Provincial France Research Articles

Eating Out in Provincial France 1965-1977

Eating Out in Provincial France 1965-1977

Printing and Bookselling in Rodez, 1624–1820: An Essay in Socio-Cultural History

This article focuses on the history of the Rodez printing firm in provincial France from 1624 to 1820 (although the firm ran until 1984). In contrast to the world of clandestine printing and bookselling, very little is known about the lives of ordinary sedentary printers in ancien-régime France. The paper is organized in three parts and considers the following issues. How did the firm operate, who worked in it, what training was required, and what was produced? How did this change over time? Secondly, this was a family firm, so we may ask how was it kept in the family, and how did the family fare as it made a living out of printing? Here we have an insight into the history of an artisan family over nearly 200 years, the ascension of an artisanal family to the level of respectable bourgeoisie. The third area considered is the possible contribution to understanding the cultural world of a provincial town. The firm printed and sold books, and account books and order books give us further information, though of a fragmentary nature. From this it is possible to raise questions about recent research on the starkly contrasting world of Enlightenment bestsellers.

Patrick Young, Enacting Brittany. Tourism and Culture in Provincial France, 1871-1939

On sait combien le tourisme a pu ou peut etre encore facteur d’ouverture pour certaines regions et combien, meme - voire surtout - dans un contexte mondialise, les specificites locales, loin de disparaitre, ressurgissent et nourrissent un mouvement touristique. Fait culturel essentiel, il interagit et retroagit avec les cultures locales. En provoquant la rencontre des personnes, le brassage des idees, la confrontation, pas toujours paisible, des pratiques, il oblige les protagonistes a change...

Lire et visiter la France de Balzac. Touristes et écrivains anglophones en France provinciale, 1880-1920

Cet article analyse l’intérêt porté par les voyageurs anglophones aux œuvres de Balzac et aux sites qui leur sont associés. Se concentrant sur la période de 1880 à 1920, qui est marquée par l’essor du tourisme littéraire ainsi que par l’apogée de la réputation de Balzac dans le monde anglophone, il interroge la relation tissée, dans des récits de voyage sur la France provinciale, entre les textes littéraires, les lieux visités et l’expérience du voyageur. Il démontre que les attentes et les impressions de voyageurs tels que Henry James et Matilda Betham Edwards sont façonnées par leurs lectures, et ce à un tel point que les imaginaires littéraires associés au lieu suscitent parfois plus d’intérêt encore que la réalité.

Marcel Proust et l’imaginaire gothique

By associating the imagination of progress with its corollary, permanent innovation, one has the feeling that modernity proceeds from a break with the past, as reflected by avant-garde artists. Nevertheless, as Malraux said, Literature dwells on past works rather than on reality, and this leads us to reflect on our legacies. It is this question that this article proposes to raise in Proust’s work, through a dual approach: 1) a superficial reading suggests that in Remembrance of Things Past, the novelist admires the aristocracy whose slow disappearance he would bemoan; yet nothing is more wrong, since he is very ironic about its court mentality and its callous heart. On the other hand, Proust takes aristocracy into consideration as a group belonging to a particular territory and gives it a place in the social imaginary. Consequently, the question of identity does not arise from oneself but refers to the place where one comes from; 2) it is undeniable that RTP brings back to life something of the French identity: the village of Combray represents the provincial and traditional France, its churches are places of memory more so than places of worship—and the writer maintains a lively relationship with all of this.

African Cultural Festivals and World Literature

Abstract In an era where cultural festivals multiply, so-called African festivals have spread in Africa, but also outside of the continent, in major cities as well as in little-known villages, for example in provincial France. What are some of their implications and effects in the case of francophone African literature? These events privilege a continental representation of literature, which often reveals itself as problematic when confronted with the complex geographies of the texts and authors represented at these festivals. Using cross-disciplinary methodology, this critical inquiry reads different reallocations of this persistent African matrix through a typology and contemporary examples (Kossi Efoui’s writings, the “Étonnants Voyageurs” and “Plein sud” festivals). As an object of study, festivals bear witness to the necessity of expanding the toolbox of the (world) literary scholar by making use of documentary sources and adopting ethnographic approaches. It reveals a structural tension between an African map and various concrete territories, where local issues matter often more than this continental category, and can affect the form and content of literature itself.

Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver

Reviewed by: Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver Stephen Conlon Satirical and elegiac Stephen Oliver. Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected. Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2016. Illustrated by Matt Ottley. A$18.95 ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7 My first encounter with Stephen Oliver was to see and hear him reading his poems at the Sandringham Hotel at the then-grungy [End Page 184] lower end of King Street, Newtown in the late 1980s. It was a Saturday afternoon, on a stage usually occupied by bands, and he was in his element as he engaged with the punters, giving as good as he received from them. This was no "Poets in the Park" gig, no audience of "peers" politely responding to one of their own. He, along with Vicki Viidikas, was reading to what most of the then poets around town in Sydney may have disparagingly referred to as swine before which their pearls were not to be spread. They were both relishing the incongruous situation as they were reading their work to a hostile or at least an unappreciative audience. Several decades later, reading Oliver's Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, I realize how grotesque this "half forgotten, half remembered" (to use his image from the title poem of Oliver's combination of some of his old and new voices) past I share with the poet in that hotel may have been. Oliver is willing to immerse himself in the low as well as the high, and fittingly so for a poet with a taste for the grotesque. Satire, at least the kind that Oliver writes, could not be written any other way. There is nothing precious or prissy about the language of the poems. Again, from "Gone": Time accumulates like dust on a mat—old gas works by the tavern block the view,a popular spot for the post-pub screw;but in the end we grew quite sick of that. The images cut in many ways—the highs and lows of cultural cross-currents. Oliver's command of this code-switching technique is one of the secrets to the metamorphic power of these satires to bring the past back to life while also charting the ways that past has passed away. The poet's voice must be big enough to hold all of these times, places, people in it, as it reaches for those shocking cadences that only great art may achieve. Matt Ottley, the Australian award-winning children's book illustrator, adds even more depth to the resonances of orality in the poems with his black-and-white drawings. Ottley's dark visions in Gone give a complementary and sardonic response to many of the pieces. Satire itself may be a dead art, though in the current political climate, the announcement of such a death may be premature. Oliver's poems keep this voice alive, as he dialogues with Larkin, Auden, Byron, and Horace from the distant past and with Baxter and more contemporary poets in the present. The channels are there, in the prosody of the satires: the rollicking rhythms of ballads, the rhyme royal from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde appropriate for a poem in which his breaks with his own poetic influences are partly embodied in the rhyme scheme's allusion to the originator of that scheme. The notes at the end of the volume in a mock-academic tone demonstrate Oliver's knowledge of the forms he uses. Oliver's voices, as I recall them over the decades, are the same voices heard through a different amplifier in these satirical poems. In Montaigne's words about how he hears his own voice and wants his son's to be "a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque," Oliver's tones could come from sixteenth-century provincial France as much as from Wellington, Dunedin, or Sydney. Montaigne would have recognized his voice as kindred. The reader of Oliver's satires needs to be well versed in the traditions of satire, the grotesque, parody, modern, classical, and ancient poetry, as well as the concrete details of the two worlds of New Zealand...

