Place De La Research Articles

Hedging Disaster

Hedging Disaster

Recent Articles

Recent Articles* Brian Michael Norton, Brian McCrea, Danielle Spratt, Karen Prior Swallow, Brian Michael Norton, Nora F. Crow, Alexander Pettit, Takeshi Sakamoto, and Manuel Schonhorn ASTELL Newton, Geoff. “Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper,” Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy, S. J. Newark: Delaware, 2010. Pp. 183–201. Emphasizing mystical and Neoplatonic elements in the 1767 correspondence between Sterne and Eliza Draper and the 1693–1694 correspondence between John Norris and Mary Astell, Mr. Newton examines divergences of divine and human love. At one end of the spectrum is Norris, for whom the love of God “ought to be intire and exclusive of all other Loves,” a principle Mr. Newton locates in the Jewish Shema, as spelled out in Deuteronomy 6:5 (“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart . . .”). Norris, according to Mr. Newton, “displaced whatever human sexual feelings he may have had” onto a “mystically conceived image of God,” which he characteristically described in “the erotic language of sexual love.” (A secondary and largely speculative argument [End Page 3] of Mr. Newton’s essay is that Norris may have had such feelings for the young Astell.) While sharing Norris’s suspicions of human sexuality and his aim of “displacing it onto a safer spiritual realm,” Astell had reservations about Norris’s rejection of all but divine love: For her, “the love of human friendship is vital and real, and cannot be excluded from her love of God, however much she says she agrees with Norris that it should be. . . .” Some seventy-three years later, Sterne continues Astell’s trajectory away from Norris, embracing not only the love of friendship, but sexual desire itself. For Sterne, as Mr. Newton aptly writes, “The love of God was not exclusive of all other loves, but was to be found, and indeed fulfilled, in expressions of care toward one’s neighbor, and if one’s neighbor was an attractive woman, he refused to be moralized out of his desire.” Sterne’s reversal of Norris here is so complete that some readers may wonder if it is necessary to go through Norris to arrive at this unobjectionable conclusion. Mr. Newton, however, asks us to consider this as a rigorously theological position on the nature and obligations of love. So while Sterne rejects Norris’s specific view of the relation between divine and human love, he does so, Mr. Newton insists, within the conceptual framework of Norris’s Christian Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Sterne’s desire for Eliza is neither a distraction from God, as Norris would have it, nor a romantic or sentimental indulgence, as secular readings may assume: more complexly, more mystically, it “intertwines the real woman with the holy presence.” In particular, Mr. Newton persuasively clarifies Sterne’s theological debts to Norris. Brian Michael Norton California State University, Fullerton BEHN Gonthier, Ursula Haskins. “ ‘La différence de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme’: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Anti-Slavery Debate,” BJECS, 31 (2008), 209–222. Behn’s role as an abolitionist writer has been bandied about for well over a century, probably as a cover to allow the reading of an “immoral” woman’s writing. In 1899, Wilbur Cross saw Oroonoko as a “humanitarian novel” intended “to awaken Christendom to the horrors of slavery.” Critics such as Edward Seeber and Wylie Sypher worked to correct this concept, which derived from the later eighteenth-century plays based on Thomas Southerne’s 1696 adaptation and from the French tradition established by Pierre Antoine de La Place’s translation, which provides the happy ending of the two royal slaves’ repatriation to Coramantien. La Place’s translations (there were several editions with expanded material) effect a paradigm shift in French thinking about Africans and slavery, epitomized by Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois in 1748 and the encyclopédistes. This study traces the impact of La Place’s translation and the influential review of it by Elie-Catherine Freron, to the bio-bibliographical notices by Pierre Bayle and Jacques Georges de Chaufepié. The essay significantly contributes to...

Identité humaine et vieillissement dans une lecture du Temps retrouvé de Marcel Proust

Dans Le Temps retrouvé , Marcel Proust au cours d’une matinée chez la princesse de Guermantes retrouve des personnes qu’il n’avait pas vues depuis longtemps. Le vieillissement a imprimé aux visages et aux silhouettes des modifications telles que Proust évoque un bal costumé et raconte des difficultés d’identification. Mais il constate que laborieusement ou sous l’effet du surgissement du trait du visage qui déclenche le souvenir, les personnes sont en général reconnues. Bien plus, cette reconnaissance malgré les changements ouvre à l’évocation d’un passé qui n’était pas perdu. Tel est le Temps retrouvé qui, du passé profondément enfoui au présent, raconte l’histoire d’une vie dans laquelle on peut plonger jusqu’aux souvenirs les plus lointains. Et le parcours de la vie n’est plus vu comme une déchéance emportée par le naufrage du Temps. Il est vu comme un parcours ascendant même si cette ascension fragilise et rapproche sans cesse de la mort. Le vieillissement décrit par Proust peut ainsi se lire comme une permanence identitaire, au sens de l’ipséité, au-delà des changements qui n’affectent que la mêmeté et préservent le lien continu de chacun avec son passé. L’être humain, si frêle dans l’espace, tire toute son ampleur de la place qu’il occupe dans le Temps. Telle est ainsi la fascination que Proust finit par ressentir à l’égard de la vieillesse qui montre un même Moi en perpétuel changement mais aussi et du même coup en marche vers la mort qui le déliera du Temps. In Time Regained (volume 8 of Remembrance of things past ), during an afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes, Marcel Proust met people he had not seen for a long time. The transformations of faces and features linked to old age seem to be a costumed ball and Proust experiences “difficulties in putting the required names to the faces around him” and in recognizing them. “Certainly, some women were recognisable because their faces had remained almost the same and they wore their grey hair to harmonise with the season like autumn leaves. But in others and in some men, their identity was so impossible to establish – for instance between the dark voluptary one remembered and the old monk of now – that their transformation made one think, rather than of the actor's art, of that of the amazing mimic of whom Fregoli remains the prototype”. But a fugitive impression or an effort of memory, abstracting “the natural feature from the travesty”, commonly allows recognition of persons. “One starts with the idea that people have remained the same and one discovers that they have got old. But if one starts by thinking them old, one does not find them so bad”. Despite changes, recognizing people allows one to refer to a past time which is not forgotten. Such is the “regained time”, which, from the past deeply hidden to the present, does tell a life in which we can reach the oldest memories. The course of life is not seen anymore as a decline caused by the wreck of Time. It is seen as an ascending path even if this ascent is also seen as an increase in one's fragility and weakness. Old age, described by Proust, can be interpreted as a permanent identity meaning “selfhood”, beyond changes which only affect “sameness” and preserve the unceasing link of each person with one's past. The human being, so weak in space, withdraws all his contribution to his place in time. This is why Proust is so fascinated by the feeling he has, regarding old age, which proves a permanent self maintaining its identity despite transformations over time, but also on the way to death which will set one free from Time.

