La Guerre Research Articles

Season of Infamy: A Diary of War and Occupation 1939–1945

The English translation of the work Une saison gâtée: Journal de la guerre et de l’occupation—originally established and annotated in 1983 by the historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who at that time advocated wider use of ego-documents—is more than just a translation, as it also includes passages from the manuscript that were not published in the original French version. As such, the translation does not merely serve to make this book available to a wider audience (a goal that by itself would offer sufficient reason for the present publication); rather, it is an entirely new narrative that we can find in it. Season of Infamy: A Diary of War and Occupation 1939–1945 is translated by Michele McKay Aynesworth with a preface by leading historian Robert O. Paxton. Other positive aspects of the work include the subdivision of the narrative into chapters corresponding to the stages in Charles Rist’s life from September 1939 to December 1945, as well as annotations and summaries that make it easier for readers to orient themselves.

The life and afterlife of French WWI songs: National identity then and now

Wartime music provides clear testimonial to the importance of melody and text in times of conflict. In the case of the Great War, which introduced the world to weapons of nightmarish capability, carefree popular ballads often stood shoulder to shoulder with sombre lyrics that called attention to the tragedy unfolding in the trenches. The first part of this article surveys the themes of French songs of the WWI era itself, such as ‘Ah! C’est la guerre’, ‘La Madelon’ and ‘La Chanson de Craonne’. The second concentrates on ‘La Madelon’, which underwent numerous transformations in response to events during the interwar years and World War II. The final section explores why the Great War took hold as a focus of French popular music in the late 1950s and continues to assert its presence to this day. A surprising number of contemporary artists have recorded World War I-themed songs, such as ‘La Guerre de 14–18’, ‘Jaurès’, ‘Verdun’, ‘Le No Man’s Land’, ‘Tranchée 1914’ and ‘La Chanson de Craonne’. What cultural phenomena might account for this in addition to the urge to memorialise? Examination of the internal and external forces that continue to fuel the ‘Grand débat sur l’identité nationale’ makes clear why songs of the Great War appeal to a citizenry determined to preserve the values of ‘Frenchness’ in the face of evolving demographics and increasing ‘Europeanisation’.

The Event of Charlie Hebdo: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control ed. by Alessandro Zagato

Reviews 287 of Rousseauan relations. Examining a wide range of Rousseau’s works including Émile, Julie, the Discourses, the Social Contract, the Letter to D’Alembert, the Reveries and others, Warner surveys “the major forms of human association” (2) in Rousseau’s thought. Adopting a perspective that is both literary and philosophical, Warner examines relationships based on pity, sexual desire, romantic love, friendship, and political association. In so doing, he seeks to determine whether or not these varied relationships can resolve the fundamental problem of man in society. This problem is defined in the study not as the establishment of freedom, but rather as the creation of inner unity within the fragmented individual. Warner’s keen eye for detail leads to complex and subtle analyses that defy simplistic resolution of the problem. Statements such as “I emphasize the defectiveness of Rousseau’s characterizations of the state of nature and the sentiment of pity not because he was unaware of them, but because he was” (69), or “the cross-cutting pressures that constitute social life overwhelm all efforts at comprehensive resolution, and the hybrid character of political life ends up producing the very dividedness it was set up to prevent” (28), exemplify Warner’s ability to tease out the not-so-obvious complexities, contradictions, and paradoxes of Rousseau’s thought. The author’s firm grasp of Rousseau’s works and modern-day criticism keeps the study on solid ground at all times, and the reader is bound to walk away from the book with much that is new and thought-provoking. Warner’s style is clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing, with no small amount of wit worked into chapter subsection titles that include pop-culture references such as Lawrence Tureaud’s signature tagline (69) and English punk rock song lyrics (113). Far from diminishing the gravitas of Warner’s argument, such well-placed references provide a topic-appropriate release in tension as Warner dives deeper and deeper into his“tragic” (217) interpretation of Rousseau’s self-conscious “failure” (4, 217) to resolve the problem of the individual in society. Warner provocatively concludes that this selfconscious failure shows Rousseau’s intent was not to reform society, but rather to bring about the“moral improvement and transformation of individual readers”(225). Such a conclusion will no doubt generate discussion amongst specialists, as all worthwhile ideas should. Rousseau and the Problem of Human Relations will be of value to literary and political scholars specializing in Rousseau studies, as well as specialists in other areas of Enlightenment literature, history, and political philosophy. Ohio University Christopher Coski Zagato, Alessandro, ed. The Event of Charlie Hebdo: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control. New York: Berghanh, 2015. ISBN 978-1-78533-079-9. Pp. 114. $13. Les neuf articles de ce court volume s’interrogent sur les conséquences sociopolitiques de l’attaque terroriste du 7 janvier 2015 contre le journal satirique Charlie Hebdo. Dans“The Barbariat and Democratic Tolerance”, Knut Rio établit un parallèle entre les événements parisiens et la violence terroriste de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (1954–1962)—faisant référence au film de Gillo Pontecorvo, La bataille d’Alger (1966)—qu’il considère comme “a continuing reapparance of the systematic conflicts built into French colonialist relations” (15). Il nous rappelle les rassemblements spontanés de millions de Parisiens, descendus dans les rues de la capitale quelques jours après les drames pour dénoncer la haine et la barbarie. Cette “France debout” (13), défenseuse de la République, fut prise d’un singulier élan de solidarité qui se manifesta notamment par le slogan populaire “Je suis Charlie”, un “global web buzz” (13). D’ailleurs, Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke dans “Where Were You, Charlie?” compare le slogan “Je suis Charlie” à la réplique “I’m Spartacus” du film de Stanley Kubrick Spartacus (1960),reconnaissant un même désir de solidarité,toutefois exprimé différemment. De plus, elle examine comment“Je suis Charlie”a engendré de nouvelles formes d’activisme politique sur les réseaux sociaux. À travers l’exemple d’Ahmed, un élève de huit ans qui n’avait pas adhéré au slogan—“Je ne suis pas Charlie...

