Ideas In France Research Articles

Offline: November 13, one year on

Offline: November 13, one year on

The cinema of Jacques Chirac: governing the French film industry, 1995–2007

During his two presidencies, Jacques Chirac was a vigorous advocate of France's system of state assistance to the film industry. The cinema, and culture more generally, were and are promoted by the country's political class as areas of vital national interest, usefully invoked in their relations with voters during and between elections. From 1995 to 2007, the President of the French Republic, working at different degrees of remove with Ministers of Culture in governments of right and left, repeatedly brought state attention to bear on the condition of French film production, distribution and exhibition. Beginning in 1995 with the possibility of enlisting culture as a means of addressing la fracture sociale, officers of state worked to devise means for French filmmakers to prosper through vagaries in the evolution of television broadcasting, to weather the storms of globalization, and take advantage of digital technologies threatening to throttle their revenue streams. Throughout these years, Jacques Chirac took the stage at home and abroad to advance and defend ‘a certain idea of France’ and the cinema's role in its culture.

Réussir et s’épanouir : deux représentations antagonistes du bonheur

From the analysis of a corpus made up with books explicitly dedicated to happiness, box-office successes and social surveys, this article intends to highlight two struggleling happiness’s ideas in France after 1945 : the social success and the self-fulfillment. What is at stake is a better understanding of the models. Moreover, the purpose is to perceive that the universe of happiness is structured by the fights between the definitions of happy life. The way of the happiness by the success is an agonistique and stiff model which bases in particular on the deferred enjoyment and wants the individuals to be happy once the success is guaranteed, whereas the self-fulfillment invites the actors to assume their own desires, to love, to have fun and to savor the path they are now browsing. To promote it, the self-fulfillment’s partisans frontally criticized the social success, considered inequitable and, besides, unfit of getting the happiness. The upholders of the success responded and also forged justificatory discurses to try to compromise their opponents. The phases of this conflict allow a better understanding of their influence, but the individuals can also reconcile them and decide to succeed in the professional world and to fulfill in their private life.

The Idea of France in “Comics” Old and New

Drawing upon a methodology that presupposes a notion of “parallel mentalities” between past and present, this article will explore a number of text/image narratives representing the Idea of France. With reference also to the key notion of the superhero, examples discussed will include a 1594 depiction of Henri IV as Perseus, Renaud Sechan's 1975 Hexagone and its YouTube visualisation, and Vica's 1943 comic-strip Eiffel Tower personification in the pro-Nazi Téméraire. We will see that it is defining periods of France's history—the Renaissance, the Revolution, or World War II—that in particular draw upon such hybrid iconography.

Interview with Christie Mcdonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman

French Global: A New Approach from Literary History, published in September 2011 by Columbia University Press, offers an innovative new look at the breadth of literary expression in French. Focusing on writers from all over the world, French Global's twenty-nine essays discuss works that span some 1200 years of literary history. Co-editors Christie McDonald (Smith Professor of French Language and Literature, Harvard University) and Susan Rubin Suleiman (C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France, Harvard University) attended the “Idea of France” conference and led a public discussion around their volume. David Pettersen (Assistant Professor of French, University of Pittsburgh) caught up with them afterwards to talk more about their project.

From One Shore, the Other … the Image of France in the Works of Contemporary Judeo-Maghrebi Novelists

The specific “Idea of France,” as expressed by French authors of Jewish-Maghrebi origin, comes from the conflicted relationship they have with the concept. These people are attached to France's republican values, but criticize what they see as a hegemony of Western people over Middle-Easterners. For them, France represents an emancipatory ideal. They remember the French revolution, the Crémieux decree of 1870, and their education in republican schools in Algeria or at the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Tunisia or in Morocco, which only reinforces the idea. Their narratives express many echoes of this shared history, where France is exalted for having brought these emancipatory values. Nonetheless, their image of France is tarnished by three striking events: the fact that Algerian Jews were stripped of their French nationality in 1940, the exile en masse from North Africa when France left her colonies and protectorates, and the difficult time they had getting established in the metropole. Given the particular history of North African Jews, this literature is surely a rare example of a bittersweet relationship to an adopted homeland.