Olbers's Planetary Explosion Hypothesis: Genesis and Early Nineteenth-Century Interpretations

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)1. IntroductionThe origin of the asteroids has been a subject of controversy ever since they were discovered in the early nineteenth century. The first suggestion as to how they might have originated - as the result of a catastrophic collision or explosion - was widely regarded as a tenable hypothesis by many in the scientific community. Even though he did not develop the idea on his own, Wilhelm Olbers accepted the concept and gave it life. This paper looks at how the idea developed in its early stages, and the ways it was both accepted and rejected by a range of different thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century.2. GenesisThe first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on 1 January 1 80 1 . On 28 March 1802 Wilhelm Olbers discovered the second, Pallas.' One of the first persons he notified was his close friend Ferdinand von Ende, who worked as a senior appellate official in the duchy of Brunswick Luneberg. Ende was an amateur astronomer, and was one of the twenty-four observers selected in 1800 to be a member of the 'Celestial Police', that loosely-knit organization formed by Baron Franz von Zach to search for the 'missing planet' between Mars and Jupiter.Less than ten days after the discovery of Pallas, Ende wrote to Olbers:Since your Pallas or Olbers, as de la Lande will certainly call it, will finish its revolution faster than Ceres it was possible for someone searching for Ceres to find it, and mistake it for Ceres. What conflicts originated between the new and old elements! What confusion did not originate from this, what conclusions of a totally perturbed orbit were not drawn - to cut a long story short: only experience or the accidental discovery of the true Ceres made it possible to escape out of this labyrinth. Thus, your discovery is extremely important at this point, so that, as both planets will probably hide in the rays of the Sun, they are not mistaken for each other when they reappear. - Furthermore now we can easily explain some of Mars's irregularities, whose orbit they must considerably perturb etc. And it is also remarkable that there where we expected one planet, we find two very small ones and if we can trust the observations made hitherto, they are still developing [planets]. - One almost wishes to say: once those two small planets had formed a bigger one; at least a comet shock is not more unlikely than throwing a comet against the Sun and the planets splinter off. Maybe, if de la Place's hypothesis of a contraction of the Sun's atmosphere is correct, a comet could be seized at exactly that moment which consequently would, as your Pallas does, complete its revolution on a very inclined orbit. - But these are only dreams that belong in the bedroom and not good society.2As this insightful letter makes clear, it was Ende who was the first to suggest in correspondence that Ceres and Pallas had once formed a larger planet later destroyed by a cometary collision. Olbers took the idea and propounded his own hypothesis, but he never credited Ende for planting in his mind the idea of a catastrophic origin for the small planets.3. Olbers Seeks the Opinion of Gauss and HerschelJust two weeks after reading Ende's letter, Olbers proposed very nearly the same concept to Carl Gauss:There is something unusual about the position of Pallas's orbit. In particular, the very close approach of the paths of Ceres and Pallas at some point gives rise to much thought. How? If Ceres and Pallas were fragments of a former larger planet that had been destroyed by colliding with a comet? It's still too early to indulge in such dreams; but a collision with a comet isn't totally impossible. A number of years ago I found the following solution to what was initially a seemingly difficult problem using probability theory. If I knew nothing more about a comet other than that it approaches the Sun closer than a planet, and the mean distance of the planet from the Sun is R, then the probability that it approaches the Sun before or after its passage through perihelion is as a. …

The Avignon Vision

PAJ 103 (2013), pp. 73–80.  73 On July 14th at 11:00 p.m., after the annual fireworks display along the Rhone, the large public square in front of the Popes’ Palace was transformed into a sound and light tribute to Jean Vilar, celebrated actor, theatre director of the Theâtre Nationale Populaire and founder and director of the Avignon Performing Arts Festival from 1947 to 1971. Thanks to KompleXKapharnouM, an arts collective from Villeurbanne commissioned by the festival to celebrate Vilar’s “birthday” (2012 marks the hundredth anniversary of Vilar’s birth), the facade of the Popes’ Palace and the back wall of the Banque de France became the backdrop screens for projections of “Place Public,” as the spectacle was called. Over eight thousand spectators caught glimpses of Vilar’s career and major contributions to French theatre history as they made their way from the Rhone to the Place de la Republique, surrounded by archival images of scenes from Vilar’s memorable productions, cartoon figures, interviews with his actors and staff, and other testimonials. The festival directors hoped that this would leave viewers with some sense of Vilar’s legacy, of his ideal to reach an audience of people from The Avignon vision

