French History Research Articles

RetroNews

Launched in 2016, RetroNews is a dynamic and growing collection of historical French newspapers, magazines, and journals digitized by the National Library of France (BNF) and affiliated partners. It contains digitized primary media sources for French and European history, politics, and culture. The collection currently offers access to 700+ titles published between 1631 and 1950. Unlike some newspaper databases that do not include images, RetroNews includes all the original images accompanying articles.

Seeing the Spanish Civil War in the Yiddish press in popular front France

ABSTRACT This article explores photographs that the 1930s Parisian Yiddish communist daily newspaper Naye prese used to depict the Spanish Civil War. I show how Naye prese sidestepped use of the now famous images of the Civil War to create their own visual culture of antifascism. The newspaper editors carefully constructed a visual narrative of the war pitting ‘republicans’ against ‘fascists’ in a way that resonated with their readers because of the references to French history and Republicanism. Unlike other interwar Yiddish newspapers in France, Naye prese used images in print widely, making the newspaper a rich source for visual analysis.

Le « tournant de la rigueur » comme processus régulatoire

Cet article se propose d’étudier le « tournant de la rigueur » de mars 1983 sous un angle sociologique. Interprétant cet épisode marquant de l’histoire politique française comme un processus de régulation, il montre que ce dernier n’est pas seulement le fruit d’une conversion au néolibéralisme des élites françaises ou de la pression d’une contrainte économique extérieure, mais aussi le résultat d’une action collective s’inscrivant dans un espace décisionnel. S’appuyant sur différents corpus de données empiriques (archives, annuaires, témoignages), il s’efforce de cerner les contours de la controverse en matière de politique économique. Après avoir reconstitué la liste des acteurs y ayant participé, il analyse leurs positions dans la structure sociale et relationnelle. Il souligne le poids que revêtent les formes de statut social, politique et étatique, dans le déroulement de la controverse, et montre l’importance du travail relationnel que réalisent certains acteurs. Dans le cadre de ce processus régulatoire, il met en lumière la portée de phénomènes tels que l’homophilie, l’intermédiarité, la concurrence de statut et la construction de niche sociale.

SSFH Society News

Journal Article SSFH Society News Get access French History, Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2020, Pages 407–410, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa042 Published: 04 September 2020

Philosophical Comprehension of Space in the Prose of Ivan Bunin

The article, addressing the prose of Ivan Bunin, examines the phenomenon of place - a point of geographical space - as a source of memory. It has been suggested that Bunin’s works written in exile can be analyzed, on the one hand, from the perspective of memory studies and, on the other hand, from the perspective of philosophical area studies. A special object of study is the “double chronotope” - the result of spontaneous work of a specific kind of memory - memory-imagination, or memogination . In particular, with this approach, the image of Paris of the 19 th century is considered. Thus, Paris is the city that inherited a number of features of “Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century” (W. Benjamin), but is already encompassed by the spirit of Modernity and seen through the eyes of an émigré , the Russian European. Bunin’s method for dealing with memory is considered in the framework of Paul Ricraur’s theory and is described by the term évocation , proposed by the philosopher. The article also presents an analysis of the space in Bunin’s prose using the concept of “places of memory” ( lieux de mémoire ) developed by the modern French historian Pierre Nora. In parallel with the question of the specificity of space in Bunin’s interpretation, a related theme of time in his prose of the period of emigration is touched upon. It is assumed that the images of Russia, addressed by the writer, are timeless in nature, as their history is interrupted by the change of eras due to the Russian revolution and thus rendered beyond the limits of the real history. The emphasis is on the phenomenon of “rediscovery” of the past, which in Bunin’s works is accomplished by mapping in detail a place against the background of a massive historical rupture. In this regard, the experience of individual memory-imagination is analyzed as an example of historical memory, which has a universalizing character.