Successful Fraud: Édouard, A.K.A. The Duchesse de Langeais

Most of Michel Tremblay's writings fit together like a puzzle to reveal a microcosm of characters that speak “le joual” and operate in a very Québécois universe distanced from the grip of the French classics. Nonetheless, one of the most emblematic characters of Tremblay's novelistic and dramatic world, Édouard, a.k.a. the Duchess of Langeais, builds his identity of drag-queen-supreme by displaying his Frenchness. To stage his persona of “femme du monde” he alludes to French literature, culture, and cinema, often imitating Parisian celebrities and recalling his stay in the capital. A closer reading of Édouard's diary will reveal the painful experience of crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries while exposing him as a fraud. The France depicted in the Duchess's stories and the “real” Paris where Édouard travelled on his journey of initiation and where he acquired his titles have little in common. Following Édouard's thread through numerous plays and novels we will examine the mechanisms of his reappropriation of the Idea of France and assertion of his status as “other” by constructing a (false) French identity.

Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century French Catholic Pilgrimage

In 1806, Viscount Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand set out, in his words, “to complete the circle of studies that he had always promised [himself] he would achieve” by undertaking a trip to the Orient. The result was the Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem. This was an account of his pilgrimage, a notion that he alluded to somewhat self-consciously: “It may seem strange today to speak of wishes and of pilgrimages, but on this point I am not restrained by a sense of modesty, and for a long time now, I have aligned myself with the class of the superstitious and the weak. I may be the last Frenchman to leave my country to travel to the Holy Land, with the ideas, the goal, and the sentiments of an old pilgrim.”1 Chateaubriand was to be proven wrong. Pilgrimage was one way that Catholics maintained their attachment to their idea of France in what was a rocky century for the church: in the middle of the century, in particular, there was an extraordinary rise in expressions of Catholicism. The rise and role of popular pilgrimage, such as the journey to Lourdes, as a means of creating a Catholic community and ensuring the ongoing vitality of Catholicism in France has been well documented.2 The story of those pilgrims who ventured further afield has not been so closely examined. Yet pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while not accessible to all, was nonetheless also intrinsic to the process of imagining and maintaining French Catholicism. At the end of his description of his stay in Jerusalem, Chateaubriand took the reader on one final metaphorical tour. Amid what he called the “extraordinary desolation” of the Holy City, he sought to leave the reader with an image that he found “even more extraordinary”: the continued existence in

REBEL OR REVOLUTIONARY?

The Bibighar Massacre (15 July 1857), allegedly ordered by Nana Sahib and involving the deaths of over 200 European women and children, forms a key figure or trope within British representations of the Indian uprisings (1857–8). Memorialized as an unforgettable act of Indian ‘savagery’, it has been used to justify both the indiscriminate revenge carried out on Indians by the British-led military and the necessity for ongoing colonial rule. The focus of this essay, however, is on the different ways that French metropolitan writing has challenged these Anglo-centric narratives or myths by foregrounding their hyperbolic nature and/or by rehabilitating the figure of Nana Sahib as a heroic and revolutionary figure. Using a range of mid- to late-nineteenth-century French-language texts, including contemporaneous Parisian newspapers, a female survivor's ‘eyewitness’ account and a play produced in 1883, this essay examines how Nana Sahib and the Bibighar massacre have been used to speak out against British colonial exploitation in India. By subverting or counter-narrating English-language representations of Nana Sahib and the massacre, these texts were able to usher in the idea of France as a preferable colonizer whose overseas expansion was supposedly based on a genuine ‘civilizing mission’. This essay thus demonstrates the extent to which national and European rivalries have been discursively played out in the imagined space of ‘India’ during an extended period of crisis for British colonialism and how the Indian uprisings have continuously provided an opportunity for French writing to challenge the hegemonic image of the British Empire.