Front and Back Covers, Volume 28, Number 6. December 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 6Front coverLIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITEMost French towns have at least one street, avenue or square named after the Republic, in a tradition that dates back to the late 19th century. The Place de la République with its monumental statue is a familiar Parisian landmark, yet smaller towns would also adorn their squares, city halls and law courts with symbolic representations of the Republic, such as in this picture.A female allegory is taken to embody the values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Once brandished in the revolutionary struggle against the monarchy, against aristocratic and clerical privileges, these principles have retained their universal appeal.Liberté, égalité, fraternité are the common denominator that French politicians of all hues can agree on, apart from the far‐right Front National which is seen as standing outside this Republican consensus, as its policies would for instance openly deny equal treatment to residents with non‐European backgrounds.EU border policing practices show that the moral and political dilemmata epitomized in French politics have begun to affect the entire continent: How much freedom of movement are Europeans prepared to grant to those who want to partake in our relative wealth and freedom? What are the limits of liberty? How far do our feelings of fraternity extend in times of austerity?In this new Europe, with countries straining under unsustainable debt burdens, and seemingly less willing to share their remaining riches, discursive markers are shifting almost imperceptibly. Claims to freedom and equality may come from unexpected quarters, as Anne Friederike Delouis writes in her article on the French far‐right fringe.Back coverFORTRESS EUROPEProtesting asylum seekers and irregular migrants face police in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta, August 2010. The protest erupted amid migrants’ uncertainty over the length of time they were kept in the enclave before transfer to mainland Spain, enacted here in the protesters’‘shackling’ of each other in front of the cameras.Ceuta and its sister enclave Melilla have been key outposts in the EU's swiftly evolving border regime since 2005, when sub‐Saharan migrants launched what the media called a ‘massive assault’ on the territories’ perimeter fences. The ensuing crackdowns led to a displacementof routes towards the Canary Islands and an unprecedented naval operation in response. Still, migrants kept coming – across the Greek‐Turkish border in 2010 and to Italy in 2011. As a result, the EU is fast‐tracking a ‘European external border surveillance system’ involving further investments. For the border guards and defence contractors involved, clandestine migration has become big business.The high stakes in controlling migration stoke increasing tensions, however – as seen in Ceuta's 2010 protest and the desperate mass entry attempts across Melilla's high‐tech fence in 2012.As Ruben Andersson argues in this issue, such tensions highlight larger contradictions in the EU's border regime, which conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to the external border – while feeding on this very risk. An anthropological lens on this ‘game of risk’ reveals how the business of bordering Europe is a fraught enterprise in which border guards, defence contractors, migrants and smugglers are stuck in a feedback loop, generating ever stranger and more distressing sights at the southern frontiers of Europe.

Orages, Littérature et culture 1760-1830. Nº; 10: L'Œil de la police (review)

Reviewed by: Orages, Littérature et culture 1760-1830. Nº; 10: L'Œil de la police Daniel Ridge Flávio Borda d'Água , ed. Orages, Littérature et culture 1760-1830. Nº; 10: L'Œil de la police. Paris: Atlande, 2011. Pp. 275. ISBN: 978-2-35030-160-0 If the symbol of the eye has in the twentieth century been largely associated with the omnipresent State—think George Orwell's 1984—it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century closely associated with the Police. The image of the eye which graces the cover of Orages: l'Œil de la police does well to remind us that although they are closely associated, the Police and the State are two separate entities, particularly where politics are concerned. The institutional reforms that occurred in France around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century not only established the modern police system we recognize today, but also set in motion a way of conceptualizing the police within the popular imagination. The eight essays which compose the dossier paint an in-depth and complicated picture of an institution largely associated with surveillance and law enforcement. One quickly concludes, however, that this institution is foremost an urban organizational force whose relationship to the prevailing political system, as well as to the public, is often times uneasy. As Vincent Milliot notes in his contribution Catastrophe de la police et police de la catastrophe, "[L]a police doit savoir se mettre au service des citoyens pour renforcer sa légitimité; elle n'est pas qu'une force coercitive au service du souverain" (53). This careful balancing act between the state and the people is built into the very DNA of the police and is explored in various aspects throughout the collected work. The collected essays are organized chronologically from approximately 1760 to 1830 and take a global approach to the basic questions that open up Flávio Borda d'Agua's introduction: Who/what are the police? Where do they come from and what do they do? And lastly, what do we know about the police as an institution? The responses are markedly historical, literary and judicial, and draw upon police reports, newspaper articles, memoirs, literary sources, and verbal trials of censorship. Appropriately, the first two essays treat the police of the Ancien Régime. Catherine Deny focuses on the [End Page 155] ways that police preparation for urban fires in the city of Lille helped reinforce and structure the greater institution. She notes that police archives "di[sent] beaucoup de choses, moins sur son objet que sur elle-même, sur ses pratiques, son organisation, ses transformations" (18). Such preparations required the mobilization of an entire series of professions outside of the police, particularly those related to construction and transportation. In this way, the police are essentially an organizational force. Vincent Milliot, in his essay, uses the catastrophe of 1770, in which 132 people were crushed to death during a public celebration for the marriage of Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI at Place de la Concorde, to outline the process of reform that resulted. This event deeply humiliated the police and not only launched vociferous debates and accusations in the press, but led to a Parliamentary inquiry. The gross result was the enunciation of the principle that police authority needed to be exercised uniformly and centrally. The next three articles address the philosophical questions and very real concerns of police surveillance. Christophe Cave, in his article "L"œil' observé: critique du contrôle et de la surveillance chez Louis Sébastien Mercier et dans les Mémoires secrets", explores the double-edged sword of police power in relation to public security. On the one hand, Cave notes that Mercier celebrates the global project of police surveillance which helps ensure public safety and order, arguing that the ends justify the means when it comes to public safety. On the other hand, the authors of Les Mémoires secrets underscore the very real possibility of despotism in which the authorities are "prêts à écraser leurs concitoyens dans des temps d'alarmes et de troubles" (64). Cave notes that although control is political and that...