Ties, Triangles and Tangles: Catherine de Medici as Philip II of Spain’s Mother-in-Law

After Catherine de Medici became the mother-in-law of Philip II of Spain in 1559, as a result of her daughter Elisabeth of Valois’ marriage to the Spanish king, she set out to augment and multiply the family ties between the Valois and the Habsburgs by negotiating further marriages. These efforts have been ridiculed by her biographers, who accuse her of a naïve faith in marital bonds. In line with more recent French historiography, this article re-evaluates Catherine’s efforts by placing them in the context of other kinship networks, especially the very dense one connecting the royal houses of Portugal and Spain. Seen in this light, it makes perfect sense for the French queen mother to weave an ever more intricate web of marriage alliances herself. It also means that most kinship relations between members of early modern ruling families were multi-layered and being ‘only’ a mother-in-law to a son-in-law was rare, complicating the conceptualisation of this particular role.

Fortune, Felicity and Happiness in the Early Modern Period

OH happiness! our being’s end and aim! Good, pleasure, ease, content! whate’er thy name: That something still which prompts th’ eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die … Fix’d to no spot is happiness sincere, ’Tis no where to be found, or ev’ry where: ’Tis never to be bought, but always free, And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee. … Some place the bliss in action, some in ease, Those call it pleasure, and contentment these … Who thus define it, say they more or less Than this, that happiness is happiness? …Alexander Pope’s lines from the Essay on Man (1734) suggest the richness, diversity and overwhelming, transgressive nature of the concept of happiness. In the above quotation, happiness seems to be curiously self-evident and inconclusive at the same time. It is the central motivation for any action or non-action, all-pervasive, omnipresent and elusive. The obviousness with which Pope uses the word ‘happiness’ for so many different states of existence (material wealth, flourishing, bliss, the good life, the common good) is, however, the result of a long process of semantic change that is convincingly described by Phil Withington: being ‘derived from the Old Norse noun hap, meaning luck or fortune’, the word ‘happiness’ was, according to Withington’s findings, first used by William Caxton in his translation of Raoul Lefèvre’s French History of Troy. The addition of the English suffix ‘ness’ to the adjective ‘happy’ denotes ‘the quality and state of hap (i.e. fortune) or the circumstances and phenomena that exemplified such a condition’. The word changed its meaning from denoting good luck and favourable external (providential) conditions to signifying ‘the active pursuit of virtue and the common good’. Happiness became an umbrella term referring to a ‘commonplace mixture of physical well-being and psychological content’, to the individual and collective desire for and pursuit of ‘public improvement’, autonomy, liberty, ‘consumer self-interest and national aggrandisement’.

Recent Articles on French History

Other| August 01 2020 Recent Articles on French History Jean-Pierre Hérubel Jean-Pierre Hérubel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google French Historical Studies (2020) 43 (3): 510–532. https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-8278514 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Jean-Pierre Hérubel; Recent Articles on French History. French Historical Studies 1 August 2020; 43 (3): 510–532. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-8278514 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsFrench Historical Studies Search Advanced Search 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.” Copyright 2020 by Society for French Historical Studies2020 Issue Section: PUBLICATIONS You do not currently have access to this content.

É possível uma história da historiografia medieval?

Neste artigo, ao tomar como ponto de partida uma possível dubiedade da historiografia medieval, nos propomos a refletir sobre as limitações de uma episteme temporal e espacialmente centrada na Europa e na modernidade, além de traçar alguns caminhos possíveis à compreensão dos modos de historicização medievais. Essas reflexões possuem como princípio um debate alavancado pela historiografia francesa da segunda metade do século XX acerca da existência de uma fratura entre modernos e pré-modernos, que impediria uma percepção acurada das experiências humanas do passado a partir de um vocabulário guiado pela modernidade. Nessa perspectiva, o próprio conceito moderno de história, fruto dos séculos XVIII e XIX, seria incapaz de apreender modos de produzir e representar o passado anteriores a sua concepção. A fim de responder tais questionamentos, procuramos traçar outras possibilidades de compreensão dos conceitos de história e historiografia através de uma aproximação entre os estudos medievais, a história da historiografia e a antropologia. As considerações estabelecidas aqui buscam reafirmar demandas atuais da história disciplinar, ao mesmo tempo que aventam uma abertura da história da historiografia como um meio de abarcar os múltiplos modos de historicização pré-modernos e não ocidentais.

