Nineteenth-Century France Research Articles

Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-century France, by Michèle Miller Sigg

Birthing Revival: Women and Mission in Nineteenth-century France, by Michèle Miller Sigg

Spatial patterns of steam technology diffusion in nineteenth-century France

Spatial patterns of steam technology diffusion in nineteenth-century France

The Settler Colonial Ideal in Nineteenth-Century France: From Revolutionary Shipwreck to Settler Colonial Shores.

This article analyzes the published testimonies of French shipwreck survivors to trace the emergence of a settler colonial ideal in nineteenth-century France. Emerging from the encounters of French survivors with the men of the Anglo-World, this ideal encouraged compassionate, paternalist authority as a solution to the ongoing conflict of paternal despotism and disorderly fraternal freedom in France. The community of sentiment imagined in shipwreck testimonies was gendered and racialized, cultivating white compassion across colonial empires. These transimperial affective ties allowed the settler colonial ideal to persist in the early twentieth century, despite the abandonment of further projects for French settlement.

Overcoming Mutual Estrangement?

Despite their relevance in art history, comics have been largely overlooked in the research field. This article builds on recent scholarship that has addressed their historical marginalization in the field by focusing on Jean Dytar’s graphic novel #J’Accuse…! (2021). The graphic novel revisits the Dreyfus Affair, a pivotal event in nineteenth-century France that marked the rise of mass media by generating an unprecedented media coverage. Drawing from art history and media archaeology, the article explores how Dytar’s narrative intertwines past and present to propose a graphic theory of media and examine the notion of “historical event.”

Gender and the Biopolitics of Public Order: Notes from Spain

Abstract This paper critically addresses the logics of exceptionality inherent to emerging regulations of the gender field, with a focus on Spain’s recent self-determination-based regulation of gender. To achieve this, it offers a biopolitical analysis of the concept of “public order” and its influence on gender governance, drawing parallels to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception and exploring the connections between contemporary regulations and the gendered public order of nineteenth-century France. Finally, it analyzes the exclusions and restrictions that the Spanish trans law reserves for migrants, non-binary people, and minors, contributing to the ongoing discourse on the limitations to gender autonomy in contemporary Western societies.

Fragments of Thought: Considering Sophie Germain’s Process Epistemology

Abstract In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth-century France. Although forgotten after her death, Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focusing on her contribution to process epistemologies. I argue that Germain was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and that her philosophical work should be mapped in the wider field of process philosophies. In doing so I make connections between Sophie Germain and Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, particularly focusing on their take on feelings, prehensions, happy ideas, and events.

Through the glass, darkly: Femininity and the mirror in nineteenth-century France

This article proposes an interrogation of the tropes of female narcissism with a material history of the mirror and women's accounts of looking at themselves in nineteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of sources in order to trace the introduction of the vanity into domestic spaces, I argue that the newfound availability of the looking glass, while encouraging a self-objectification in the eyes of the others, likewise allowed female subjects the fashioning of a critical eye, the ability to construct and play with femininity and imagine alternative ways of being. By historicizing the act of looking at one's reflection, I aim to turn the female gaze back on itself, providing a contextualization of women's self-understanding and perception dependent on material and embodied practices.

Joseph W. Peterson. Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria.

Joseph W. Peterson. <i>Sacred Rivals: Catholic Missions and the Making of Islam in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria</i>.

Iran and French Orientalism: Persian in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France by Julia Caterina Hartley (review)

Iran and French Orientalism: Persian in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France by Julia Caterina Hartley (review)

Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

The Revolution Takes Form: Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France by Jordan Marc Rose

The Revolution Takes Form: Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France by Jordan Marc Rose

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France by Cheryl Krueger (review)

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France by Cheryl Krueger (review)

“Un son si étrange”: Writing Dissonance in Les Chants de Maldoror

Abstract: This article considers the role of unpleasant sound, dissonance, and noise in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror . The author presents his writing as dissonance, allegorizing his text as a strange-sounding lyre as he recounts the nefarious adventures of the misanthropic Maldoror. Despite the sonic nature of this text, evident even in its title, few have engaged with the sounds of Lautréamont’s work. I argue that Lautréamont uses dissonance as a metaphor for writing and that unpleasant sound in the form of frightening moans and a primal scream catalyzes the protagonist’s exploration of his fraught identity and facilitates his coming to writing within the narrative. Considered alongside emerging sound technologies from the time, Les Chants de Maldoror compels us to rethink modernist aurality in nineteenth-century France.