The Evolution of Economic Policies and Economic Ideas in France before and after the Second World War

The Evolution of Economic Policies and Economic Ideas in France before and after the Second World War

Who Is French?

In recent years scholars of France have devoted a great deal of time and effort to the study of what has been called French universalism, the idea that the nation’s republican tradition, and to an important extent French culture in general, centers on certain values held to be applicable to all peoples. Explorations of this issue have emphasized not only the essential contours of this ideology but also its contradictions.1 How can adherence to a certain set of values simultaneously define both a specific national identity and the common experience of humanity? Among other things, Frenchness is a culturally expressed sense of belonging to a political state. Yet what does one make of those individuals and communities who live in France, even possess French citizenship, and yet are not regularly included in the concept of civilization—defined through education, language, culture, and morals—that normalizes acceptance?2 Moreover, if one focuses on ideas generated during a particular period (for France, especially the Enlightenment and the Revolution), do those values change over time, and how do concepts of national identity reflect those changes? Ultimately, what does it mean to be French, and to what extent does republican universalism exemplify or reify the essence of the nation? Feminist and postcolonial theories have posed fundamental challenges to the idea of France as one and unified. The two approaches, while certainly not the same, have much in common. Both antislavery and feminism have a heritage that reaches back at least to the eigh-

Seminary Reform and Theological Method on the Eve of the Modernist Crisis: Transatlantic Reception of J. B. Hogan's Clerical Studies (1898)

Seminary Reform and Theological Method on the Eve of the Modernist Crisis: Transatlantic Reception of J. B. Hogan's Clerical Studies (1898) C. J. T. Talar "It is safe to say that someone writing after 1910 what Hogan wrote in the 1890s would have come under great suspicion and probably condemnation."1 At several points in his series of studies on the education of Catholic clergy written over the course of the 1890s the Sulpician John Hogan emphasized that the time was one of transition. And a theology that would be of its times could not be immune to development. Nor could the institutional settings in which priests received their intellectual formation. The period 1884 to 1910 was also a transitional one for American seminaries. Its beginnings reside in the decree of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), De Clericorum Educatione et Instructione,2 while the articles that were eventually published in book form in Clerical Studies (1898)3 were written during the developing crisis over [End Page 1] Americanism, and its latter part was marked by the condemnation of Modernism and its aftermath. By 1910 there were not only severe restrictions on theological inquiry but also greater Vatican control of the seminary curriculum.4 Hogan's survey of the various areas of clerical learning, his historical contextualization of those areas and his prescriptions for fruitful methods of their transmission thus reflect a sense of optimism regarding what was thought possible in the way of reform, antedating the backlash of the antimodernist sanctions of 1907 and the Oath against Modernism imposed in 1910. The council's decree on the education of priests gave an impetus to a number of suggestions for its implementation. In what follows, Hogan's contribution will be set, briefly, within this context. As a moderate progressive, Hogan has been characterized as more of an incrementalist than a revolutionary.5 Three areas in particular may be singled out as reflecting an attempt to broaden theological education on his part: the teaching of dogmatic theology, the manner of doing apologetics, and the overall approach to biblical studies as exemplified in the treatment of inspiration and inerrancy. Lastly, his writing on clerical studies soon found its way into French translation. The reception of those ideas in France provides a glimpse of the perceived significance of seminary reform in the minds of French clergy. "It is a book altogether different from any we have had thus far, as opening the mind to the importance of theological studies whilst showing a way in which to master them. It is modern, yet safe."6 Prior to his coming to the United States to become the founding rector of Saint John's Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts in 1884, John Baptist Hogan (1829-1901) had already enjoyed a distinguished career in seminary formation at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Irish by birth, he chose to study for the priesthood in France, following the example of an uncle who had responded to an appeal for Irish priests to serve in France to meet the deficit of priests following the French Revolution. Ordained in 1852, Hogan entered the Society of Saint Sulpice and occupied the chair of fundamental dogma in Paris from 1852 to 1863, the year he became Professor of Senior Moral, until his assignment to the United States in 1884.7 While teaching at Saint-Sulpice, Hogan exercised a notable influence on many of those who would figure prominently in the movement for the reform of Catholicism that developed into the Modernist crisis. Among his students may be counted Eudoxe-Irénée [End Page 2] Mignot (1842-1918),8 later bishop of Fréjus and archbishop of Albi; Louis Birot (1863-1936),9 later Mignot's vicar general and close collaborator; Maurice d'Hulst (1841-1896)10 and Pierre Batiffol (1861-1929),11 who became rectors of the Instituts catholiques of Paris and Toulouse, respectively; Félix Klein (1862-1953),12 who achieved notoriety as a result of his involvement in the Americanist controversy in France; Marcel Hébert (1851-1916),13 who assumed the directorship of the École Fénelon in Paris; and Georges Frémont (1852-1912), later a speaker and...