The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier by Keith Reader (review)

Reviewed by: The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier by Keith Reader Anne O'Neil-Henry Keith Reader , The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. vi + 184 pp. In the early hours of May 7, 2012, France's newly-elected socialist president arrived at the Place de la Bastille to address supporters, reaffirming the political and symbolic importance of this Parisian space. Imploring his audience to remember this moment, "trente-et-un ans après, jour pour jour," Mitterrand's Bastille election gathering, François Hollande proclaimed "Portez loin le message, souvenez-vous [End Page 252] toute votre vie de ce grand rassemblement de la Bastille."1 Throughout his compelling study of this quartier, Keith Reader describes the Place de la Bastille's historic prominence as an "important rallying-point for the Left" (3). Of Mitterrand's 1981 election, Reader writes that "the Place de la Bastille was filled with a deliriously celebratory crowd for what remains—possibly forever—its last grand political moment" (124). The fact that France's second socialist president should stage his post-victory celebration in this symbolically-charged space underscores the importance of the quartier as an active political breeding ground in France's collective memory; it also demonstrates the relevance of Reader's study, which anticipated Hollande's election by one year. In this richly intertexual book, Reader weaves together literature, film, and popular culture, social and political history and his own experience into what he calls a "defiantly eclectic [approach]" (18) to his "detailed cultural and historical survey" (1) of the Place de la Bastille. Covering the quartier's beginnings as the center of Paris's furniture industry through the 1989 construction of the Opéra-Bastille, Reader's chapters highlight its central role throughout important moments of Parisian history: 1789, Haussmannisation and the Occupation, among others. Though the chapters are structured chronologically, the author does not limit himself to texts produced during the designated period. Rather, Reader widens his approach to include works about the period; in his chapter on the pre-Revolutionary quartier, for example, he mines both the writings of Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Jean Diwo's late-twentieth-century historical trilogy Les Dames du faubourg for material. Consequently, his reader gains a sense of the history that transpired in this space, and of the lingering resonance of those events in this Parisian lieu de mémoire. The principle narrative here shows the transformation Reader sees taking place in the quartier: from a working-class, tempestuous political space (he calls this Faubourg) to the gentrified, cultural bobo haven as it exists today (he calls this Bastille). Faubourg is the "largely self-regulating community of skilled workers, often living in conditions of crowding and deprivation . . . [which] can be seen, if not as a powder-keg, then certainly as a fuse ready to be lit" (30); it is Louis Chevalier's "classes dangereuses"; it is Gavroche (whom Reader calls "at home [. . .] in the Faubourg" [50]); it is, finally, the [End Page 253] "revolutionary volcano that had erupted five times in less than a century" which, with few notable exceptions, became "dormant" after the Commune. Bastille is a "radical-chic residential and cultural centre" (5), where entertainment like movie houses and bals musettes became dominant during the Belle Époque, where workers could no longer afford to live, and where the Opéra-Bastille "unquestionably brought about the most dramatic changes in the area since the days of Haussmann" (136). Though Reader takes care to underscore the "enticing seediness" (103) of Bastille, as well as moments of political eruption there during the twentieth century (Mitterrand's 1981 election; 1936 demonstrations by the Front populaire), his study effectively argues that Bastille's "social and cultural composition had irreversibly changed" (140). The author maintains, however, that what is so crucial about this space is that its double mythology (center of revolutionary and cultural activity) co-exists in Paris's collective memory: "the area [is] an architectural palimpsest in which different, often divergent tendencies in the evolution of Paris as a whole may be read" (2). Reader grounds his methodological approach in both canonical and...

The Spread of Novels: Translations and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

The Spread of Novels: Translations and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century

Revolutionary Rites: Political Demonstrations at the Place de la Nation, Paris

Historians who study sites of memory emphasize the fluidity in meaning attached to those sites. The meaning of monuments is dependent upon changes in political context, which affect both how they are perceived and the uses to which they are put. With specific attention to the Place de la Nation in Paris and to Dalou’s monument, Le Triomphe de la République, this article argues that street demonstrations have played an important role in creating meaning for Parisian sites of memory. It focuses on four events in the history of the Place/monument: the inauguration of the bronze statue on 19 November, 1899; the demonstration marking the formation of the Popular Front on 12 February, 1934; the “bloody” 14 July demonstration of 1953; and the demonstration against Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front on 1 May, 2002. While the specific political context of these demonstrations varied, as did the character and purpose of the actors composing them, they all provided an occasion for the rehearsal of France’s revolutionary traditions, with particular reference to the Paris Commune. The transitory nature and specific purposes of particular demonstrations, however, restricted their ability to alter the monument’s significance. This is painfully apparent in the case of the Algerian demonstration of 14 July, 1953, which ended in a quickly forgotten massacre.

