cultural practices. The discussion here seeks to reposition autonomism within the context of local politics and to compare the distinct experiences of Alsace and the Moselle in the decade after their return to French rule.

Riding the Currents of Colonialism

Western technological innovations such as steamers and railways were often relied upon by Colonial rule in Africa. However, Adouma canoe workers in the French colony of Gabon demonstrate how pre-colonial transportation methods could survive into the twentieth century. Adouma canoe workers were the most skilled navigators in Gabon before the arrival of French expeditions in the 1880s. French authorities and concessionary companies, confronted by the shallow and rocky Ogooue River, preferred to rely on Adouma canoes rather than building costly roads or use steamers. Adouma workers used their monopoly over transport on the upper Ogooue to enrich themselves and retain their autonomy. Adouma canoe workers formed a partnership with these companies to transport passengers and merchandise, while most Gabonese suffered during the early decades of French rule. Thus, even though they did not radically alter previous forms of travel, Adouma communities used their transportation skills to overcome the challenges of French conquest.