French History Research Articles

Terrorism as a Special Form of Political Fight in the Modern World

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon in human history, and since ancient times, various political and social forces have tried to seize power in this way, resorting to violence and intimidation. Various forces saw terrorism as a means of fighting their opponents. In the middle Ages, terrorism acquired a special status in European countries as a special form of political struggle to protect the interests of the state, church and religious authorities.The very act of officially killing criminals in any form was committed with the aim of intimidating people and various sectors of society. The violence of the marginalized, expressed by the term “terror,” has become more common in modern French political history. The advocates of the reform saw the protection of the interests and freedoms of the individual with the help of terrorism as an effective means of political struggle. However, later this term was considered a negative act, and terrorism was presented as a crime against the state. That is, since the end of the 18th century, the term “terror” has been used in a negative sense.Especially at the current stage of the development of human society, terrorism has acquired more frightening features. Terrorists kill innocent people to intimidate the public and authorities. Terrorism has become one of the main instruments of the struggle for power, the protection of group, ethnic, racial and other interests.

Indivisibilité, Sécurité, Laïcité: the French ban on the burqa and the niqab

In France, secularism is celebrated in the public sphere. The paper makes general arguments about France’s changing identity and specific arguments about the burqa and niqab ban. It explains how French history shaped the ideology of secularism and of public civil religion, and how colonial legacy, immigration, fear of terrorism and security needs have led France to adopt the trinity of indivisibilité, sécurité, laïcité while paying homage to the traditional trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité. While the motto of the French Revolution is still symbolically and politically important, its practical significance as it has been translated to policy implementation has been eroded. The emergence of the new trinity at the expense of the old one is evident when analyzing the debates concerning cultural policies in France in the face of the Islamic garb, the burqa and the niqab, which are perceived as a challenge to France’s national secular raison d'être. The French Republic has attempted to keep public space secular. Is the burqa and niqab ban socially just? Does it reasonably balance the preservation of societal values and freedom of conscience? It is argued that the burqa and niqab ban is neither just nor reasonable in the eyes of the women and girls who wish to wear the Muslim garb, their families and community, and that paternalism that holds that the ban is for the women’s own good is a poor, coercive excuse. Claims for paternalistic coercion to protect adult women from their own culture when they do not ask for protection are not sufficiently reasonable to receive vindication.

Clitic climbing in a modal verbal complex in the history of Spanish and French (1550-1950) Similarities and differences

Clitic climbing in a modal verbal complex in the history of Spanish and French (1550-1950) Similarities and differences

Trans Rachilde: A Roadmap for Recovering the Gender Creative Past and Rehumanizing the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT Gender-focused studies of nineteenth-century French literature and history in the last few decades have often relied on heteronormative and gender normative paradigms. Using Rachilde as an example, I demonstrate how trans studies can offer tools through which to recover the gender-creative past. These tools are meant to work in concert with feminist and queer theories, while centering gender in a broad sense by focusing on challenges to the gender binary, modes of gender expression, attention to the material body, and a felt sense of gender.

Sensing, Measuring, Writing: On Recent French Historiography of the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT This essay surveys recent francophone historiography of the Nineteenth Century. It focussed on three areas of research in particular: the french tradition of l’histoire des sensibilités; historical works that grapple with time, space, and scales of analysis; and the poetics of writing history in dialogue with literature. In each of these areas, the essay finds evidence of innovative and creative scholarship that is changing our understanding of nineteenth-century France and the French empire.

Recent Books and Dissertations on French History

This bibliography is designed to introduce readers to recent publications on French history, broadly defined. It is organized according to commonly recognized periods, with works that bridge multiple categories classified under “General and Miscellaneous.”

프랑스] 타자와의 대화, 차이의 생산: 2019~2020년 프랑스사 연구

COVID-19 suggests some trends currently under way in historical studies, given that it potentially embodies unprecedent global proliferation and infinite variability in human history. First, it clearly shows that a society or community can never be a closed system. In other words, historical research also reminds us that history of one society or community has always been made through constant exchanges and contacts with other communities or others. Secondly, the possibility of endless virus mutations shows that all beings, including humans, are in the process of constant change. These are major characteristics of the trends in French history research conducted in Korea from 2019 to 2020. First of all, the scope of historical research is extended from France to outside Europe, providing an opportunity to see France differently or anew. Next, a large number of new topics that have not been noticed have entered the academic discussion stage. In addition, of course, many research achievements are faithful to the existing large historical context, while thickening research achievements in various directions. This paper aims to look at these research trends in three categories: dialogue with others beyond France, discovery of new topics outside the existing framework, and deepening and spreading major topics that are the mainstay of the existing framework. However, the imbalance in research topics and the decline in future academic generations in French history have been a source of anxiety in the long term.

Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War

French historians will perhaps be surprised that this book is being reviewed in French History. It does not, strictly speaking, speak to French history at all. Rather, it is an excellent examination, as its subtitle puts it, of the topics of ‘sovereignty, legitimacy, and the formation of new polities after the Great War’. The essays contained in Beyond Versailles range widely, from an examination of the fundamental question of plebiscites, to Austria, Italy, two essays on Egypt, three on Poland, one on Persia and a stimulating essay on black internationalism. They problematize the notion that the new world order born of the Paris Peace Conference was a progressive moment. In line with much recent writing on the Great War itself, they also de-centre the peace conference narrative away from the Franco-German problem and delineate the global, as much as European, ramifications of how the conflict ended. One of the unintended ironies of the Paris Peace Conference was that in its rush to reify the idea of ‘national self-determination’, it ended up essentially opting for the German idea of the nation, as opposed to Ernest Renan’s famous French republican definition of the nation in his 1882 Sorbonne lecture. Thus, John Deak comments in the case of Austria that ‘The Paris system that emerged granted legitimacy based on the idea of ethnic populations’. Provocatively, he concludes that the Treaty of St Germain was a ‘moment of destruction and of unmaking a state: the unmaking of multinational—or even nationally indifferent—possibilities for European history’. Jesse Kaufman writes with regard to Poland that ‘the most intriguing and unsettling aspect of the triumph of this vague ideal [is] that, after thousands of years in which power had been legitimated in a host of ways, national self-determination so thoroughly and rapidly annihilated all competition and ascended to the status of supreme norm for the organization of politics both domestic and foreign’. This is heady stuff, if one follows the argument to its logical conclusion. If the ‘destruction’ and ‘unmaking’ of states was the ‘supreme norm’ because national self-determination had ‘rapidly annihilated all competition’, then one is left with an argument on the international level that is similar to Robert Gerwarth’s (in The Vanquished) on the domestic level: the status quo ante was arguably better than the post-Versailles order.

French Historiography and Oskar Halecki

French Historiography and Oskar Halecki

On the origins of the demographic transition: rethinking the European marriage pattern

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to the roots of the process and offers novel ways of explaining why people started to control their fertility in France and how they did so. In this paper, I track the evolution of marriage patterns to a point before the premises of the demographic transition. I identify two distinct phases. Next, I rely on exploratory methods to classify French counties based on their discriminatory features. Five profiles emerge. I discuss these profiles through the lens of the French Revolution, one of the greatest events that ever occurred in French history, which irretrievably altered its society. In particular, the results show that the fertility transition was not as linear, but more complex than previous research had argued. They show the importance of accounting for cultural factors and for individuals’ predispositions to adapt more or less quickly to societal changes. Yet cultural factors are not all. They can help to explain the timing of the transition and the choice of methods used to control fertility, but modernity and gender equality are also needed to describe the mechanisms in play behind the process.

Ecole des Annals and Iraqi Perception: Its Impact on Early Iraqi Historians

The article is a study of the Ecole des annals' impact on the first generation of Iraqi historians and historiography during the 20th century. The Ecole des annals had emerged as a reaction of the 1st world war disasters and its destructive results which implicated on the political, economic and intellectual situations in Europe during the interwar period. The school had founded in 1929 by two French historians: Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), and published its first journal " Annales d'histoire économique et sociale", in addition to publications of the school which concentrated on social and economic history, and kept away from the political history which was the main interest of "École méthodique" (Methodological school) since late 19th century and its journal " Revue historique" at 1876. The annals school had important influences on the European and American, and then world historiography since its rise up to present. The school had moved the historiography from political and diplomatic aspects to social, intellectual and economic issues.

Propositions pour une psychosémiologie historique du français : quelques réflexions à partir de l’histoire du verbe français

Abstract While it is true that the linguistic theory of Gustave Guillaume (1883–1960) is generally designated under the name of psychomechanics because it postulates that the thought in the language action operates through a constantly repeated and formally homogeneous set of movements, which gives it its psychically systematic character, it does not ignore the semiological dimension of language, which also aims at a certain systematization. Hence a place for a psychosemiology, which this contribution aims to define and illustrate from examples taken in the morphological history of French.

Historical Memory in the Process of Formation and Reproduction of Modern National Identity: the French Experience (Part 1)