Jochen Bertheau (review)

866 Reviews discussed in any detail. An argument could be made for including the 'Tagebuch der italienischen Reise', in which Goethe describes his journey in terms of a eure for melancholy that offersgenuine relief. Valk, by contrast, argues that the theme of activity, rather than amounting to an unproblematic affirmationof life, is an attempt to eure a melancholy that never in fact entirely goes away (p. 9). The finalchapter on Faust seems to bear out the continuing relevance ofmelancholy to Goethe's sense of himself as a writer. Valk makes the crucial point that the wager is in part the product of Faust's melancholy. It would be interesting to consider in more detail how the formulation of the wager and in particular the issue of 'Sorge' relate to melancholy. In committing himself to activity Faust seems to be advocating something that he has already rejected. Valk acknowledges this problem without fully resolving it. He agrees with Jochen Schmidt that Faust's melancholy is both what drives him into Mephistopheles's clutches and what makes Mephistopheles an ultimately unsatisfactory companion. A certain unclarity remains. What is the value of Faust's attempts to rid himself of melancholy? What is the status of the 'Sorge' that leads Faust, so we are told, into ceaseless activity,but also finally blinds him? In some cases more extensive documentation could be given, in particular from lyric texts, which receive little attention. The absence of an index in a book of this importance and breadth ofreference is regrettable. Valk has beaten a path down which others will want to follow him, and ifthere is much work leftto be done, this testifies to the importance of the theme. Valk's monograph establishes a framework within which much of Goethe's writing will now have to be seen. King's College London Matthew Bell Holderlins franzosische Bildung. By Jochen Bertheau. (Heidelberger Beitrage zur deutschen Literatur, 14) Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Ox? ford, and Vienna: Peter Lang. 2003. 203 pp. ?39. ISBN 3-631-51356-9. This Heidelberg dissertation by a former teacher at Besigheim Gymnasium offers more and less than its title suggests. It is not a complete study of Holderlin's debt to French culture, but it provides new critical material on his time in France and its influence on his later life and works. The first ninety pages analyse the deve? lopment of revolutionary ideas in France, contrasting the harshness of the Jacobins with the more idealist Girondins. Pierre Bertaux's ground-breaking study Holderlin und die franzosische Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969) is seen as an 'unzulassige Verallgemeinerung' (p. 11), a judgement supported in detail throughout, where Bertheau relates historical facts to Holderlin's written comments and his literary works. He also examines which publications Holderlin read by Rousseau, Helvetius, and Hemsterhuis. The result is a far more sophisticated definition of the ideas behind the French Revolution and of Holderlin's political education through events and ideas in France than has been given previously. He was no Jacobin, despite Bertaux's attempts to name him as one. The fictivereferences to Jacobin methods in Hyperion and Empedokles (with Alabanda and Hermokrates) reflectonly one side of Holderlin's concerns. Holderlin's ideal of a republic based on the principle of brotherly love, developed from reading Montesquieu and Helvetius, is reflected in Hyperion as the golden age of Athens in contrast with Sparta. This, Bertheau suggests, was the main dif? ference that led Holderlin away from the ideas of Rousseau. Later, he shows how Holderlin's early admiration for Bonaparte and his hope for days of simplicity and peace were dashed by experiences in Lyons, by the testing of public opinion in May 1802, and by Bonaparte's claim as consul a vie to appoint his successor. A good MLRy 100.3, 2005 867 case is made for considering Goethe's Werther as the major model for Hyper ion as an epistolary novel, and Bertheau offers a convincing interpretation of the contrast between Alabanda and Hyperion as an early expression of Holderlin's reactions to and hopes fora rapidly developing political situation. Albert Camus's use of a reference to Holderlin's...