A War of Colors: Beirut Street Art and the Reclamation of Public Space

A War of Colors:Beirut Street Art and the Reclamation of Public Space Nadine Sinno (bio) The Lebanese Civil War left its mark not only on the bodies and psyches of Lebanese people, but also on the visual landscape and cultural ethos of Beirut. During the war (1975-1990), and for years following the cessation of armed conflict, Beirut’s streets belonged to militias, thugs, snipers, and shabāb, young men who acted as vigilantes in their respective neighborhoods. Fearful for their lives on account of the danger posed by bullets, bombs, or kidnappings, ordinary civilians hurriedly walked through the hazardous, dirty streets to get from one place to another. The city’s visual landscape was mainly comprised of pockmarked walls, crumbling buildings, posters of political leaders both dead and alive, menacing political slogans, and the logos of various militias who fought to control the streets literally and symbolically. After the war, these same walls would undergo substantial transformations at the hands of emergent street artists who grew dissatisfied with the hegemonic occupation of the cityscape by militias and their divisive sectarian markings. Recognizing the potentialities of street art in forging an aesthetic intervention and presenting an alternative discourse to sectarianism, Beirut’s street artists have tasked themselves with reimagining the streets as a space for creating community-centered artwork [End Page 71] and engendering civic engagement, thus reclaiming them from the hands of warring political factions that monopolized them during the Lebanese Civil War. While the visual culture of wartime Beirut remains generally understudied, Maria Chakhtoura and Zeina Maasri have contributed pioneering studies of graffiti and political posters, respectively. Maria Chakhtoura’s La Guerre des Graffiti [The Graffiti War] (1978) offers an annotated survey of the ubiquitous graffiti slogans that filled Beirut’s streets from 1975 to 1977. Chakhtoura’s collection documents the overwhelmingly dehumanizing rhetoric common among Lebanon’s various political factions. The derogatory slogans collected in Chakhtoura’s study include expressions such as “The Phalanges are dogs. Their leader is a pig,” “Jumblat birthed a mule,” “Jisr el-basha is the graveyard of Palestinians,” and “Arab=Animal.”1 It is no surprise that Chakhtoura lamented the findings captured by her camera, which, according to her, reflected the spirit of “delirium” and “orchestrated fanaticism” that permeated Beirut at the time.2 In a similar vein, Zeina Maasri’s Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (2009) offers an insightful study of political posters that were ubiquitous during the Lebanese Civil War. Maasri’s study reveals the power of these discursive tools in commemorating sectarian leaders, intimidating and demeaning perceived enemies, and advocating each political party’s version of “truth” and its vision for Lebanon. Arguing against the reductionist conceptualization of political posters as mere propaganda, Maasri argues that political posters “are inscribed in the hegemonic articulations of political communities in Lebanon’s war” and that they serve to “articulate the discourses, desires, fears and collective imaginaries pertinent to the various political identities being formed and transformed during wartime.̶3 Similar to sectarian graffiti, political posters thus served as a weapon of war—one that sought to elevate sectarian leaders, dehumanize the enemy, and assert the real or imagined dominance of local and regional actors. In addition to bearing the marks of sectarian graffiti and political posters, Beirut’s walls have endured the impersonal, sterile touch of urban revival in the postwar era, as Lebanese leaders sought to reintegrate Lebanon in the global market and to reinvigorate its tourism sector. After the end of the war, reconstruction efforts swept the country, and signs of change appeared in some [End Page 72] parts of the city: freshly painted walls, shiny storefronts, newly paved streets, renovated sidewalks, and striking high-rises. However, as many Lebanese artists, scholars, and activists have contended, such cosmetic changes have been alienating, contrived, and exclusionary in their own way. Upscale development projects—including Solidere’s infamous reconstruction of downtown Beirut—do not truly reflect or honor the Lebanese people’s struggles, local talents, or unique history.4 While the reconstruction projects did alter select public spaces, rendering them more “inhabitable,” such projects have been generally reserved for neighborhoods deemed worthy of resuscitation due...

Duvalier à l'ombre de la guerre froide. Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963) by Wien Weibert Arthus, and: Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours by Wien Weibert Arthus