Holding a Mirror to Fiction: Voltaire and the History of Tom Jones1

AbstractThis paper sets out some striking parallels between Voltaire's life and events in Fielding's Tom Jones, a work that inspired Candide. I argue that the autobiographical dimension latent in Candide derives from the way Voltaire saw his own life story in terms of Fielding's fiction, revisited and corrigé by the contemporary translator Pierre‐Antoine de La Place.

‘A la place de l'autre…’: Otherness, gender and nation in two films by Agnès Jaoui

ABSTRACTAgnès Jaoui has stated not only that all her films are ‘about what it is to try to be à la place de l'autre, which is by definition, impossible’, but also that attempting to understand the other is ‘one of the meanings and the goals of life’. This article addresses what it means to put oneself in the shoes of others in Jaoui's Comme une image/Look at me (2004) and Parlez-moi de la pluie/Let's Talk about the Rain (2008). It argues that, in a multiethnic, postcolonial France where the 2000 gender parity law has opened the way for a recognition of difference, the films' use of an ‘aesthetic of oscillation’, manifested in a narrative tension between the personal and public spheres, reveals a progressive engagement with a political understanding of both gender and ethnicity, leading to increasing questioning of the French universalist republican model. At the same time, the imbrication of the personal and the public leads to an exploration of the self—other relation as both moral and political.

Les arrière-boutiques de la littérature: auteurs et imprimeurslibraires aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles ed. by Edwige Keller-Rahbé

of her work was wrongly credited as author of her poetry. Dominique Rabaté adds a broad-brushed overview repeating literary history as hagiography and its desacralization by subversive writers while Christine Baron, recalling the Barthes-Picard debates as symptomatic of the Ancients-Moderns confrontation, looks at cross-cultural writings representative of the stance toward a history not belonging to the writers sensing themselves trapped by it. Likewise, four essays compose the division on critical fictions. Mathilde Bombart focuses on Furetière’s case for allegory as social commentary, Larry Norman on how the English imported and varied the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Swift’s Battle of the Books, Marielle Macé on Sartre’s arguments against the social existence of literature , and Claude Coste on how Chevillard’s novel L’œuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster reminds us of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Borges, and Henry James. The essays that most convincingly articulate the arguments of this book appear in the chapter entitled “Microfictions.” Mélanie Leroy-Terquem introduces the case of Octave Uzanne and “bibliophile fiction.” This category in the margins of literature contains plagiarism, false texts, and assorted hoaxes then exposed by Martine Lavaud for their potential as subversive writing. In fine form Jeannelle explicates Georges Perec’s Le voyage d’hiver wherein Hugo Vernier exemplifies the prototype of “une allégorie critique” (189) in a pastiche that can “garantir l’authenticité de faux” (174) with Vernier as a plagiarist whose works have a date of publication indicating his own writing as originating plagiarism by others. Perec’s example of the literary mise-en-abyme sets up the model for a desynchronized literary space that Aude Préta-De Beaufort separately reveals in Pascal Quignard’s Albucius. Four other contributions make up a chapter on variations within literary genres. Stéphane Zékian shows how theater during the Parnasse revolts against the drama from the Thermidor while Sylvie Triaire has fun with Flaubert’s characters Bouvard and Pécuchet, Suzanne Lafont clearly shows the complex undermining of the anti-Semitism by Céline and Brasillach in Patrick Modiano’s La place de l’Étoile, and Denis Labouret explicates the pastiche by Jean-Louis Curtis in La Chine m’inquiète. A single definition of literary history would have been helpful as a common point of reference. In this collection, literary history refers alternately to a manual, a fiction, Lanson, and too many other meanings for the term to be a helpful common denominator for the reader. Nevertheless, we do have Michel Murat’s final essay showing how fiction, especially the novel, modifies and adapts the tradition that comes before it. If the reader looks at this essay first, then the other contributions give us variations on the subversion that the writing of literary fiction can accomplish. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne KELLER-RAHBÉ, EDWIGE, éd. Les arrière-boutiques de la littérature: auteurs et imprimeurslibraires aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2010. ISBN 978-2-81070118 -6. Pp. 262. 24 a. Research on the material book and the printer who produced it is no longer the purview of historians alone. Edwige Keller-Rahbé has edited a welcome and cohesive collection of essays exploring the relationships between sixteenth- and 952 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 seventeenth-century printers and authors from a literary perspective. In her informative introduction, she contends that a focus on these multi-faceted relationships contributes significantly to our understanding of French literary history during the ancien régime. Keller-Rahbé uses primarily seventeenth-century examples in her introduction, deliberately compensating for a dearth in studies on seventeenth -century printers. The essays also include four valuable analyses of sixteenth-century authors and “printer-booksellers” (“imprimeurs-libraires”). Not all eleven European contributors are familiar names on this side of the Atlantic, but the consistently thoughtful and well-researched essays provide an excellent introduction to these scholars. The contributors propose compelling hypotheses about the interdependence of printers and authors, relying on patterns of publications , conventional and often fictionalized paratext, and typographical characteristics . The thematic organization of the collection divides the essays into four complementary, and equally intriguing, sections. In the first...