Time as Trauma, Poetry as Alternative: The Berezina, Lamartine, Baudelaire

Abstract: This article makes two principal arguments. First, that the experience of time in early nineteenth-century France differed significantly from current perceptions of time. Signs from the first half of the nineteenth century point to a very different experience of time, one in which the past as such—rather than the future—terrified and traumatized. Under the influence of figures such as Martin Heidegger, however, French theory and philosophy since the Second World War largely defined the human relation to time through futurity and the absolute limitation of mortality. Second, poetic texts can undermine such a coherent narrative of temporal epochs. A reading of Baudelaire's "Chant d'automne" shows how poetic forms can create simultaneous and incompatible time structures that undercut the possibility both of history in general and, more particularly, of literary history—that is, of subordinating literary temporalities to historical ones.

Designing deaf spaces: education, hygiene, and citizenship in nineteenth-century France

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction projects in the nineteenth century to emerge as modern educational spaces. Although these projects remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture, they were closely tied to contemporary discourses on education, hygiene, and citizenship. The renovation of the Paris Institute for Deaf-Mutes during the 1820s–30s engaged pressing questions about hygiene and social progress in the postrevolutionary era of national reconstruction. The architectural transformation of the Bordeaux Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls from the 1860s not only reflected the changing pedagogical focus from sign language to oralism; it was also imbricated in broader debates about laïcité and educational standardisation as France transitioned from empire to republic. Far from being marginal, these institutions functioned as key sites for working through notions of citizenship and national identity. Their histories reveal how architectural and material frameworks could serve to impose ideology on the one hand, and provide important grounds for the formation of a minority community on the other.

Translation as Politics: Translating Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines the three translations of Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler published in nineteenth-century France. Relying on Descriptive Translation Studies so as to challenge the traditional narrative about the political innocuousness of Karamzin’s travelogue, it reconstructs the historical contexts of the three publications in order to highlight the political agendas of their translators and/or translating patrons. Far from being the innocent product of the translators’ sheer curiosity, the three translations prove to be political objects, used at three key moments in the history of Franco-Russian relations in the nineteenth century, in order to call for political change, to try and restore Russia’s damaged reputation, or to attempt to forge new diplomatic alliances.

Growing Old in Nineteenth-Century France: Texts, Fictions, and Representations

Abstract: The introduction to this special issue about French fascination with the aging process provides an overview of cultural interest in this topic from the Second Empire to World War I. It sets the scene for other contributors' analysis of the ways in which nineteenth-century writers and scientists took up aging or aged figures to explore complex new social dynamics.

Blurred Humanity: The Grandparental Fantastic and the Values of Aging

Abstract: Within storytelling economies of nineteenth-century France, grand-parental authors and narrators operate ambiguously, often relegated to the outworn periphery of social life but still central to the circulation of inheritable tradition and cultural wealth. Further, Charles Nodier suggests, grandparents' age gives them privileged access not so much (or not only) to the heights of wisdom but also to the strangely "intermediary" and often devalued realm of the fantastic. This article sets off to explore Nodier's suggestion by means of five tales—by Clémence Robert, Delphine de Girardin, Madame de Ségur, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—in which encounters with the nonhuman push the grandparental fantastic to scrutinize the unstable values of intergenerational exchange.

A Study of the Translation and Influence of Tang Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

A Study of the Translation and Influence of Tang Poetry in Nineteenth-Century France

Don't Let Them Eat Horse

Review of: Kari Weil, Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France. Animal Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. xiv + 217 pp. 32 illus., 4 in colour. $97.00 (hb), $32.00 (pb).