Reviewed by: Duvalier à l'ombre de la guerre froide. Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963) by Wien Weibert Arthus, and: Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours by Wien Weibert Arthus Patrick Bellegarde-Smith Duvalier à l'ombre de la guerre froide. Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963). Par Wien Weibert Arthus. Port-au-Prince: L'Imprimeur, 2014. ISBN 9997046447. 389 pp. Paperback. Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours. Par Wien Weibert Arthus. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2017. ISBN 2343103151. 246 pp. 26 €. Paperback. Wien Weibert Arthus, in these two recent works, gives us a global view on Haitian foreign policy and international relations. In Duvalier à l'ombre de la Guerre Froide, he defines his focus in the book's subtitle, Les Dessous de la politique étrangère d'Haïti (1957–1963).1 His 2017 book Les Grandes dates de l'histoire diplomatique d'Haïti, de la période fondatrice à nos jours provides a compendium of Haitian diplomatic history, a short cut in the form of vignettes, that will prove useful to Haitianists. The author makes his intent clear, in both works, with a sentiment that unites him to most Haitian scholars before him, by citing Eduardo Galeano in his epigraph: "Vale la pena repetirlo una vez más, para que los sordos escuchen: Haití fue el país fundador de la independencia de América y el primero que derrotó la esclavitud en el mundo. Merece mucho más que la notoriedad nacida de sus desgracias." Haitians have always believed this to be true, a vérité de La Palice, as it were, if few others did or have. Arthus—and Galeano—would argue that Haiti's misfortune, its dysfunction, ses malheurs, are a result, intended and unintended, of domestic and international conflicts. Hence the need for the present texts. In three parts and fourteen chapters replete with information, Duvalier à l'ombre de la Guerre Froide brought back painful memories from my youth, as I recall each and every situation he described. My childhood, in an intensely political family, was no barrier to knowing. I am both grateful and saddened to be forced to remember what we have suffered, which has marked my life deeply. [End Page 124] My reading of Arthus tells me that a paramount distinction between 1957–1963 and the agitated period of 1934–1957 was that Francois Duvalier's foreign policy was deeply personal.2 It was irremediably tied to staying in power: not ideological, not connected to lofty ideals of middle-class rule or to earlier politics of les authentiques, the authenticity of Black power, and the primacy of Haitian culture of President Dumarsais Estimé. That earlier period, 1934–1957, saw the consolidation of elite/upper-class/bourgeois power rendered possible by the United States' Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934. As it turned out, l'occupation, which brought Haiti into its twentieth century, exacerbated the acrimonious relations that had existed between social classes since the state's creation in 1804. Of course, foreign nations contributed, as Arthus's analysis shows, and so did the Roman Catholic hierarchy that favored the upper class, as it did elsewhere in Latin America. France—the former colonial power—was the perennial enemy, as well as the Vatican, the Dominican Republic, and especially the United States: each played their role, as could be predicted, against a marginalized nation-state. In earlier days, Haitian diplomacy and diplomats, controlled by a Westernizing elite, had to respond to a primary impulse: ne pas faire honte au pays, to not shame the country. In fact, the concept of honte—shame—influences all areas of Haitian culture. That Haitians were right in being leery is illustrated in a statement by France's ambassador to Haiti, when Duvalier eschewed the niceties that hitherto applied: "La conception que le Président de la République [Duvalier] a du pouvoir, diffère assez peu de celle que pouvait avoir un roi nègre du 18ème siècle." Duvalier never quite cared about what...

Tenir tête aux dieux par by Mahmoud Hussein

Reviews 273 smile rather than to excoriate our illogical actions and incongruencies. Hervy’s criticism of muddle and incoherence is the bataille in the title, but the book’s tone is teasing rather than warlike. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Hussein, Mahmoud. Tenir tête aux dieux. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07017979 -4. Pp. 167. 17,50 a. This novel, recounted in the first person by its protagonist, is the story of a young freedom-fighter in Nasser’s Egypt. The action takes place in 1959, but the narrator intersperses flashbacks about the hero’s past while recounting events in the narrative present. The unnamed protagonist is an idealistic young medical student in Cairo who seeks to revive and advance the dignity of his nation and its people in reaction against its former colonial masters, especially Great Britain. Unfortunately for him, his democratic ideals, tinged with communism, have gotten him into trouble with the totalitarian authorities of the Nasser regime. When we meet him on the first page, he is already a prisoner in a camp for political dissidents. His description of the humiliations suffered by him and his fellow detainees is interrupted at regular intervals by reminiscences of his past. The reader learns progressively about his impoverished childhood and student years. We meet several of his friends, also young political idealists, with two of whom he is reunited in the course of his incarcerations. The guiding star of his life is a beautiful young woman, also a medical student, named Nadia. She aggressively takes the initiative of pursuing the affections of the shy young man. She loves him and wants to marry him. She also questions the need for and value of his Marxist political philosophy. Her doubts give him the opportunity to expound upon his principles in a series of ideological discussions with her. She and her father represent a majority of Egyptians who want the best for their country too but who passively accept the status quo despite its infringements on individual liberty. Nadia writes faithfully to the hero throughout his imprisonment, and he compares her fidelity to that of Penelope in the Odyssey. At the same time, he looks upon his own brave confrontation of his captors with the steadfast courage of Homer’s hero. Matters get increasingly worse for him, however. The narrator moves forward into the future as well as looking back into the past. He is sent to places of incarceration that are more and more hellish. We take leave of him at the last one where he is stripped and beaten but remains defiant in the face of tyranny. The last word of the text is the selfdescriptive adjective “inexpugnable” (167). The reader is left in suspense as to the hero’s ultimate fate. Curiously, the last page of text is followed by twenty-four blank pages. Perhaps we are being invited to fill them in with our own surmises. There are other interesting stylistic features. As in the Nouveau Roman, there are constant references to angles of vision and thoughts being revealed by looks rather than words. Also noteworthy is the narrator’s use of the classical style ternaire that goes back to the seventeenth century. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and phrases almost always occur in groups of three. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Jouannais, Jean-Yves. La bibliothèque de Hans Reiter. Paris: Grasset, 2016. ISBN 9782 -246-85776-1. Pp. 160. 17 a. Commissionné par un bibliophile parisien pour acheter une collection de livres ayant appartenu à un dénommé Hans Reiter, le narrateur de ce récit acquiert deux cent-cinquante titres arrachés à un étrange rival lors d’une vente aux enchères. Il entreprend de comprendre ce qui relie les ouvrages de cette collection hétéroclite traitant de la guerre et se rend compte que la clef du mystère se trouve dans la page manquante de chaque livre. Naviguant dans l’univers kafkaïen d’un récit constellé d’anecdotes et de saynètes comiques, le lecteur percera le secret de l’enquête bien avant le narrateur. Ce dernier est pourtant mis sur la voie dès le d...

