Movement In France Research Articles

Partisan Movement in Southern France in 1814: The Case of Florian

In the face of the invasion of the Allied troops into the territory of France, Napoleon highly relied on the popular resistance of the French to the enemy. The author considers the history of a partisan detachment operating in the South of France under the command of Florian, a “half-hero” or “half-robber”. What was the real contribution of partisans to the course of military operations? What was the motivation of their leaders? What was the relationship between the military command and the commanders of the partisan detachments? How did the civil authorities and the local civilian population treat the partisans? The paucity of official documents is compensated by sources of personal origin, which make it possible to reveal the human dimension of this “small war”. In 1814, “Captain” Florian, who led a detachment of twenty volunteers, behaved like a free corsair, whose actions at times situationally coincided with the interests of the military command. Lacking an official partisan patent, he attacked the allies’ supply trains, robbed army stores, intercepted English couriers, and did not disdain the capture of officers’ personal luggage. Having had a reputation as a marauder in Spain since 1813, Florian in 1814 allowed himself all sorts of “excesses” in relation to the local population. The civil authorities in the person of the prefect tried to reason with him and certain individuals disinterestedly worked for him as “pointers”. Only in March did Marshal Soult try to intensify the creation of partisan detachments and subordinate them to a single command. Florian claimed to have unlimited powers from Soult. However, the negotiations between Soult’s representative Major Bory de Saint-Vincent and Florian ended in nothing: the complaints of the civil authorities and the reputation of the partisan commander caused discontent on the part of the marshal. The last action of Florian’s partisans was an attack on April 12 on an English courier, from whom a watch and a large amount of money were confiscated according the “laws of war”. Mythologized in popular scholarship and educational literature of the 1870s, the partisan movement in France in 1814 was distinguished by a very modest scale and limited actions, and the line between ordinary robbery and a patriotic action was sometimes difficult to discern.

Бретонські національно-культурні рухи XIX – першої половини XX століття в оцінках Михайла Драгоманова та Ольґерда-Іполита Бочковського

The article deals with the views of two Ukrainian thinkers, Mykhailo Drahomanov and Olğerd-Ipolyt Bochkovsky, on the contemporary nation-building processes which took place in the Breton society. The aim is to reveal the main opinions of Drahomanov and Bochkovsky regarding the course of linguistic and cultural movements in Brittany. The authors briefly characterize the three waves of the Breton linguistic and literary movement, and dwell in detail on the analysis of two Ukrainian historiographical sources. Mykhailo Drahomanov’s first article «The Neo-Celtic and Provençal Movement in France» of 1875 was a detailed political study of the first Emsav, of which Drahomanov was a contemporary. The second article, «Young Brittany and Neo-Breton activism», 1932, belongs to the Ukrainian sociologist and historian Olgerd-Ipolyt Bochkovsky and is the result of a detailed analysis of the Breton national-cultural movement of the first half of the 20th century up to the time of writing the article, comparing it with the 1st Emsav of the 19th century. Both thinkers, reflecting on the course of the Breton national and cultural revival, first of all payd attention to measures for the revival of the language and the promotion of Breton-language literature. Drahomanov leaded to the idea that national literature would be the fundamental basis for building national identity. Bochkovsky, among whose ideological inspirations was Drahomanov, also emphasized the measures taken by his Breton contemporaries to improve the language and polish, modernize and elevate literature. Being a supporter of nation-building «from the elites down», he welcomed a similar strategy of the Breton Gwalarn movement – to train educated elites to then influence the entire Breton community through them. The detailed attention of Ukrainian intellectuals to the national and cultural movements in Brittany was caused by the need to find models for the Ukrainian national movement at various stages of its development in the second half of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, and also testified to the good awareness of both thinkers regarding current social and political issues and local events in European countries.

French Political Leaflets of the 1960s: a Source Study Aspect

The article analyzes the particularities of the leaflet as a historical source with the base on the French documents of 1960s. Student trade unions and political organisations which took part in the May-June 1968 protest democratic movement in France produced a significant amount of different leaflets that allow to discover characteristic points of this type of documents: presentation of a single idea, engaging the reader into the action and use of the lexical and grammar instruments in the consequence of the chosen theses. The particularities of the leaflets are showed in the article in the context of the opinion of their authors towards their opponent, president and conservative forces leader Charles de Gaulle, because so, in the framework of the epoch political history, the perspectives of the source study work with the documents of this type are open in the widest way.