The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier by Keith Reader

anyone keen on discovering the roots of the cultural misunderstandings that continue to influence Franco-American relations today. It is sobering indeed to learn that over two hundred years ago, Americans were already being taken to task for not devoting enough time to leisure... University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen READER, KEITH. The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-665-4. Pp. viii + 184. £25. Even though the Bastille prison was demolished shortly after 14 July 1789, countless visitors seek out its location for its role in the Revolution. Here, Reader warns that knowledge about the Bastille is no doubt incomplete and may even be erroneous. Taking the long historical view, Reader aims to provide “a simultaneous work of familiarization and defamiliarization” (18) as he invites us to question common assumptions and to deepen our knowledge of the Bastille and its area. The presence of two dissimilar structures which dominate the Place piqued Reader’s interest in the quartier. On the one hand, the 1840 Colonne de Juillet, erected in homage to the victims of the 1830 Revolution, evokes the civic unrest and street riots so common in the quartier’s history. Opposite, the 1989 Opéra is a palace of entertainment and refined culture, indicative of its current identity. The transformation of the Place de la Bastille and its neighborhood “may serve as well as any other as a prism through which changes in Paris, and hence in France as a microcosm of Europe, can be refracted” (19). Before the area was defined by the Bastille, it was known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Today this is the name of the quartier’s main street, which stretches eastward from the Place de la Bastille towards the Place de la Nation. In 1204, a Cistercian abbey was established on the site. The Bastille structure, originally a fortress built to defend eastern Paris, became a prison in 1403 and became a symbol of the brutality of the Ancien Régime. However, it was never the worst of Paris prisons and, indeed, the crowds who stormed it on 14 July 1789 were seeking ammunition , not freedom for prisoners; its seven inmates were freed as a side effect of the attack. For centuries, the area was a working-class district populated by laborers in the furniture and metalworking industries. It was known for its disposition to political protest, bawdy nightlife, sordid dance halls, and widespread prostitution. But, beginning in the nineteenth century, the social composition of the area evolved; traditional artisans were displaced by artists, antiquarians, architects, and gallery owners. By the late twentieth century, with the opening of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, the transformation was complete; the Faubourg SaintAntoine had become the Place de la Bastille, as it is known today. In addition to research in scholarly documents, this book draws on representations in artistic works—literary, pictorial, and cinematic—which portray life in the quartier or depict events which took place there. Conditions in the prison itself figure prominently in the third volume of Alexandre Dumas’s Les trois mousquetaires in a fictionalized treatment of “the man in the iron mask,” based on a mysterious prisoner whose identity was never established with certainty. The tale was retold in dozens of print and several film versions. In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, an important section is set amidst an1832 uprising in the Faubourg. Many writers—Daudet, Balzac, Simenon, and many others—portrayed scenes of 774 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 life in the quartier. Cinematic examples range from Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (released in 1945, with action set in the 1830s) to Cédric Klapisch’s Chacun cherche son chat (1996), in which several scenes document the demolition of the quartier’s impressive church of Notre-Dame-d’Espérance. It was replaced by a glass-fronted modern building. This in-depth study of the Place de la Bastille and its surroundings is a welcome addition to the study of the cultural history of Paris. The work is made even more appealing by the literary and cinematic depictions of life in the quartier. The final chapter’s...

Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793–1798 by Doina Pasca Harsanyi

HARSANYI, DOINA PASCA. Lessons from America: Liberal French Nobles in Exile, 1793– 1798. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010. ISBN 978-0-271-03637-3. Pp. xi + 204. $80. Meticulously documented and persuasively argued, this book tells the story of a group of French liberal aristocrats (Talleyrand, Liancourt, Noailles, and six less familiar figures) who, during the Reign of Terror, chose emigration to America over almost certain execution for alleged antirevolutionary activities. The first three chapters are devoted to setting the stage for the émigrés’ exile, describing in detail the situation in France on the eve and in the aftermath of the Revolution. The period between 1789 and 1792 saw their identity regress “from liberal nobles to just ‘aristocrats,’ and from enlightened leaders [...] to enemies of the people and agents of despotism” (20). These ex-members of the National Constituent Assembly, all firm believers in Enlightenment values, congregated in Philadelphia at the bookshop of one of their own, Moreau de Saint-Méry. Harsanyi discusses depictions of America already in circulation, such as that of Cornelius de Pauw, who considered living in the state of nature “the result of innate stupidity mistakenly interpreted as simplicity by European observers” (41) and that of Démeunier, an émigré himself, who believed that America represented France’s future. The heart of the study is the chapter on the émigrés’ American experience as recorded in memoirs, diaries, travel notes, and letters. The mix of “begrudging respect” for American institutions of government and “a sort of Schadenfreude” regarding sociocultural standards resulted in new stereotypes that replaced “the lofty prerevolutionary image of America” (57). Among the grievances: America’s lack of enlightened leadership (“the rich had no manners, no taste, and no class” [67]) and its obsession with making money (Liancourt claimed that “getting rich quickly was the only true ideal of all Americans” [61]). Not surprisingly, these “accidental tourists” (115) had no interest in assimilating into American culture (Liancourt, for one, proclaimed “I would perish if I had to stay here” [118]); rather, they wished to preserve the integrity of the values and principles under siege at home in the hope of restoring them once the political climate changed. In the penultimate chapter Harsanyi discusses the émigrés’ reactions to politics in America and their forays into business (particularly land development), destined to fail because of their aversion to money-making and their reluctance— as short-timers—to make long-term investments. By 1798 all but two of the members of Moreau’s coterie were back in France, some blessed with bright futures (Talleyrand embarked upon an impressive diplomatic career, for example), others not (the marquis de Blacons gambled away the money he had made in America and killed himself). The final chapter proper looks at how the lessons learned in America, where stability and social peace reigned (“uncouth and ignorant American elites” [77] notwithstanding), might be applied to the France to which the émigrés would return. Harsanyi’s talents for synthesis and interpretation truly shine in her conclusion, where she analyzes the extent to which the émigrés’ observations anticipated those of Tocqueville: she states unequivocally, for instance, that the émigrés were wrong about so many things American “because they so intensely needed to be right about France” (140), and that although Talleyrand and Liancourt did not have a direct influence on Tocqueville’s thinking , they and their cohorts “helped create the paradigm of intense scrutiny of America qua analytical tool, a precedent that Tocqueville was able to build on” (142). Though aimed primarily at historians, Lessons from America will appeal to Reviews 773 anyone keen on discovering the roots of the cultural misunderstandings that continue to influence Franco-American relations today. It is sobering indeed to learn that over two hundred years ago, Americans were already being taken to task for not devoting enough time to leisure... University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen READER, KEITH. The Place de la Bastille: The Story of a Quartier. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84631-665-4. Pp. viii + 184. £25. Even though the Bastille prison was demolished shortly after 14 July 1789, countless visitors seek out its location for its role...

