Twentieth-century France Research Articles

Vicious Circles: Immigration and National Identity in Twentieth-Century France

IN AUGUST 1993, THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT'S Journal Officiel published the terms of newly-adopted legislation designed, according to Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, to stem the tide of would-be immigrants threatening to overwhelm France's political, cultural and social institutions. Impelled by ambitions to see the country achieve a state of policy nirvana he called Zero Immigration,' between May and August 1993, Pasqua ushered into existence a cluster of laws designed to curb the entry of foreigners at the borders and to assert greater control over the conditions of their legal residence in France.2 Described by Le Monde's Philippe Bernard as a very severe toughening3 of policies with respect to foreigners, the Pasqua legislation crowned a twenty-year effort by the French state to halt the influx of immigrants-particularly workers from North Africa and other former colonies whose labor had fueled the postwar industrial expansion that began to slow in the early 1970s. Pasqua's sweeping policy initiative, like its more piecemeal antecedents of the preceding decade,4 places French society at considerable odds with its venerable post-revolutionary tradition of welcoming foreigners in need. Born of a commitment to universalist principles of inalienable human rights, modern France's open-door policy of granting refuge to persecuted individuals and minorities-singularly generous by European standards-is being sorely tested in the postcolonial era, in which former imperial subjects and their progeny have fled the grinding poverty of economies left underdeveloped by a century or more of colonial exploitation.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais. Edited by JEREMY JENNINGS. Basingstoke-London, Macmillan; New York, St Martin's Press, 1993. xiv + 233 pp. Hb £40.00. KEITH A. READER KEITH A. READER KINGSTON UNIVERSITY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLIX, Issue 1, January 1995, Pages 109–110, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLIX.1.109 Published: 01 January 1995

Review. Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais. Jennings, Jeremy (ed.)

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century France: Mandarins and Samurais. Edited by JEREMY JENNINGS. Basingstoke-London, Macmillan; New York, St Martin's Press, 1993. xiv + 233 pp. Hb £40.00. KEITH A. READER KEITH A. READER KINGSTON UNIVERSITY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLIX, Issue 1, January 1995, Pages 109–110, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLIX.1.109 Published: 01 January 1995

Land and Money

"The Russian crisis is in particular and above all an agricultural crisis," Pavel Miliukov wrote in his book [The Russian Crisis],1 which was published at the beginning of the twentieth century in France and the United States. This was a true but incomplete assessment because the irreversible crisis of agriculture—as the economic foundation of Russian life—presented the entire Russian agrarian society based on this foundation with the final limit. This was its crisis and a sign of rural Russia's ever more appreciable lag behind Western countries, which were becoming increasingly industrialized and urbanized.

Land and Money

"The Russian crisis is in particular and above all an agricultural crisis," Pavel Miliukov wrote in his book [The Russian Crisis],1 which was published at the beginning of the twentieth century in France and the United States. This was a true but incomplete assessment because the irreversible crisis of agriculture—as the economic foundation of Russian life—presented the entire Russian agrarian society based on this foundation with the final limit. This was its crisis and a sign of rural Russia's ever more appreciable lag behind Western countries, which were becoming increasingly industrialized and urbanized.

Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought

Long considered 'the noblest of the senses', vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes' writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of 'scopic regimes'. Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France. William H. Schneider

<i>Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France</i>. William H. Schneider

The Large Family Firm in Twentieth-Century France

This survey of family capitalism in twentieth-century France demonstrates that, by using alternatives to managerial structures, especially the holding company, families were able to reconcile expansion with personalised control, without sacrificing efficiency. This article demonstrates that familial control, most usually associated with the staple industries, also persisted in new industrial sectors and in retailing in the inter-war period and into the post-war era. Since by the inter-war period many of the firms in these sectors were large in terms of employment, levels of integration and capitalisation, it appears that personal capitalism should not always be equated with stagnation and conservatism: This survey also shows that the decline of family ownership and control in large-scale companies was not always the product of the quest for scale economies. Indeed, by highlighting the contrasting economic and sometimes political pressures facing firms in a range of sectors, it demonstrates how difficult i...