Fueling opposition? Yellow vests, urban elites, and fuel taxation

ABSTRACT The yellow vest movement in France was triggered by a fuel tax increase. The increase was designed to reduce petrol consumption and hence emissions. However, the costs of this policy were unequally distributed among citizens. The yellow vests illustrate that abstract support for public action against climate change is not enough to secure support for concrete policies. These policies run the risk of being opposed by citizens when their costs are unevenly spread across society. Through a survey experiment on Norwegian citizens, we analyse how different policy characteristics generate ‘support gaps’ within society. Particularly, we contrast two stylized profiles: ‘urban élites’ (high-educated urbanites) and ‘yellow vests’ (low-educated ruralites). We find that opposition rises with the individual cost of the policy but in a non-linear way. Environmental earmarking and invoking personal responsibility widen the gap between yellow vests, urban élites, and the rest of society. Redistribution to low-income households and invoking international commitments help to bridge such gaps. We argue that, instead of focusing on aggregate levels of support, both policymakers and academics should rather pay attention to the polarizing effects of certain policy attributes.

Understanding the French Yellow Vests movement through the lens of mixed methods: A French touch in social movement studies?

This first special issue on the Yellow Vests movement (YVM) published in English has three objectives. First, we advocate that this puzzling movement proved to be an insightful research field for scholars to make a plea for mixed methods. By so doing, we bridge the usual gaps between positivist and constructivist approaches. Second, after four years of research, this publication is also a first milestone to provide empirical data and analysis of the movement, to better understand its evolution, significance and effects on French society. By combining case studies and national-based comparison, regional face-to-face surveys, national online surveys and in-person surveys, the nine articles provide a clearer and more precise picture of the movement’s composition and its evolution over the months. In addition to a detailed description of the social and political components of the movement, several articles propose to establish bridges between the values and opinions of the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests, the cultural practices of the social groups from which they come, and the modalities of mobilization and form of politicization, inscribed in space and in time. In this way, they provide the debate with valuable keys to understanding the dynamics of the movement. Third, this special issue consequently further analyses how the YVM challenges contemporary social movements studies, the understanding of uprisings and assumptions about contentious politics. The first article introduces the major analytical issues and mixed-method approaches of the 9 articles and their contributions as whole to scholarship on the study of the YVM and social movements in France and from a comparative perspective.

A new form of anti-government resentment? Making sense of mass support for the Yellow-Vest Movement in France

ABSTRACT Anti-elite and anti-political resentment have become a permanent feature of political life in many if not most contemporary democracies, leading to support for populist parties, systematic anti-incumbent voting, and new types of movements, such as the Yellow Vests protests that shook France in 2018–2020. The aim of this paper is to explain the unusual popular support they mobilized. Going beyond the somewhat tautological “populist” label attached to the movement this paper proposes a class-based explanation. Using original data from a survey run after the European Elections of 2019, it shows that social precarity, combined with a lower /working class position, is the main driver of affinity with the YV. The movement is disproportionately supported by the most insecure segments of production workers (mostly men) and service workers (mostly women), giving an identity to those who feel excluded and not represented by mainstream parties and unions. This disaffected “precariat” can be seen as a magnifying glass of the crisis of political representation affecting most Western democracies. A reservoir of discontent that is here to stay and that the economic and political impact of the Covid-19 pandemic could revive.

Zhak Shaban-Del'mas

The article is devoted to the life most famous "barons of Gaullism' Jacques Chaban-Delmas. He took an active part in the Resistance movement in France and even during the Second World War joined General de Gaulle. During the Fourth Republic, Chaban-Delmas became a member of the Unification of the French people party, wich was in opposition to the regime. However, after its collapse, the became a minister several times. He played an important role in the process of the fall Fourth Republic and the foundation of the Fifth Republic. Chaban-Delmas was elected President of the National Assembly of France three times. The peak of his political career was the work as Prime Minister of the country in 1969-1972.

Seizing the Populist Moment: Towards a New Penal Politics?