Satirical and elegiac

Reviewed by: Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver Stephen Conlon Satirical and elegiac Stephen Oliver. Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected. Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2016. Illustrated by Matt Ottley. A$18.95 ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7 My first encounter with Stephen Oliver was to see and hear him reading his poems at the Sandringham Hotel at the then-grungy [End Page 184] lower end of King Street, Newtown in the late 1980s. It was a Saturday afternoon, on a stage usually occupied by bands, and he was in his element as he engaged with the punters, giving as good as he received from them. This was no "Poets in the Park" gig, no audience of "peers" politely responding to one of their own. He, along with Vicki Viidikas, was reading to what most of the then poets around town in Sydney may have disparagingly referred to as swine before which their pearls were not to be spread. They were both relishing the incongruous situation as they were reading their work to a hostile or at least an unappreciative audience. Several decades later, reading Oliver's Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, I realize how grotesque this "half forgotten, half remembered" (to use his image from the title poem of Oliver's combination of some of his old and new voices) past I share with the poet in that hotel may have been. Oliver is willing to immerse himself in the low as well as the high, and fittingly so for a poet with a taste for the grotesque. Satire, at least the kind that Oliver writes, could not be written any other way. There is nothing precious or prissy about the language of the poems. Again, from "Gone": Time accumulates like dust on a mat—old gas works by the tavern block the view,a popular spot for the post-pub screw;but in the end we grew quite sick of that. The images cut in many ways—the highs and lows of cultural cross-currents. Oliver's command of this code-switching technique is one of the secrets to the metamorphic power of these satires to bring the past back to life while also charting the ways that past has passed away. The poet's voice must be big enough to hold all of these times, places, people in it, as it reaches for those shocking cadences that only great art may achieve. Matt Ottley, the Australian award-winning children's book illustrator, adds even more depth to the resonances of orality in the poems with his black-and-white drawings. Ottley's dark visions in Gone give a complementary and sardonic response to many of the pieces. Satire itself may be a dead art, though in the current political climate, the announcement of such a death may be premature. Oliver's poems keep this voice alive, as he dialogues with Larkin, Auden, Byron, and Horace from the distant past and with Baxter and more contemporary poets in the present. The channels are there, in the prosody of the satires: the rollicking rhythms of ballads, the rhyme royal from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde appropriate for a poem in which his breaks with his own poetic influences are partly embodied in the rhyme scheme's allusion to the originator of that scheme. The notes at the end of the volume in a mock-academic tone demonstrate Oliver's knowledge of the forms he uses. Oliver's voices, as I recall them over the decades, are the same voices heard through a different amplifier in these satirical poems. In Montaigne's words about how he hears his own voice and wants his son's to be "a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque," Oliver's tones could come from sixteenth-century provincial France as much as from Wellington, Dunedin, or Sydney. Montaigne would have recognized his voice as kindred. The reader of Oliver's satires needs to be well versed in the traditions of satire, the grotesque, parody, modern, classical, and ancient poetry, as well as the concrete details of the two worlds of New Zealand...

Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France, 1848–1914: Harmony and Hostility

Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France, 1848–1914: Harmony and Hostility

Book Review: Alan R. H. Baker: Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France 1848–1914: Harmony and Hostility

Book Review: Alan R. H. Baker: <i>Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France 1848–1914: Harmony and Hostility</i>

Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900 by Jonathan Simon

Reviewed by: Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900 by Jonathan Simon Anne Hardy Jonathan Simon. Diphtheria Serum as a Technological Object: A Philosophical Analysis of Serotherapy in France 1894–1900. Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017. x + 156 pp. Ill. $90.00 (978-1-4985-3147-4). The two key words in the title of this book, "technological" and "philosophical," should not discourage readers interested in infectious disease, public health, [End Page 393] immunization, pharmacy, and the political aspects of medicine from adding it to their reading. Although Simon's approach is avowedly drawn from the philosophy of technology, his study enriches our historical understanding of the history of the diphtheria antiserum in refreshing and unexpected ways. In their effect on human bodies, medicines are, after all, as much technological objects as scalpels and syringes, and this understanding gives Simon's study originality and message. From his account of how the serum was made using the blood of specially selected and cared-for horses, through to his masterly analysis of how the serum was inserted into France's political economy as an instrument of revenge on German medical science for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, this is no standard history of drug development, a genre that Simon describes as being "close to the model of biographies for living historical figures" (p. 142). The first three chapters deal with the making of the serum itself, from the stable and laboratory through the process by which the serum passed from generic substance to recognition as a legal medicine, to the forging of an international consensus on the effectiveness of the drug. It was indicative of the degree to which medicine had already become scientific that the doctors in the 1890s were not content simply to accept the effectiveness of the preparation—they wanted to know why and how it worked. The later chapters focus on how this technology operated to shape late nineteenth-century French society and was simultaneously shaped by it. Chapter 5 considers medical practice—how the drug was administered, the emergence of bacteriological diagnosis of diphtheria and its links to serotherapy, and the existing surgical remedies, tracheotomy and intubation, in France, although Simon admits to omitting to examine key considerations needed for understanding the role of serum in "a specific historical, political and national context" (p. 70). He goes on to consider how the serum was "branded," and became not only a triumph of modernizing medicine for the Pasteur Institute, but also a transformative modernizing agent for the French medical profession, even though there were medicos who remained unconvinced. A large part of the cultural and medical significance of the antiserum lay in the fact that diphtheria was perceived as a dangerous disease of small children, and children in France were of particular importance at this period, since the country's population growth was very small compared to substantially rising populations in Britain and Germany. This demographic concern has escaped Simon, but he is good on the gendered aspects of the serum story, on the importance of women as mothers on the one hand and, on the other, in the manufacture of the serum (a woman's job), and in nursing roles supporting the male medical administration of treatment. The contemporary impact of the antiserum on France was further illustrated by Roux's elevation to Pasteurian status as a national hero, although he was eclipsed as such by Pasteur in the later twentieth century. The final chapter in this book, "Serum and French Politics," is perhaps the most intriguing, turning as it does on the political aspects of the serum, not just internationally, in the antagonism toward Germany, but also internally, in the complex and historic regional resentments against the power of Paris that motivated the French provinces. Diphtheria antiserum became the means by which [End Page 394] towns and cities across France set out to produce and supply serum locally, and so contributed significantly to improved medical education in provincial France. Anne Hardy London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Baker R.H Alan, Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France 1848-1914 Harmony and Ho

Baker R.H Alan, Amateur Musical Societies and Sports Clubs in Provincial France 1848-1914 Harmony and Ho

Christopher H. Johnson. Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880.

Christopher H. Johnson. Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880.

Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880. By Christopher H. Johnson.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+346. $65.00.

<i>Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880</i>. By Christopher H. Johnson.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. xii+346. $65.00.

Le Terroir, l'Histoire, et la Vierge Noire : ce qui ne passe pas (encore) dans Soumission de Michel Houellebecq

ABSTRACTIn Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel Soumission, France becomes an Islamic Republic. The narrator, François, a literature professor who lives in Paris, seeks refuge in southwestern France to escape from the civil war following the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate in the Presidential elections. François acknowledges in the beginning of the novel his lack of interest in either history or politics, but ends up in a medieval village named after the Frankish prince who stopped the advance of the Muslim armies from Spain in 732 C.E.There, François meets by chance one of his colleagues from the University of Paris, similarly exiled in provincial France, who cooks a delicious regional meal, from lamb shank to duck confit, for him. The narrator then goes to Rocamadour, one of the architectural jewels of medieval Christendom, and falls under the spell of a statue of the Black Madonna. His attraction to medieval Christianity and Périgord's haute cuisine is not enough, however, to convince him that France can be saved from the decadence induced by modernity. Having returned to Paris, François considers converting to Islam in order to resume his teaching position at the Sorbonne and be given three wives by the Muslim authorities.

Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France 1670–1880. By Christopher H. Johnson. Cornell University Press. 2015. ix + 345pp. $65.00.

Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France 1670–1880. By Christopher H. Johnson. Cornell University Press. 2015. ix + 345pp. $65.00.

Autoexoticism with Promotional Purposes? Samuel-Henri Berthoud and Provincial Literary Ruse in Nineteenth-Century France

“There speaks the provincial!”—Goncharov, The Same Old StoryIn nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Becoming Bourgeois. Love, Kinship & Power in Provincial France, 1680–1880

Becoming Bourgeois. Love, Kinship & Power in Provincial France, 1680–1880

Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880. By Christopher H. Johnson (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015) 345 pp. $65.00

<i>Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880</i>. By Christopher H. Johnson (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015) 345 pp. $65.00

Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880. By Christopher H. Johnson

<i>Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880</i>. By Christopher H. Johnson