Operation Torch, 8 November 1942: America’s Encounter with a Divided France and Africa and the Middle East in Transformation

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 2, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources OPERATION TORCH, 8 NOVEMBER 1942: AMERICA’S ENCOUNTER WITH A DIVIDED FRANCE AND AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST IN TRANSFORMATION ALLAN CHRISTELOW* On 8 November, 1942, American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. It was the first step toward an Allied victory in Europe. But it also marked the beginning of the end of the French colonial empire. Studies of Operation Torch by Western scholars have largely focused on how it fit into the conflict between the Allied and the Axis powers.1 Yet it was less than three years later that we see the first event of the conflict leading to Algerian independence – the brutal suppression of Algerians calling for independence following VE Day in May of 1945.2 American President Franklin D. Roosevelt stressed the importance of self-determination, but he was ambivalent about where and how soon this principle should come into effect. One needs to recognise that Operation Torch was not a single, isolated event. It fit into other military campaigns in Africa: the movement of British forces into the Italian colonial territories of Ethiopia and Libya, and the movement of Free French forces from Equatorial Africa through Chad into Libya.3 Also, just three years after Operation Torch, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. The uranium used to make it had come from the Belgian Congo, just to the south of the Free French base in Equatorial Africa – a story fully examined only recently.4 Part of the problem is that scholars focusing on the European conflict and using conventional sources fail to recognise the magnitude of the social and cultural changes that took place among French colonial populations in the early 1940s – in Africa, Indochina, and the West Indies. This includes looking at the psychological impact of new military technology, above all aeroplanes, on these * Idaho State University, Idaho, USA 1 Among such studies are Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: the War in North Africa, 1942– 1943. New York: Picador, 2002; Andrew Buchanan, America’s Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean During World War II. Cambridge University Press, 2004 and Anthony Verrier, Assassination in Algiers: Roosevelt, Churchill, De Gaulle and the Murder of Admiral Darlan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 2 Studies focusing on how this period helped pave the way for the Algerian revolution include Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Aux origines de la guerre d’Algérie, 1940–1945: de Mers-El-Kebir aux massacres du Nord Constantinois. Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2001; and Mahfoud Kaddache, Histoire du Nationalisme Algérien: Question Nationale et Politique, 1919–1951. Algiers: Société Nationale d’Édition et de Diffusion, 1980. 3 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: the African Resistance. Cambridge University Press, 2014. 4 Susan Williams, Spies in the Congo: America’s Atomic Mission in World War II. New York: Public Affairs, 2016. 100 ALLAN CHRISTELOW populations. Another part of the problem is that these scholars tend to view Algeria and Morocco as individual ‘nations’ separate from others, rather than considering their connections to other parts of the Arab world through migration, study, travel, and Arabic language media – which became a lot more important with the development of printed material in Arabic starting in the late 1800s. Also, there is a lack of historical perspective. To understand Operation Torch it can be useful to go back to the early 1900s when the French and the British finally ended their rivalry in Africa, and began building the Entente Cordiale, and when the United States made its first appearance on the scene with President Teddy Roosevelt sending battleships to Tangier, and America helping to promote a solution to Morocco’s problems at the Algeciras Conference in Spain in 1906. Morocco had become, in effect, the door through which America entered North Africa as a mediator. Algeria’s most important ties were with Syria, where there was a large population of Algerian refugees centred on the family of Amir `Abd al-Qadir, leader of the Algerian resistance against the French invasion...

Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature) ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise

Reviewed by: Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature) ed. by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise Anne Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Les personnages mythiques dans la littérature de jeunesse (Mythical Characters in Children's Literature). Edited by Nathalie Prince and Sylvie Servoise. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. In this collection of seventeen essays gathered from a symposium on children's literature held at the University of Maine in Le Mans, France (12–14 June 2013), Prince and Servoise fuse two problematic categories of literary theory: the concept study of characterization on the one hand, and the concept study of mythology on the other. How does children's literature "mythify" itself and create myths? How does it recycle mythical figures drawn from the Bible, from Greek and Roman literature, or from comic or literary fictions originally intended for adults? May characters for children be mythical, and, if so, what characteristics differentiate them from classical mythical figures? How does children's literature (including comics) recapture mythical heroes and heroines aesthetically? Do these works simply entertain, or do they reinforce the characters' unchanging archetypical nature? In constructing such a type of children's literature, how do we measure the evolution of mythology in various media for children and young adults? Finally, as part of this generic reconfiguration, how do children benefit from becoming acquainted with such mythical figures and stories, and what are the writers' intentions in rewriting them? Véronique Gély, a specialist in mythology, welcomes this continuation of a debate that she initially launched in 2011 in a symposium held in Paris titled "La Mythologie à l'usage des enfants" (Mythology for use by children), and contends that this book expands the concept study of mythology in literature. She praises the project, examining how contributors refashion familiar and less familiar myths and mythical characters in the light of many pressing issues (political, editorial, and aesthetic) within the genre. Part 1 addresses the problem of characterization with the renewal of characters drawn from Greek mythology into modern narratives. Which elements do children's authors retain, discard, or alter from original myths, and for what effects? The four essays in this section examine the role that authors play in transmitting these mythical heroes and heroines to young people as cultural patrimony. They also assess the significance of the use of mythology as one source of fictional and artistic innovation. Nadège Coutaz compares two best sellers that revive Sophocles's tragic heroine Antigone in Jacques Cassabois's fantasy novel for adolescents Antigone 256 (2007) and Martine Delerm's picture book Antigone peut-être (2007). Antigone is refashioned into multiple images of the child/adolescent figure. The "miniaturization" of Antigone from an adult figure into many images of a rebellious teen who rejects her [End Page 262] prospective marriage attests to these works' editorial success and to the changing status of both girls and adolescents. Sylvie Dardaillon examines Yvan Pommaux's graphic novels and the figure of Ulysses in Œdipe: l'enfant trouvé (2010), Ulysse aux mille ruses (2011), and Troie: la guerre toujours recommencée (2012), in which a father takes on the roles of both narrator and storyteller. Analyzing Pommaux's detailed research and illustration style, she highlights his unique "mytho-graphic" approach, his editorial success, and his pedagogical intentions. Hélène Cassereau-Stoyanov studies Ulysses and other Homeric characters from The Odyssey in Sylvaine Jaoui's adolescent novel Fort comme Ulysse (2011). The poem's ethic reflects onto the life of young Eliott, who gradually becomes blind yet strives to gain independence from his parents and from the students who bully him. The section closes with Agathe Salha's reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851), in which myths are refashioned as new sources of fantasy and wonder for children and embedded within national American landscapes as part of their "naturalization" (65). Part 2 explores the ways in which children's authors revisit biblical myths for the edification of plots and characterization. The actualizations of such mythical characters reveal the values of the time in which they were born. Carlo Collodi's Le avventure...

‘Après la guerre’: John Redmond, the Irish Volunteers and Armed Constitutionalism, 1913–1915

Abstract The received narrative of the Ulster crisis relegates John Redmond to the role of bystander as parliamentary politics were sidelined by paramilitarism. Only the First World War, in this account, arrested the advance of armed force in Irish politics. This article seeks to disrupt this narrative by demonstrating that Redmondites were not untouched by the militarist turn which Ireland experienced in these years. Instead, home rulers developed an armed strategy of their own in response to the advent of militant extra-parliamentary politics. Having taken over the Irish Volunteers in spring 1914, Redmondites began to arm their supporters in defence of self-government. Separatists were scornful of these efforts, and it is true that Redmondites initially saw this activity primarily in political terms. But the outbreak of war persuaded Redmond that the eventual return of loyalist soldiers to Ireland at the end of the conflict could be decisive if the Ulster crisis resumed. Believing that nationalists needed to plan for this contingency, Ireland’s prime minister-in-waiting resolved to use the war to build a home rule army. Initially, pro-war nationalists hoped that this could be achieved through the Volunteers becoming a government-sponsored home guard, but War Office opposition forced Redmond to the conclusion that only British military service could ensure a sufficient force to secure the future of self-government. Though this strategy of armed constitutionalism had unravelled by Easter 1916, that it was attempted suggests that late Redmondism should not be conceived of only in terms of Redmond’s public rhetoric of orange and green reconciliation through common battlefield sacrifice.

War and peace in the contemporary French film ecosystem: Valérie Donzelli’s La Guerre est déclarée

This article analyses Valérie Donzelli’s film Declaration of War (La Guerre est déclarée, 2011), in the context of the contemporary French film ecosystem. The article argues that Donzelli’s film exemplifies the French miniaturist mode of production; demonstrates the modern conceptual notion of applied cinephilia; highlights the idiosyncratic uses possible for French popular genres, particularly the comedy and the musical; and embodies the French film industry’s export mission by representing on-screen the French national healthcare system.

Vingt ans d’histoire religieuse de la première guerre mondiale en Allemagne où en est l’histoire des formes de piété?

This article offers a panorama of the work of historians who, over the past twenty years, have studied the forms of piety developed by Christians in the Germanic world during the First World War. This 20-year framework has been chosen precisely because it was in 1994 that Annette Becker’s La guerre et la foi was published, and which represented a turning-point in the religious historiography of the war. The article outlines the ways in which this book and its author’s other publications became a turning point before attempting to see if the openings it suggested have been explored by German historians.