AbstractIn the context of rising populism across the globe, penal populism has returned with a vengeance. However, somewhat paradoxically, this paper asks if the populist moment may be regarded as an opportunity rather than a threat when it comes to promoting less punitive solutions to the crime problem. This is a moment that appears to be marked by a strong desire for increased popular participation in politics, as exemplified by the gilets jaunes movement in France. It is argued that democratization of the policy-making process through greater representativity and accountability could respond to this desire while promoting justice, especially by refocussing attention away from punishment and demonstrating how political, social, economic and legal justice are inextricably linked together.

Who are neorurals? or, How capitalist time discipline dilutes political projects and makes it difficult to propose an alternative

Urban‐to‐rural migration is a rising trend across industrialized countries, the significance of which is not interpreted unanimously. The explanations tend to fall into two competing groups: (a) an alternative to capitalism or (b) perpetuation of the status quo, where, on one hand, the richer participants effect a green lifestyle choice, while the poorer participants follow a coping strategy, on the other. Instead of focusing only on the radical fringe, this article describes and analyzes the diversity of the present‐day neorural movement in France. It argues that the neorural movement is a multivocal critique of modern capitalist societies that rapidly transforms into an apolitical lifestyle choice once it is confronted with the capitalist value‐making mechanisms. It shows that the deradicalization of rural utopia has to do with social stratification and people's enormous difficulty in reappropriating their agency over their time‐use and lives at the household level. Finally, it suggests that the imagery of rural utopia could be mobilized for constructing a shared alternative, but one that would require rewriting the rules of socioeconomic interdependence.

Riot Platforms: Protest, Police, Planet

AbstractA wave of urban uprisings swept the planet from 2018 to 2021, throwing protesters into violent collisions with police, confrontations fought out both in the streets and on digital platforms. This paper proposes successive cycles of digitally‐mediated social unrest are passing into a phase marked by protesters’ assemblage of “riot platforms”. It examines the development of such platforms by movements in France, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador and elsewhere, and the responses of a police power which is itself increasingly digitalised, examines how these contending dynamics played out in 2020 Black Lives Matter rising, discusses the alt‐right’s Capitol Hill seizure as a digitally‐organised reactionary counter‐riot, and concludes by situating “riot platforms” in planet‐wide processes of political recomposition.

The Bretagne Nationalist Movement in France and the CELIB

The Bretagne Nationalist Movement in France and the CELIB

Defining Basque music: Charles Bordes' (1863–1909) musical regionalism and influence in the Basque Country and Paris

AbstractThis paper analyses the influence of the French composer and musicologist Charles Bordes (1863–1909) on the definition of ‘Basque music’ both in the peninsular Basque Country and in Paris. On the one hand, it studies Bordes' ideological background, his vision of traditional Basque music and the acceptance of his shared musicological legacy in Basque regionalist and nationalist circles. On the other hand, it pays particular attention to the reception of his ideas in the Parisian musical milieu through the analysis of the criticism aroused by the premieres of two Basque‐themed operas: Ramuntcho (1908) and Chiquito (1909). This article frames Bordes' activity within the regionalist movement in France. However, it also draws attention to the transnational and ambivalent nature of regionalism, especially in cross‐border spaces, where regionalist discourses could take divergent forms according to the different nationalist agendas with which they were associated.

Resistance in Postwar France: Five New and Noteworthy Histories

Historians of modern Europe have long seen the tragic events of the Second World War in France as a major caesura in the history of that nation. But eighty years later, do the legacies of the war still help us understand postwar France and its political divisions? The five superb books under review make a strong case that the fracturing experiences of defeat, Vichy and the Resistance shaped some of the most important subsequent developments in France in ways that previous historians have failed to recognise. The developments identified by these authors include the waxing and waning of Resistance myths as part of a contested deportation memory landscape, an anti-authoritarian résistant psychiatry born in 1940 that went on to revolutionise French theories of alienation in the face of both Stalinism and postwar capitalism, and rural resistance to the state-led transformation of the countryside as part of France's postwar economic modernisation. Collectively they point to a larger takeaway for historians of postwar Europe: oppositional movements in France may resemble similar movements elsewhere in a Western context marked by Cold War tensions and, more recently, globalisation; but these protests are also always following a script haunted in part by the trauma of France's war years – a past that has not passed, even eight decades later.