The Influence of Anglicism on French Language——Enrichment or Danger

The phenomenon of Anglicism is one of the hot linguistic topics which exists in almost every language in the world, especially in the French language. We look back to the history of English and French, and introduce the definition and classification of Anglicism. Considering the predominant place of the UK and the USA in many fields, the English language undoubtedly becomes Lingua franca in recent years.In certain high-tech domains, there are some irreplaceable words or the words which can't be translated properly in the target language. In order to introduce relative concepts, we have to ask the original language for help. That's how the Anglicism appears. And since then, the Anglicism has grown rapidly.By analyzing the history of the two languages, the origin of Anglicism and its development, we try to find out whether the phenomenon of Anglicism causes positive or negative effects for the French language.

Helena ROSENBLATT, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

“It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.” It is with these suggestive words of the French historian Lucien Febvre that Helena Rosenblatt begins her last book The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. By studying the history of the word liberalism, Rosenblatt attempts a clarification of what happens to be a catch-all term encompassing very different thinkers, political actors and followers. While liberalism is often seen as a mainly Angl...

The reform of zeal. François de Sales and militant French Catholicism. By Thomas A. Donlan. (St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, 9.) Pp. iv + 145. St Andrews: Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St Andrews, 2018. No charge (ebook or paperback). 978 1 907548 16 1

The reform of zeal. François de Sales and militant French Catholicism. By Thomas A. Donlan. (St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, 9.) Pp. iv + 145. St Andrews: Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St Andrews, 2018. No charge (ebook or paperback). 978 1 907548 16 1

Deutschland – Russland. Stationen gemeinsamer Geschichte – Orte der Erinnerung. Band 1: Das 18. Jahrhundert by M�ller H. (review)

SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 580 Möller, H., Scharf, C., Dudarew, W. and Lawrinowitsch, M. (eds). Deutschland – Russland. Stationen gemeinsamer Geschichte – Orte der Erinnerung. Band 1: Das 18. Jahrhundert. Deutschland-Russland: Stationen gemeinsamer Geschichte, Orte der Erinnerung. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin and Boston, MA, 2018. 410 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Suggested reading. Chronology. Index. €29.96; £27.00; $42.00. In 1993–94 Russian President El´tsin and German Chancellor Kohl resolved on thefoundationofaJointCommissionforResearchintotheMoreRecentHistory of German-Russian Relations, in order to strengthen post-Soviet GermanRussian relations. It was to cover the period since 1700, and to publish parallel volumes in Russian and German. Its crowning work, a lavishly-produced trilogy,wasformallyunveiledinaceremonyattheGermanEmbassyinMoscow in 2019 (). Volume three, devoted to the twentieth century, had appeared in 2014/15; the present volume, dealing with the eighteenth century, was followed by volume two on the nineteenth. The Commission had assembled an impressive cast of authors; for the eighteenth-century senior scholars such as Manfred Hildermeier and Michael Müller, and rising stars like Andrei Kostin and Igor Fediukin. The series and volume titles refer to lieux de mémoire, the concept coined by the French historian Pierre Nora, which he explained as ‘any significant entit[ies], whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time ha[ve] become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’. Applying this to early modern German/Habsburg and Russian history, the authors were able to single out periods and areas of German-Russian interaction which they consider most significant. The format is essays on chosen themes, usually of joint German-Russian authorship but in a few cases with separate German and Russian contributions. The essays understandably tend more to encyclopaedia entries than to research pieces; the texts are illustrated by numerous plates and by selected extracts from primary sources, evidently designed to give a more direct sense of contact with the events described. The volume is divided into five sections: Germany and Russia in 1700; Early-Modern State-building; International Relations; Enlightenment and Absolutism; The French Revolution and Europe. The last section also takes in the cultural history of Weimar, the early reign of Alexander I and the Napoleonic Years, ending with the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813 — an unusual periodization, neither the ‘short’ not the ‘long’ eighteenth century. For those interested in Russo-German interactions this is an engaging and interesting volume. It is beautifully presented; much of it is well done, it appears to have few errors, and it offers both recent scholarly insights, such as Fediukin’s essay on the mechanisms of Petrine reform, and interesting different emphases, as in the Russian and the German essay on Karamzin. REVIEWS 581 It is however somewhat old-fashioned in its approach, focusing above all on Kings and Battles, Dynastic Relations, and Enlightenment and Reforms. Interpretations are also on occasion old-fashioned: thus while Frederick II’s partial but definitely incomplete relaxation of serfdom leads on to a hesitantly positive judgment of him as a monarch of his time (p. 216), Catherine II’s failure to abolish serfdom looms as a major blot on her escutcheon which meant that Russia could not ‘transform itself into a modern society’ (p. 240) — recent re-evaluations of Russian serfdom are not considered. Some items that one might expect are omitted. Christian Wolff is mentioned briefly, but the fact of the dominance of his system in Russian philosophy throughout the eighteenth century, until replaced by another German luminary, Kant, does not appear. The wide-ranging influence in Russia of cameralism, largely a German phenomenon, which equally affected Russia, Prussia and Austria, is ignored. One result of cameralist policy was the formation of a whole new social group in Russia, the Volga Germans (unmentioned, except fleetingly in connection with the 1812 formation of the Russian-German Legion, p. 367). Friedrich II’s opposition to the death penalty for infanticide or abortion is explained (p. 206) in terms of Enlightened Reform, disregarding its place in the cameralist population policies which were a major driver of his domestic regime. The volume ends with detailed military accounts of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and...