Re-Imagining Nations, Rewriting Lives: The Image of France in The Autofictions of Storm Jameson and Assia Djeb

This article analyses the ideological use of autobiographical fiction by two twentieth-century women writers, working in radically different historical and political conditions (England in World War II, and Algeria after the War of Independence), to rewrite the imaginations of their readers into fresh configurations, and point their own national communities in fresh directions. In both projects, the image and idea of France plays a pivotal role, and the forms and processes of writing are foregrounded and laid bare, in order to summon the reader into active participation in the creation of a new idea of national identifications and allegiances.

France and the US

IT HAS BECOME BANAL TO STATE THAT THE IRAQ CRISIS has generated profound tensions between the United States and France. The rift that resulted can be considered unprecedented, which makes the evaluation of its long-term consequences difficult. Throughout the crisis, newspapers in the US, and to a lesser extent in France, have told of a clash between two states that presumably have two visions of security management which not only are incompatible but would also dilute their relationship as allies.This essay aims to provide an analysis of Franco-American relations during and in the aftermath of the Iraq crisis, in the broader context of the transatlantic relationship. Three main issues will be addressed. The essay will look first at some of the inherent characteristics of the US and France that would lead to some form of confrontation between the only superpower on one side and one of the few states that aspire to play a global role on the other side. It then comes back to the crisis over Iraq as the source of the rift between the two countries. The French policy is analyzed by distinguishing motives deriving from an alleged grand from elements driven by fundamental divergences with the US on the very nature of the Iraqi threat, and hence on the way it should be tackled. Finally the essay addresses the nature of the transatlantic link after the Iraq crisis and war, with particular attention to France and the US. It looks at threat assessment and perceptions, the acrimony that developed in the two countries and their visions for international institutions. It argues that despite true discrepancies over the nature of the partnership, it remains an framework for addressing current threats.FRENCH VERSUS AMERICAN GLOBAL VISIONS: THE BASIS FOR CONFRONTATIONAmong the many reasons that make the analysis of the Franco-American relationship interesting is the fact that France and the US share some similarities in their approaches to their respective roles on the international scene. Notwithstanding the huge gap that separates the two countries in almost any aspect of what constitutes power nowadays, France and the US are the only countries in the world that cultivate with a degree of confidence the idea that they, as countries, are necessary to the world. The US is the indispensable nation(1) and the French leaders have always had a certain idea of France(2) that implies the notion of doing good. This can be encapsulated in the messianic approach of both countries, by which foreign policy is intimately linked to the promotion of values along with support of more narrowly defined national interests. Any analysis of the American and French foreign policies has to combine these two sets of elements, which fall within both the realist and the liberal paradigms.On the international scene, this peculiarity is associated with the idea of global vision, of a global role.(3) But while such characteristics come naturally with the power status that the US enjoys, they are the result of a permanent struggle for France, which can hardly pretend that it possesses the assets that would naturally give it a global vision or a global role. Yet one of the key principles of French foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the beginning of the Fifth Republic with Charles de Gaulle's return to power (1958), has been to maintain the rank of France on the international scene. With great regularity under all the Fifth Republic presidents, the obsession with France's status has led to a policy combining the optimization of the assets that France inherited from its past (permanent seat at the UN Security Council; relations with Arab states, former colonies and French-speaking countries), the acquisition and development of some elements of what constitutes hard power (nuclear capability and other military assets) and reliance on aspects other than hard power (discourse on human rights, promotion of values, relative independence from the two superpowers during the Cold War, i. …