Vulnerability, Vulnerance and Resilience—Spiritual Abuse and Sexual Violence in New Spiritual Communities

In February 2017, Braz de Aviz, Prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, acknowledged in an interview that some 70 “new spiritual movements” were under investigation for abusive behavior committed by their founders. The number of cases that remain undetected is probably large. This article uses the example of these communities to analyze the precarious tension between vulnerability, vulnerance, and resilience. It draws on Céline Hoyeau’s excellent study of those founders of new spiritual movements in France who were later exposed as abusers. It also presents my research on the sacred in its dangerous connection to the victimizing sacrifice. My basic thesis is that exploring the link between vulnerability and resilience is not enough. Rather, vulnerance needs to be systematically included in the analyses. This new approach opens up a more complex understanding of abuse, cover-ups, and disclosure. It can tackle both the vulnerant resilience of the perpetrators and the voluntary vulnerability of survivors in disclosing abuse.

The Paradoxes of The Second Surrealist Manifesto

Abstract By 1929, the Surrealist movement in France had begun to seriously stagnate, and there was widespread dissatisfaction among its members. Some of the latter wanted to pursue a closer alliance with the French Communist Party; others wanted greater freedom to explore various commercial avenues that were available to them. In order to remedy this situation, André Breton decided to publish a second manifesto, which, somewhat paradoxically, not only introduced the concept of ‘the supreme point’ but also redefined the nature of the Surrealist act. Offsetting those members who either abandoned the movement or were expelled from it, a new group of converts joined the Surrealist cause, including Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Luis Buñuel. These in turn contributed new creative energy to the enterprise and created a number of striking masterpieces.

Posters and protesters

Do social media incite protest movements, how? How does onsite protest shape online communication dynamics on social media? We examine the oft-debated relationship between social media activity and protest, considering the Yellow Vests or Gilets Jaunes movement in France. We use data of temporal and spatial distribution of Facebook activity and onsite events over a year of social mobilization to address these questions within a system of interacting online and offline activity. This study contrasts with others by analyzing mutual influences between online and offline domains while considering collective information diffusion in social networks. The results show that the relationship between social media activity and onsite protests is not constant nor one-sided, but mutual, and that it changes over the course of the collective action in specific and measurable ways. Using online and offline data, we show different mechanisms by which both domains of activity influence each other. Specifically, the creation of Facebook groups impacts the outbreak of protests, and in turn, this outbreak modifies the parameters of information diffusion between users on Facebook. In addition, Facebook content that pertains to the frames of the movement and mobilization affects onsite mobilization efforts. Our work contributes to the modeling of social movements as systems of online and offline events, expanding on studies that traditionally examine the impact of online activity over onsite protest.