Places and spaces of contested identity in the memorials and monuments of Paris

ABSTRACT Paris claims to stand for the whole of France, and sometimes the whole Francophone world. A heavy responsibility therefore lies upon it to represent Francophone identity in the best possible way. Through looking at ways of remembering and memorialising events in French history, we can see the extent to which this is, and has been, successful over time. This article analyses a selection of Parisian monuments and sites of memory through a framework of memory studies and cultural memory, notably Pierre Nora and the postcolonial critique of his work, to investigate the ways in which Francophone identity is manifested and contested in the capital city. The article presents and assesses the Catacombs, the Panthéon, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, the Mémorial national de la guerre d’Algérie et des combats du Maroc et de la Tunisie, and the Place de la République, one of France’s longest-standing living memorials, to examine the expression of transnational or multifaceted Francophone identity, and the politics of memory through monuments and memorials.

Beyond the dual revolution: revisiting capitalism in modern France

Abstract— What communication has there been—and should there be—between the history of modern France and the new history of capitalism? In this introduction to a special issue, the authors trace the recent development of a new scholarly interest in the history of capitalism, outlining the ways that this field intersects with existing research on the history of economic life in nineteenth-century France and suggesting how historians of France can push this scholarship into new directions. In particular, French history’s global turn, the strength of historiography on consumerism and marketization, the place of (revolutionary) property in law and culture and the significance of cultural history represent particular vectors through which the history of nineteenth-century France and the new history of capitalism can develop.

El Mercado de trabajo agrícola en el noreste francés (1789-1836)

El artículo tiene como objetivo el estudio del mercado de trabajo asalariado rural del noreste francés entre 1789 y 1836. Mientras que los mercados de tierras o cereales ocupan un lugar destacado en la historiografía francesa, los mercados de trabajo han tendido a ser relegados en el análisis, circunscritos sobre todo a los espacios urbanos. El presente trabajo parte del análisis de mercuriales, decretos nacionales y departamentales, correspondencia y testimonios locales con el propósito de analizar las características fundamentales del mercado de trabajo agrícola y los alcances y sentidos de la política estatal de fijación de un nivel de salarios. Se insiste en la importancia de la estructura de producción rural que impone serios límites tanto a la política estatal y sus posibles regulaciones como también al desarrollo espontáneo del mercado de trabajo, polemizando así con los abordajes a la cuestión desde enfoques liberales y neoinstitucionales.