Raymond Aron, the History of Ideas and the Idea of France

Raymond Aron's vision of liberalism reflects the paradox that ideologies both fuel and restrict democratic debate. This may be related to the history of French liberalism developed by Albert Thibaudet in the inter-war period. This article considers Aron's use of Thibaudet's ideas in his wartime writings. It suggests that these represented a significant step forward from his pre-war approach to pluralism and set certain parameters for his post-war political thought. It is also suggested that Thibaudet's writings led Aron to study the ideas of the nineteenth-century intellectual Ernest Renan. These contributed to his understanding of international relations. While Aron was to lose interest in Renan and Thibaudet, his wartime debt to them represents an important stage in his intellectual evolution and ties him to a distinctively French (if little known) tradition of pluralist thought.

The Idea of France (review)

The Idea of France (review)

The idea of France

The idea of France

Base de données pour une étude prosopographique : les auditeurs du cours de Lamarck au Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (1795-1823)

Raphaël Bange, A Data Base for a Prosopographical Study: Lamarck's Audience at his Lectures at the National Natural History Museum (1 795-1823) This paper presents the computerised data-base developed in a collective research project aimed at identifying and studying the audience of the naturalist Lamarck, approximately one thousand people who enrolled for the lectures he delivered between 1795 and 1823. Designed to serve as a research-tool and clearing-house, this data-base (soon to be available on the web) reproduces the autographs of all the attendees together with the biographical and bibliographical data gathered for each. It should thus help support an investigation into the audience reached by Lamarck's theories and the ways in which they were disseminated and interpreted, and more broadly, lead to a better understanding of the social and cultural dimension of the transmission of scientific knowledge and the circulation of ideas in France and Europe from the revolutionary period to the Restoration.

Towards a Paradigm for Research on Social Representations

Based on Moscovici’s (1961) classical study on the cultivation of psychoanalytic ideas in France in the 1950’s and our own research on modern biotechnology, we propose a paradigm for researching social representations. Following a consideration of the nature of representations and of the ‘iconoclastic suspicion’ that haunts them, we propose a model of the emergence of meaning relating three elements: subjects, objects, and projects. The basic unit of analysis is the elongated triangle of mediation (SOPS): subject 1, object, project, and subject 2, captured in the image of a ‘Toblerone’. Such social units cultivate, that is produce, circulate and receive representation which may be embodied in four modes–habitual behaviour, individual cognition, informal communication and formal communication–and in three mediums–words, visual images or non‐linguistic sounds. We propose an operational definition of a ‘social representation’ as the comparison of four characteristics of communication systems: the content structures (anchorings and objectifications; core and peripheral elements), the typified processes (diffusion, propagation, propaganda etc.), and their functions (identity, attitude, opinion, resistance, ideology etc.), within the context of segmented social milieus. Seven implications for research on social representations are outlined: (1) content and process; (2) segmentation by social milieus rather than taxonomies; (3) cultivation studies within social milieus; (4) multi‐method (mode and medium) analysis; (5) time structures and longitudinal data; (6) the crossover of cultural projects and trajectories; (7) the disinterested research attitude. This ideal type paradigm leads to an operational clarification to identify new research questions, and to guide the design and evaluation of studies on social representations.