Les pêchers par Claire Castillon

stolen manuscript,Derrida is murdered on the Cornell campus and Searle subsequently commits suicide. As the investigation broadens, a mysterious Logos Club becomes increasingly important. This is a debating society of sorts, whose Grand Master is Umberto Eco who, due to his own rhetorical effusions, once had an opponent urinate on his leg. The Logos Club is a place where verbal dexterity occasionally triumphs over content—Socrate“est un peu le Elvis de la rhétorique”(198)—yet the jousting is not really friendly. A loser risks having a finger chopped off, or, if the stakes are high enough, a more significant part of the anatomy. As the police enquiry lurches toward its conclusion, it becomes increasingly apparent that the culprits are among Barthes’s friends, and while nobody is arrested, a rough type of justice is done.Although the fate of the purloined manuscript remains unclear, it seems to have figured in Mitterrand’s surprise victory over Giscard in 1981, and in the blossoming American academic career of a former male prostitute. Binet’s novel also explores the blurred line between fiction and reality—“I think I’m trapped in a novel” (348)—but the initial reading is simply a prolonged experience of wicked delight. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Castillon,Claire. Les pêchers.Paris: L’Olivier,2015.ISBN 978-2-82-360790-1.Pp.203. 17,50 a. This novel explores the punitive nature of romantic love, from the perspectives of three women in sentimentally-challenging situations. The phrase“la guerre des sexes” is often used to describe the thematic of Castillon’s novels. Indeed, this novel finds some of its characters in conflict with people of the opposite sex. They are often in love with people unattainable, recalling Flaubert’s concept of bovarysme. Thirteen chapters are told by Tamara, the first of three pécheresses (supposedly sinners because they love) and narrators, and wife to the class-conscious doctor, Claude. Eight chapters are recounted through the eyes of Claude’s materialistic ex-wife, Aimée, who now lives with Quick, Aimée’s former lover. Lastly, nine are told by Esther (“Terra”), daughter to Aimée and Claude. The sufferings of Tamara, pining for Quick, and of Aimée, preferring Claude to Quick, are compounded by jealousy. Sartre’s Huis clos comes to mind, in that these four characters punish each other through their relationships, if not purposefully, carelessly. Not only is there a guerre des sexes, but there are also civil wars among men, and among women. The exclusivity of romantic relationships, as well as their ability to confer social status, can be cruel to interested outsiders. Tamara faces a third challenge as she feels trapped in her marriage to Claude, evoking Emma Bovary’s feelings of enfermement in nineteenth-century France. Comprehensively, some of the interpersonal situations described in this novel overlap with many other stories of romantic disappointment, but Castillon’s depiction of the process by which four characters, in effect, exchange romantic partners among each other accentuates 230 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 231 the tensions inherent to this tale of relational loss. It could be argued that this scenario is implausible, but its depiction is worthwhile as a thought experiment. Moreover, through her portrayal of Esther, Castillon is to be praised for calling attention to the position of single people. This intelligent teenager has romantic feelings for Clarence, who is rude and dismissive to her, and who dotes on the attractive and self-confident Priscille as the three make a film together. Esther concedes that she is disadvantaged in la guerre des sexes because beauty usually triumphs over intelligence in capturing the affections of men. Her circumstances are not as dramatic as those of Tamara or Aimée, yet her predicament, especially as a daughter already blamed for the difficulties of her father’s love life, could be the subject of an entire novel. Is there not violence in the way single people are sometimes stigmatized? Esther’s mother, Aimée, grieving her marriage to Claude, tells her that she is ill-fated for love (184–85). Although it is disconcerting to ponder the extent of the cruelties that can...

Philippe Vandermaelen, the Mercator of young Belgium

This article presents the conclusions of a book published concomitantly by the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique: Philippe Vandermaelen, Mercator de la jeune Belgique. Histoire de l’Établissement géographique de Bruxelles et de son fondateur. This publication is the result of twenty-five years of research in the Maps & Plans section, the depository of the exceptional cartographic and documentary collection from the Établissement géographique de Bruxelles. The article and work it refers to present the life of the visionary geographer in a chronological journey centred on his cartographic production (methodology, collaborations, surveys, levelling, commercial management, etc.), ending with a passing of the baton to the Dépôt de la Guerre, the future Institut géographique national. It also opens the doors to Vandermaelen’s different institutional creations in a cross-cutting approach: the documentation centre, the natural history gallery, the lithography school and the École Normale, the museum of ethnography, and the organisation of scientific expeditions.

La guerre comique: Molière et la querelle de l’École des femmes par Patrick Dandrey

Dandrey, Patrick. La guerre comique: Molière et la querelle de L’École des femmes. Paris: Herrmann, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7056-8955-1. Pp. 416. 27 a. This particular “querelle” is the most literary one imaginable because the devices used by both sides are plays or criticisms of plays. Indeed, one of Dandrey’s conclusions is that both La critique de l’École des femmes and L’impromptu de Versailles are no longer to be considered as mere arrows in Molière’s rhetorical quiver but as full-fledged comic texts in their own right: La critique defines the new form of comedy and L’impromptu shows how to stage it. To allow the readers of La guerre comique to decide for themselves who wins the arguments, Dandrey gives full details of the lives and literary productions of Molière’s opponents, distinguishing between, for example, the passionate (Montfleury) and the peaceable (Chevalier). In the process, Dandrey enlarges the circle of documents and plays that Georges Mongrédien had presented in his magisterial La querelle de l’École des femmes in two volumes (1971). In fact, Dandrey’s book is filled with quarrels of his own intention. He answers the objections by Jean la Guardia and Claude Bourqui who found fault with Dandrey’s L’esthétique du ridicule (1992), on which much of the discussion of comedy in La guerre comique is based. He also clearly disagrees with some of Georges Forestier’s hypotheses and chronology presented in his Pléiade edition of the complete works of Molière (2010). But the main thrust of Dandrey’s book lies in its enlightened demonstration of the quarrel as a multi-act spectacle that, at critical moments, Molière seems to be directing from the wings, whether it be his own plays or his adversaries’. In the face of attempts by his enemies to create a “succès de scandale” that would enhance their own image, Molière triumphs by turning their own ideas and devices against them in a deeply “dramatic” way. His genius for imitating others’ arguments and style is such that “le renouvellement de la querelle a procédé de retournement, de détournement et d’enveloppement, de simultanéité et de dépassement, de tuilage et de court-circuit” (216). There are, therefore, moments when, without the context, one would have difficulty in confirming who was speaking.Yet, it is clear that Molière succeeds in two important ways: he developed a new “staging” for winning polemics, and he used the quarrel to justify his innovative conception of comedy, that had the extra, positive effect of drawing the Court’s attention to what could easily have passed as a petty dispute between rival theater companies. For those interested in a model of research into the culture of the theater and society in classical France, one can do no better that Dandrey’s brilliantly argued and amply informed investigation. University of California, Santa Barbara Ronald W. Tobin 216 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 ...