On Global Time in Revolutionary Japan

This article reveals how Japanese anti-regime rebels in the mid-1870s deployed news of the Ottoman Empire and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in a burgeoning national public sphere to justify and encourage violent revolution against the Meiji government. It focuses especially on commentary in Hyōron shinbun and its successor publications Chūgai hyōron and Bunmei shinshi, short-lived radical newspapers linked to what became the Kagoshima and Kumamoto rebel factions in the Japanese civil war of 1877. Anti-government agitators drew from French and American theory and history and constructed Turkey as a hidebound violator of freedom and civil rights, casting the Turkish case as a parable for what would befall the Meiji government, supposedly a similar wielder of despotism. They inveighed at the same time against European powers for seizing on “Asian” weakness to expand their empires in Asia. Newspapers thus produced a sense of global simultaneity, intimating to readers that they lived in the same empirical moment as people across the world, but as they constructed this empirical simultaneity, they produced also a sense of theoretical nonsynchronicity, in which the histories of some nations acted as the futures of others. Violent revolution, the journalists suggested, provided the best means of reconciling these dual temporalities of global time.

Literary theorists in and beyond French academic space (1960–1970s)

This article demonstrates how social strategies deployed at the margins of French academic space to legitimize theoretical approaches to literary texts (semiology, semantics, structural analysis of narratives) in the 1960s and 1970s strongly relied on the interventions of their promoters beyond the academy. It specifically examines two strategies privileged by promoters of literary theory which allowed some of them to bypass several requirements for academic careers in taking advantage of the transformations of higher education, of the absence of stable and strong disciplinary frames, and of their own integration into the intellectual and literary fields. First, either through the alliance with literary avant-gardes or by the temporary constitution as one, the collective strategy of the literary avant-garde became a way to engage both politically and aesthetically. Second, the investment of transnational networks and internationalization allowed the critics and theorists to get around the national path to symbolic and academic consecration, and to reframe the modalities of their public engagement. Ultimately, this article offers an understanding of how, for aspirant or marginalized academics, interventions beyond the perimeter of the academic space have, at a certain point in French history, helped their acquisition of academic legitimacy.

“Les lieux de mémoire” and Pierre Nora’s writing of French national history

After World War II, the orientation toward economic and social history of France’s new history weakened the traditional national history narrative. A series of major social and political changes in French society of the 1970s reduced consciousness of the nation-state, and individualized historical memory and counter-memories and identities became increasingly prominent as the historical memory of the Lavissian nation-state fragmented. It was in this context that les lieux de mémoire emerged; Pierre Nora seeks to pursue a national consciousness without nationalism by recalling the realms of memory. Although inspired by Ernest Lavisse’s L’histoire de France, this study, more inclusive than Lavisse’s, is a reflective “second-degree history” that attempts to seek identity in the “inheritance” of national memory following the decay of nationalist ideology. The proposed lieux de mémoire implies a profound change in the past, present and future relationships of French national history, a change that undermines historical continuity. This can be regarded as a new marker for a historical system: “presentism.”

The era of the user. Testimonies in the digital age

ABSTRACT In her seminal work, ‘The era of the witness’, the French historian Annette Wieviorka has described the rise of the witness as key figure in the cultural memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War since the 1960s. This article elaborates on the concerns Wieviorka has expressed regarding what she referred to as the new technologies of dissemination, which have become ubiquitous by now: searchable online portals to video testimony collections. These testimony portals have two important characteristics: they ‘force’ users to choose from a large number of testimonies; and they reconfigure the relation between witness and audience. In effect, as will be argued with as will be argued with the notion tertiary witnessing, a different approach to testimonies has emerged, in which the user is central, not the witness. An online questionnaire and the web statistics of the online portal getuigenverhalen.nl (‘eyewitness stories’) provided data on the use of this portal and users’ perceptions of eyewitness accounts. These data not only offer detailed information on the important issues Wieviorka addressed. They also substantiate the notion that we have entered a new phase in public memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War: that of the ‘era of the user’.