La Place, Monbron, and the Origins of Candide

It has recently been argued that Candide was significantly influenced by Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones , through the French adaptation of that work published by Pierre-Antoine de La Place in 1750 under the title L’Enfant trouve . Candide, Cunegonde, and Pangloss can plausibly be seen to have evolved, respectively, from Tom Jones, Sophia Western, and the philosopher Square, as depicted by La Place. Voltaire was also inspired by the general structure of L’Enfant trouve and took up and adapted parts of that novel’s plot, starting with Tom’s childhood paradise in Somerset and ending with the masked ball in London where he desperately searches for his beloved Sophia. It seems reasonable to assume that in writing Candide Voltaire consciously challenges Fielding’s faith in ‘the controlling hand of Providence’, illustrated by Tom Jones ’s astonishing deus ex machina happy ending. In his 1913 edition of the tale Andre Morize opined that Candide may have been partly inspired by the cynical memoirs of Fougeret de Monbron (1706–1760). The present essay argues that these two narratives cross-fertilized in Voltaire’s mind, contributing in important ways to the characters that Candide portrays, to the narrative that binds those characters together, and to the language in which the whole is expressed.

La dénotation spatiale des noms d’événements

This paper deals with the spatial features of event-denoting nouns [EvNs], which are often overlooked in the linguistic literature on space. EvNs can refer to spatial entities, as they can be used as trajectors in localization sentences (Il y a une cérémonie dans l’église ‘There is a ceremony in the church’). Still, EvNs differ in several ways from nouns denoting prototypical spatial entities. They do not combine with complements denoting spatial extension (*une cérémonie de deux hectares ‘a four acres’ ceremony’), and they are associated with specific nouns and verbs of location (le lieu / *la place de la cérémonie ‘the location / the place of the ceremony’, Une cérémonie a lieu / *se trouve dans l’église ‘A ceremony takes place / is in the church’). It is assumed that the peculiarity of the spatial denotation of EvNs is due to their direct relation to time. The dependence between the spatial and temporal properties of EvNs shows when these nouns are used as landmarks (Pierre se rend à la cérémonie ‘Peter goes to the ceremony’). First, spatial eventive landmarks bear a temporal specification. Second, the temporal features of events determine their ability to be used as spatial landmarks.

What Happened?: Camus's La Chute , Shoshana Felman and the Witnessing of Trauma

What Happened? event is not a given. (Felman 194; emphasis in original) act of the woman remains unclear in the text: she may have jumped, she may have fallen, or something else may have happened. (LaCapra 78) At the end of the last century Raymond Gay-Crosier invoked practical reasons for declining to cite the more than two hundred works devoted specifically to Camus's La Chute (127). It would be a much more realistic undertaking to list critical studies of Camus's third novel in more recent years. Whilst there has been a palpable revival of interest in Camus, much of it has been from a postcolonial perspective, drawing impetus from the posthumous publication of Camus's final, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme in 1994 and focussing on his conflicted attitude to Algerian independence. Set around the foggy streets and canals of Amsterdam, La Chute offers less obvious material to the postcolonial critic than Camus's other major novels and short stories. However, as important texts by Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra have demonstrated, the novel is of substantial interest when read from the standpoint of trauma studies. La Chute refers explicitly to the killing of Jews during the Second World War and it revolves around questions of memory, narratorial reliability, and the entanglement of personal and collective histories. This article examines the issues of trauma and witnessing in La Chute principally by analyzing Felman's essay Camus' Fall, or the Betrayal of the Witness, which appears as a chapter in her and Dori Laub's Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Felman's discussion of La Chute is exemplary both as a committed reading and as an instance of how Camus's novel entices its readers into the pitfalls of misreading. What interests me here are the ways in which the novel both encourages and resists Felman's reading, implicating her--as it has perhaps implicated all its best readers--in a complex interplay of blindness and insight through which the text itself remains stubbornly opaque. Felman's interpretation of La Chute tells about the nature of reading in general and about the specific difficulties of producing a persuasive, comprehensive reading of Camus's most difficult novel. Felman makes an irresistible case for relating La Chute to the problems of witnessing and representation raised, in particular but not uniquely, by the Holocaust. invitation to read the novel in the dark light of the Holocaust is issued in its opening pages when Cla-mence tells his interlocutor that he lives in the former Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. This establishes Amsterdam, and Europe more generally, and the text of La Chute, as spaces which are marked by an indelible crime: Moi, j'habite le quartier juif, ou ce qui s'appelait ainsi jusqu'au moment ou les freres hitleriens y ont fait de la place. Quel lessivage! Soixante-quinze mille juifs deportes ou assassines, c'est le nettoyage par le vide. J'admire cette application, cette methodique patience! Quand on n'a pas de caractere, il faul bien se dornner une methode. lei, elle a fait merveille, sans contredit, et j'habite sur Ies lieux d'un des plus grands crimes de l'histoire. (701) Although there is no reason to believe that Clamence is directly or indirectly a victim of the Holocaust, he can readily be seen as suffering the effects of some kind of trauma, acting out an experience that is not fully recalled and assimilated. This could explain, for example, his sense of doubleness and falseness, his dissociation from his own acts, his sense that he is playing a game or performing a role, and the oscillations between forgetting and partial remembering which recur throughout his narrative. It might also help to explain the self-consciously unreliable nature of his narrative. As Cathy Caruth explains, trauma narratives almost invariably raise the question of their own truth: The problem [of truth] arises not only in regard to those who listen to the traumatized, not knowing how to establish the reality of their hallucinations and dreams; it occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and experience of the traumatized themselves (Introduction, 5). …