Le rôle du savoir au sein de l’armée: sciences de la guerre et bibliothèques militaires en France au XIXe siècle (c. 1800–c. 1900)

This article analyses the development of military knowledge in France in the 19th century, both in terms of production of knowledge (especially through the Dépôt de la Guerre) and of transmission through a network of army libraries. The strategic dimension of this form of knowledge required a direct intervention of the state, to control or restrict the publication of sensitive data. State intervention was also necessary to coordinate and generate a unified, applied military knowledge using data submitted by members of different army branches, or by civilians. The work of military librarians and bibliologists was all the more difficult because of the very wide range of sciences which could be used by the army. Growing state intervention and public funding were thus essential for the production and transmission of military knowledge.

Diplomaties au temps de Napoléon

The high points of Napoleonic diplomacy remain both well known and fully integrated into the existing historiography, but very few studies have addressed the wider impact of the Napoleonic endeavour on the development of diplomacy in Europe. Diplomaties au temps de Napoléon represents a pioneering attempt to offer a comprehensive overview of the continuities and discontinuities that marked the transformation of European diplomacy between the early 1790s and 1815. The twenty-five chapters included in this work were initially presented at a conference held in Paris in March 2014. Summing up the conference’s overall objective, Yves Bruley explains that the time had come to examine the development of diplomacy by looking beyond the two big trees—Napoleon and Talleyrand—that have obstructed the view of the larger forest for too long. The first part of the book covers French diplomacy between the Revolution and the Empire. Yves Bruley emphasizes that the term diplomatie first entered the French language during the early 1790s, when its application to the realm of international relations departed from the pre-revolutionary emphasis on aristocratic negotiation and the accompanying courtly intrigues. However, Patrice Gueniffey rejects the view that the revolutionary period brought about a complete break in the practice of diplomacy, but he argues nonetheless that the republican government’s ideas about legitimacy led to the emergence of a new form of diplomacy, which later became increasingly marked by a military logic during Napoleon’s rise to power. The second part of the book presents a re-examination of the French ministry of foreign affairs through an analysis of the roles played by Talleyrand’s many associates. Continuing with the focus of lesser-known figures, the third part of the work contains an extensive analysis of the French diplomatic corps, as well as the shifting practice of diplomacy, which, as Michel Kerautret points out, initially preserved the pre-revolutionary tradition of congresses during the early 1800s and later succumbed to Bonaparte’s interventionist approach and penchant for centralization. The fourth part contains an illuminating discussion of Napoleon’s attitude towards the droit des gens , which he perceived as a type of moderating force that softened the harshness of the droit de la guerre . In this respect, Thierry Lentz argues that Bonaparte’s views on international law gradually led him to a reaffirmation of the traditional preference for the primacy of treaties and their written formulas. In other words, for Napoleon, the treaties’ texts came to represent laws that conditioned relations between nations and between sovereigns. Finally, the last part of the book examines the attempts of Russian, British and Italian diplomats to resist Napoleon’s domination of the continent. In the concluding chapter, Georges-Henri Soutou claims that Napoleon did not seek to reorganize Europe because he relied neither on the model of a Westphalian equilibrium nor the revolutionary droit des peuples . Instead, he opted for a general unilateralism that combined elements of traditional monarchism with the politics of the family.

La guerre telle qu’elle pourrait être

This paper intends to identify a representation of France at war related neither to gung-ho fiction nor to testimonial fiction in the French war novel of the first half of the 20th century. The vein of the War-as- itcould-be will be characterized by its historical span (dating back to before WW1 and lasting long after WW2), its generic forms (future wars, espionage, melodrama...) and its ideological ambivalence (secret concerns over the French soldier’s frailty and the Army’s ability to adequately defend the country).

Body in Transit, Body in Transition: Resignifying Colonial Wounds in Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir!

AbstractQuébec’s status as a potentially colonial space that underwent a process akin to decolonization during the Révolution tranquille has generated much critical attention in recent years, as scholars consider how Québec’s liberatory struggles resonate with other narratives of decolonization around the globe. Roch Carrier’s first and most renowned novel, La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1968), deserves particular attention as a literary work that interrogates Québec’s colonial dynamics. While scholars have emphasized the images of the body in Carrier’s work, with particular consideration of La Guerre, Yes Sir!’s carnivalesque elements, no study thus far has focused on how shifting depictions of individual bodies over time and space allegorize transformations of an imagined national body. In this article, I argue that La Guerre, Yes Sir! dramatizes Québec’s struggle to regain possession of and define its national body, as represented by the villagers’ desire to recover physical and symbolic possession of the corpse of the fallen soldier, Corriveau. Specifically, I examine Carrier’s engagement with familiar tropes of contemporaneous anticolonial writing, such as the wounded or cannibalized body, demonstrating the community’s power to ultimately reinterpret them. This article concludes by considering how the novel’s final scenes critique the nationalism that seems a prerequisite for the villagers’ assertion of autonomy.RésuméLa notion d’un Québec considéré comme un espace colonial ayant traversé, durant la Révolution tranquille, un processus qui s’apparente à une décolonisation, a suscité, dernièrement, un vif intérêt de la critique postcoloniale. Ainsi, les spécialistes analysent la manière dont les combats pour l’autonomie du Québec font écho à d’autres mouvements de décolonisation à travers le monde. Dans cette optique, le premier roman de Roch Carrier, La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1968), mérite une attention particulière en tant qu’ouvrage littéraire interrogeant la dynamique coloniale québécoise. De nombreux travaux ont insisté sur les images du corps chez Carrier, en s’appuyant notamment sur les aspects carnavalesques de La Guerre, Yes Sir! Il semble pourtant, qu’à ce jour, aucune étude n’ait été consacrée à la manière dont les représentations changeantes des corps figurent comme une allégorie des transformations successives du corps imaginaire national. Dans cet article, j’explore l’idée selon laquelle La Guerre, Yes Sir! illustre la lutte du Québec pour l’autodétermination et le contrôle de son intégrité physique. Cette lutte est apparente dans les efforts des villageois pour récupérer le corps du soldat Corriveau, combattant tombé au champ d’honneur. Plus précisément, j’examine l’adoption par Carrier de lieux communs de la littérature contemporaine anticoloniale, comme le corps blessé ou cannibalisé, et sa démonstration du pouvoir que le groupe a de les réinterpréter. Cet article s’achève sur un examen des scènes finales et de leur charge contre le nationalisme qui se révèle, chez les villageois, comme condition préalable à l’affirmation de l’autonomie.