4. Enterrés dans Paris occupé. Les tombes des Juifs dans les cimetières parisiens (1941-1944)

While it is not commonly known, Jews were able to participate in the social conventions surrounding funeral traditions during the Occupation. In her diary, Hélène Berr describes the funeral she attended in broad daylight at Montparnasse Cemetery in 1943. This article discusses which burial methods were available to Jewish people during their persecution in Paris. Are their grave sites still visible in the city’s cemeteries? Do those that remain show evidence of the government’s persecution? Do they indicate that the deceased passed away during the Occupation? What do the graves of the Jewish people who died during this time have to tell us?In Paris, regardless of whether they died “naturally,” i.e. from disease or starvation, or in internment camps, Jews could be: 1) laid to rest by their family in a personal tomb, 2) buried for free by the national community in trench graves, 3) interred by the association representing French Jews within the General Union of Jews in France (UGIF). A common characteristic of the remaining grave sites of Jews who died in the Drancy internment camp is the total absence of any mention of the persecution they faced in France during the Occupation. No inscriptions or any other form of evidence describes their tragic fate. Indeed, their tombstones do not mention the Drancy camp or their status as a prisoner at the time of their death.This article also explores one of UGIF’s unique strategies for burying the dead, namely the use of collective vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. This strategy represented a commonality between two distinct types of Jewish populations, namely French Israelites, who made up the majority of UGIF’s leadership, and immigrant Jews, most of whom came from Eastern Europe. Their funeral traditions differed, as did their preferred places of burial in Paris at the time. Members of the first group were buried in Montparnasse and Montmartre, while members of the second group were buried in the Bagneux and Pantin cemeteries. And yet, during the government-led persecution of Jews and the collaborationist regime, these two groups adopted similar funeral rites by requisitioning vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. The purpose of these organizations was to voluntarily unite Jews from Eastern European cities or their descendants. These individuals agreed to offer mutual aid to all members upon their death through the purchase of a collective and permanent tomb where the remains of all contributors and their families could be interred. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these organizations set up an ingenious system in France that made it possible to evade the French regulations that prohibited this type of collective vault. At the time, only family vaults were allowed.By creating its “burial” service using the funds and vaults of this type of organization, called “La Terre Promise,” UGIF also absorbed the assets of all Jewish associations in France, which had been dissolved after its creation in November 1941. From that point on, UGIF had control over the empty spaces in these collective vaults, which it decided to allocate to interned Jews who had died in the Drancy camp and had no pre-existing vaults.A paradox ensued. Jews who died as a result of the anti-Semitic movement in France, but who had not contributed to or joined these kinds of organizations, were nevertheless buried in these vaults, even though they did not have any ties with them. If descendants of the deceased are around today, what do they know? Victims were able to be re-buried by their loved ones in similar vaults after the war. After several years spent renewing the plot the UGIF purchased for his daughter, who died at the age of 4 as an internee in the Drancy camp, a Polish father who had returned from deportation finally had her body exhumed and re-buried in Bagneux in the collective vault of his village’s mutual aid society, before going into permanent exile in the United States himself. However, the direct descendants, who were cousins of the little girl, did not know she had died on French soil, nor that her current grave, an imposing collective monument, is located less than 600 feet from their family vault in the same cemetery.This example shows how the Jewish graves in Parisian cemeteries (because no Jewish cemeteries exist in France today) are the site of a fragmented remembrance that is separate from the persecution Jews suffered in occupied France.

Ideas and Values of the "Yellow Vests" Movement in France

The "yellow vests" movement that stirred up France in November 2018 was a complete surprise not only for its leaders, but also for the whole world. Spontaneously arising in the depths of social networks from a simple petition for refusing to raise taxes on petroleum products, the horizontal, decentralized association of ordinary citizens has become the largest social protest movement since the student unrest of 1968 and the longest in the history of the Fifth Republic. It made it possible to reveal serious problems in the social organism of the country, about which it was not customary to speak publicly before, and to begin to conduct a comprehensive dialogue on them. It also created a new symbol of the struggle of the grassroots of society for social justice - the yellow vest, which has already acquired an international status. This work is devoted to the study of the ideas and values of the "yellow vests" movement in France. Based on the analysis of a wide range of scientific literature, the results of sociological surveys, statistical data and media materials, an attempt is made to identify and describe the ideas and values of the "yellow vests" movement. Achieving this goal allowed us to get an idea of what motivated people who regularly went to protest rallies in 2018 - 2019. The results of the study can be useful both in the study of modern social protest movements and for conducting a general assessment of the French domestic political situation during the current "five-year plan".

“I want Black children to know that they should never, ever, ever settle for things that society wants to give to them”: Self‑published Black French and Black German Children’s Literature as Blacktivism1

In this paper, I analyze self‑published children’s books by Black French and Black German authors as a form of Blacktivism. I study how the authors’ comments about their work echoes with an activist narrative, and how they participate in a fight for racial justice, not only through the message of their children’s books, but through their choice of self‑publishing. First, I examine their motivations for writing and relate them to what I call “kidliteractivism,” to then show how self‑publishing can be a form of literary and racial insubordination, and finally I shed light on how self‑published children’s books by French and German authors of African descent are linked to broader Blacktivist movements in France and Germany.

Student Emotions during the May-June 1968 Protest Movement in France

The article is dedicated to analysis of the emotional side of the student protest activities on May-June 1968 in France. Different types of the historical sources have been used for better reflection of the events. The comparative historical and psychological methods make possible paying attention to the circumstances of the emotions. The conclusion is made that collective emotional portrait of the French students gave them a civic consciousness experience and developped free discussions on the problems of the universities and society.