History, Memory, and Instantaneity in Edgar Degas's Place de la Concorde

In Degas's Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters proves to be layered with political signification, making it an eloquent visual account of the vexed nature of early Third Republican democracy. Most prominent among its signs is the erasure of the sculpture Strasbourg behind Lepic's hat, creating an absence evocative of France's territorial loss. Degas's protomodernist vocabulary—fragmentation, cropping—also appears in the popular imagery expressing the contradictions of the Third Republic's contested early history. Ultimately, Place de la Concorde emerges as a careful record of the ideologies of Impressionism's formal language.

Réparateur de destin par Cyrille Fleischman

où se trouvent la force et l’originalité de l’écrivaine dans la narration d’un sujet si sensible. California State University, Long Beach Najib Redouane FLEISCHMAN, CYRILLE. Réparateur de destin. Paris: Fayard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-213-65436-2. Pp. 152. 13,50 a. Cyrille Fleischman, winner of the 2002 Max Cukierman Prize for his literary contribution to the promotion of Yiddish culture, demonstrates his expertise through the thirteen stories comprising his most recent work. Each story recounts its protagonist’s dissatisfaction with fate and his or her efforts to rectify this incongruity . Fleischman’s use of understatement, irony, and cultural particularities emphasizes the milieu of Parisian Ashkenazi Jews while underscoring the universality of the situations depicted. In “Sur la terrasse de la Samaritaine et ailleurs,” for example, overly frugal Mr. Eisenblic has resigned himself to spending his summer vacation on the rooftop terrace of La Samaritaine department store; there, he can enjoy the sunshine and open air for free, even though it means disappointing his wife by not taking her to the beach resort of Néris-les-Bains in September. He is satisfied with his plan until a friend of his wife’s occupies “his” table on the rooftop. As she asks him to reconsider accompanying his wife and two female friends, Mr. Eisenblic becomes intrigued by that possibility. During their conversation he realizes how young-looking, attractive, and well-perfumed she is, and he walks her home part of the way. This leads him to speculate about the third woman in the group as he seriously entertains thoughts of leaving on vacation with the three women. If the first story pokes fun at being overly thrifty and set in one’s ways, “L’avis du docteur Artzig” demonstrates the wisdom of letting a problem resolve itself. When Dr. Artzig finds his two neighbors arguing about the volume of the radio that one of them plays, he invites them into his apartment for a “schnaps” so they can listen to his favorite Yiddish singer. Neither neighbor wants to stop at the doctor’s. As he insists, they lose their momentum for fighting. When they turn down the invitation and leave, he laughs because he has defused their argument by doing nothing. The message here is universal: knowing when to keep silent is as important as knowing when to speak. Besides its commentaries on human behavior, Réparateur de destin denotes a specific Parisian Ashkenazi Jewish milieu. Numerous references to La Samaritaine, la rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, the subway station Châtelet, le boulevard Sébastopol, la place de la République, and the Bagneux Cemetery designate this cultural group’s neighborhood. Other details, such as the newspaper Unzer wort in Yiddish and such terms as “schlémil” (66) and “‘houtzpah” (94)—no French translation would do these connotations justice— demonstrate the exotic aspect of these stories. Furthermore, even the Yiddish names of the characters exemplify the narrator’s tongue-in cheek attitude towards them. The expression, “le docteur Artzig,” for instance, alludes to the “doctorly” doctor. Mr. Eisenblic (“wink”) changes his opinion instantaneously about going on vacation with his wife and her friends. Similarly, “Sender Aufzug” in Réparateur de destin climbs socially from poverty to riches. The German word “Aufzug,” meaning “elevator” in English, aptly describes the protagonist’s upward economic progress. Fleischman thus acquaints the reader with cultural specifics about the Reviews 213 Ashkenazi Parisians: he shares their language, newspaper, and daily parameters. His true talent, however, lies in his ability to make his characters universal despite their specificity. The impressionable Mr. Eisenblic’s physical attraction for his wife’s friend amuses the reader: a pretty woman will turn any man’s head no matter how indifferent he thinks he is. Likewise, the purposely reticent Dr. Artzig, and the socially mobile Sender Aufzug, in light of their desire to improve their interpersonal relationships and economic standing, respectively, could be any man indeed. University of Texas, El Paso Jane E. Evans FOURNIER, JEAN-LOUIS. Poète et paysan. Paris: Stock, 2010. ISBN 978-2-234-06324-2. Pp. 155. 15,50 a. Humoriste, écrivain et réalisateur de télévision, Jean-Louis Fournier...