Fanon, the French Liberal Left and the Colonial Consensus

This article focuses on a murky period in French history when nationalism cemented a consensus between left and right. It demonstrates how nationalism came to underlie racial antagonism, engaging with Jean-François Lyotard's analysis in La Guerre des Algériens and situating Fanon's unorthodox Marxist views in relation to the PCF's ‘assimilationist’ politics which shaped such consensus and ultimately offered fertile ground for the emergence of colonial fascism in the 1950s. Fanon's journalistic writings show that he upheld the Republican – and more specifically Dreyfusard – tradition which was jettisoned by the left at the height of the Algerian crisis. His reworking of Marxist theory helps us understand how the colonial issue was overshadowed by the PCF's (inter)nationalist rhetoric. The article demonstrates that Les Damnés de la terre as a revolutionary anthem draws its significance from the Internationale at the same time as it rethinks the Marxist-Leninist doctrine that acted in complicity with colonialism.

This Is a Test of the System

This Is a Test of the System Thomas Israel Hopkins (bio) I’m in the office of floyd flander, headmaster of Pinkness Prep, the private all-boys school where I teach. We’re having an informal conference. Floyd considers me a confidant. I secretly think Floyd is a bozo. But I let him continue to think of me this way; my theory is that a man has to be something of a bozo not only to want to run a prep school in the first place, but to actually land the job and hold on to it. A cocktail of prerequisites: part circus clown, part lap dog. “I’m tired of busting people,” the headmaster says, standing by the window, sloshing his Scotch and ice around in his glass. Floyd’s definition of informal conference means Scotch at ten in the morning, during the all-campus midmorning break. Floyd is a bozo, but I don’t resist this either; I slosh my Scotch and ice too. When in Rome. “They’re not people,” I say. “They’re teenagers.” “I don’t even know if you can call them that,” Floyd says. “More like monkeys.” He’s looking out the window at a gang of about seven or eight of them on the center quad, building something that looks like the beginnings of a funeral pyre. It’s a beautiful spring day. They’ve been at it for a few hours already this morning. They’re methodical and ambitious. “They’re probably smarter than monkeys, Flander,” I say. “I can’t take it anymore,” Floyd says. “I really can’t, I really can’t. This is the worst.” He whistles into his Scotch, ruffling the bottom edge of his salt-and-pepper mustache, rippling the liquid over the surface of the ice. He always says this, always does this—no matter what it is, specifically, that he thinks he can’t take. Ever since he got the job five years ago, after Algie White took his own life jumping off the footbridge into the Hale River. Although it’s not really a river, more like a trickle; a tough body of water to drown in. Like a half-full sink. “À la guerre comme à la guerre,” I say, trying to be helpful. Floyd doesn’t hear me. “And to top it off now, physical plant tells me they’ve got snags with the nuclear emergency system. Did you notice they haven’t had a test for quite a while now?” “That’s been something of a relief, actually,” I say. Is it the worst this time, though, as he says? [End Page 122] “I hate that siren as much as the next fellow, but holy moly,” he says. “What to do, Wheezer?” Every single student, to a boy, on the campus of this elite New England prep school, gone completely AWOL — gone anarchic, gone wild — does that qualify as the worst? It might. “Mrs. Buttonweiser’s locked herself in on the second floor of Gatling,” I say. “That’s always been my favorite building on campus,” he says. He looks nostalgic, bleary, spent. He keeps watching the fire starters outside. “Did I ever tell you that?” I’m at the top of the stairs of Gatling House, sitting on the landing by the door to the corridor, the door behind which my wife has locked herself. “Penny?” I say. I knock on the bottom panel: tap, tap, tap. The wood is scarred and scuffed by the generations of well-bred sixteen-year-olds who have been through this place. “Pen, honey? You’ve got to come out.” “Westmoreland says they’re winning at Khe Sanh,” she says, her voice muffled. “He said so this morning. But they’ve been winning Khe Sanh for just months now, haven’t they?” “It’s starting to look embarrassing,” I say. “There’s a faculty dinner tonight.” “And Tet? I have not been keen on Tet,” she says. “Not keen at all. Where does it all end? How far do they get?” Penny and I got married one year ago. We’d known each other nine months before that. I’m fifteen years her senior. I...