The article is devoted to the study of the role of historical tradition and national memory in the formation of modern types of ethno-national identity and mechanisms of consolidation of citizens at the stage of formation of the French state of the modern type. In this regard, various versions of French history were analyzed by representatives of historical and historiographical schools, which still compete with each other for the status of creators of a generally accepted interpretation of important historical events.
 It was found that consistently patriotic motivation, which ensures the formation and realization of the innovative potential of the people and social activity of this creative core of the nation, aimed at overcoming any crisis challenges, is formed only on the basis of maximum meaningful synthesis of existing interpretations of French history. In particular, the effectiveness of memory policy is ensured by the fact that symbols, traditions and historical monuments that positively influence the dynamics of national-patriotic motivations and feelings are inevitably (and often, quite consciously) filled with qualitatively new meanings and values.
 The complete failure of neoliberal and left-wing radical critiques of Holism's theory and practice has been proved, the conservative elements of which, in particular the appeal to the heroic past, are not at all identical with medieval archaism and almost neo-Nazi political preferences. On the contrary, the typological similarity of Bonapartism and Hollism is due precisely to their ability to effectively oppose reactionary and revolutionary extremism, which is equally destructive to the nation-state.
 In this regard, the exceptional relevance of the use of historical memory to form their own traditionalist and authoritarian charisma (in their relationship) by the creator and first president of the Fifth Republic Charles de Gaulle in the process of his opposition to anti-national provocations of far-right and far-left.

The Enduring Influence of Female Special Operations Executive Agent Biopics on Cultural Memory and Representations in France and Great Britain

Seventy-five years have elapsed since the end of World War Two. Yet, the memory of the conflict still occupies a central place in British and French collective consciousness. Fiction and film representations of the war act as powerful ‘vectors of memory’, to borrow an expression from French historian Henry Rousso, and as such, they have deeply contributed to shaping popular and cultural memories of the war.
 This article investigates a specific aspect of World War Two representations, namely the cinematic representations of the female agents from the SOE F section, focusing on the ‘generic’ or archetypal figure of the female SOE agent as generated by the post-war cultural industry. After a brief contextualisation focusing on Churchill’s clandestine organisation, the article will analyse the contribution of Odette (Herbert Wilcox, 1950) and Carve Her Name with Pride (Lewis Gilbert, 1958) to the construction of a World War Two ‘mythology’. It will then address more recent films, concentrating on Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Female Agents (Jean-Paul Salomé, 2008).
 How did the fictional construction of the female spy come to influence the social and cultural perception of the SOE agent? Are the tropes developed in such post-war films as Odette or Carve Her Name with Pride still current or have they evolved with time? The analysis of these fictional representations will reveal the permanence or evolution of certain representational patterns and also allow us to approach different perspectives on the cultural representation of World War Two on both sides of the Channel.

Олимпийските ценности в спортните дейности и обучение по ФВС от разстояние в електронна среда

The Olympic values are the sports' spiritual power, which is incomprehensible and secret to many people, but can make sense of time, restore dignity and change the athlete's personality. “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well”, says the French educator and historian known as the father of the modern Olympic Games, Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. The noble spirit of this idea hides power and can become an ideal for anyone who wants to change himself/herself and the world around him/her. The time of technology, that we live in, represents a challenge of a healthy, educational and socio-cultural nature. The COVID-19 surprise blocked many activities and completely changed the world of sports and the physical activity of modern people. New issues and difficulties emerged, the great need for personal and family responsibility was felt, and spiritual, purely human values appeared. This article describes how teachers in physical education and sports found a landmark, solution and support in the idea of the Olympic movement and implemented it as an alternative in sports activities with young people and sports classes.

In search of a lost cinema

This article shows how creative approaches can contribute to a productive engagement with losses in film heritage. By (re)producing and (re)circulating images, sounds and narratives, documentaries on film heritage in particular relate to larger contexts of cultural and moving image memory. On the one hand, they are premediated by older productions, including feature films. On the other hand, they bring in new artistic, political and/or social perspectives. Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou, 2012), a documentary about Cambodia's lost film heritage before the Khmer Rouge period, serves as an example to illustrate these ideas. It carries a dual perspective that is simultaneously post-migratory and marked by (French) cinephilia as a cinematographic memory culture. In order to do justice to this complexity, dynamic concepts from the field of memory studies such as Svetlana Boym’s notion of nostalgia (Boym 2001) and Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (Rothberg 2009) are drawn on alongside literature on the history and theory of (French) cinephilia. In this way, cinephilia is reimagined as a multidirectional moving image memory culture that plays a particularly important but also complex role with regard to film heritage. In conclusion, several questions are outlined that need to be explored in further research.

Recent Articles on French History

This bibliography is designed to introduce readers to recent publications on French history, broadly defined. It is organized according to commonly recognized periods, with works that bridge multiple categories classified under “General and Miscellaneous.”

The Duty of Memory Revisited: Ricoeur’s Contribution to a Crisis in French Historiography

The Duty of Memory Revisited: Ricoeur’s Contribution to a Crisis in French Historiography

SSFH Society News

Abstract The Society for the Study of French History (SSFH) offers an extremely generous range of grants and bursaries to support researchers — and especially postgraduates — in their work. In this edition we offer an overview of the grants available, as well as details on recent and forthcoming books in the Studies in Modern French and Francophone History series with MUP, for which members of the SSFH are entitled to a 35% discount.

Introduction: Plagues, Pandemics and Pathologies in French History

Introduction: Plagues, Pandemics and Pathologies in French History