Limiting Reason's Empire: The Early Reception of Hegel in France

Limiting Reason's Empire: The Early Reception of Hegel in France BRUCE BAUGH 1. THE PROBLEM OF PAN-LOGICISM THE STORY OF HEGEL'S RECEPTION in France is more complicated and more tangled than the standard accounts would have us believe.' From the standpoint of the generation of philosophers that came to prominence after the Second World War, it appeared that a genuine knowledge of Hegel did not exist in France prior to the publication ofJean Hyppolite's Gen~seet structure de la Ph~omknologie de Hegel (1946) ' and Kojeve's Introduction ~ la lecture de Hegel (x947),s both hailed at the time of publication as the first major French interpretations of Hegel.4 In large part, this version of events still predominates, in ' See in particular Vincent Descombes, Le M~me et l'autre: quarante-cinq am de la philosophic fran~aise (Paris: Minuit, 1979);in English, Modern French Philosophy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 198o); Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Satire to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975); Michael S. Roth, Knowingand History."Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Judith Buffer, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988);Jacques d'Hondt, Hegel eth~g~lianisme(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982). Further references to Descombes are to the English translation. 'Jean Hyppolite, Genkseet structure de la Ph~aomtnologie de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1946); English translationby Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman, Genesisand Structure ofHegel's "Phenomeno/ogy of Spirit" (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UniversityPress, 1974). sAlexandre Kojtve, Introduction gzla lecture de Hegel, texts edited and assembled by Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, a947); parts of this work have been translated into English byJames Nichols as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1969). 4See Mikel Dufrenne, "L'Actualit6 de Hegel," Esprit 16 (1948): 396-4o8, and "La tht~sede Jean Hyppolite," Fontmnc i a (1947): 461-7o; Gaston Fessard, "Deux Interprttes de la Phtmom& nologie de Hegel: Jean Hyppolite et Alexandre Kojt~ve,"Etudes z55h 1 0947): 368-73; Henri Niel, "L'Interpr&ation de Hegel," Cr/t/que3h8 (1947): 426-37; Georges Canguilhem, "Hegel en France," Revue d'histoireet dephilosophie religieuses~8-29 0948-49): 282-97. [259] 260 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL 199 3 English-language accounts as well as French ones.s Even those more knowledgeable commentators who recognize the importance of the pre-war works of Jean Wahle and Henri Lefebvre~ give the impression that Hegel became known in France through his adversaries: Marxism (Lefebvre) and Kierkegaardian existentialism (Wahl).s Otherwise, it is said, Hegel was virtually unknown in France, not taught at the Universities and in all respects outside the mainstream of French intellectual life.9 These interpretations contain a grain of truth: a certain Hegel, the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, did not become known in France prior to the Marxist and existentialist commentaries that began appearing in the I9UOS. It was not until after 1945 that this "dramatic" Hegelianism, which centered on the theme of historical becoming through conflict, came to be seen as compatible with existentialism and Marxism, *~and even as encompassing and surpassing both these more recent tendencies." Since it was this interpretation of sIn particular, this is true of Poster and of Descombes, whose accounts are often cited as authoritative. 6See Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la consciencedam la philosophicde Hegel (Paris: Rieder, t9~9); Vers le coneret(Paris: Vrin, 193~); Etudes kierkegaardiennes(Paris: Aubier, 1938). 7See Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, "Pr6face" to Morceaux choisisde Marx (Paris: Gallimard, t934); La Consciencemystifi~e(Paris: Gallimard, 1936); "Introduction" to V. I. Lenin, Cahiers sur la dialectique de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1938); Morceaux choisisde Hegel (Paris: Gallimard , 1939); and Henri Lefebvre, Le ma~/a//sme d/a/ect/que(Paris: Alcan, 1939). SSee Hyppolite, "La P/dvum~vJo/og/ede Hegel et la pens6e frangaise," "Hegel, Kierkegaard et la pens~e franfaise contemporaine" and "Hegal/i rouest," all in Figures de la pens~ephilosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971); Roger Garaudy, Perspectivesde l'homme: existentiali .,me, marxisme, penste catholique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 114-17, 230, 399; and...

Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France

Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France

Human Imperfection: Unresolved ResponsesThe Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States.Philip R. ReillyQuality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France.William H. Schneider

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommentaryHuman Imperfection: Unresolved Responses The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Philip R. Reilly Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France. William H. Schneider Elof Axel CarlsonElof Axel Carlson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 67, Number 3Sep., 1992 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/417660 Views: 10Total views on this site Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France

1. Introduction 2. Degeneration and regeneration 3. From puericulture to eugenics 4. The French eugenics society to 1920 5. Postwar eugenics and social hygiene 6. The campaign for a premarital exam 7. French eugenics in the thirties 8. Eugenics, race and blood 9. Race and immigration 10. Vichy and after 11. Conclusion Notes.

The Rise of the Paris Red Belt

From 1920 until the present, the working-class suburbs of Paris, known as the Red Belt, have constituted the heart of French Communism, providing the Party not only with its most solid electoral base but with much of its cultural identity as well. Focusing on the northeastern suburb of Bobigny, Stovall explores the nature of working-class life and politicization as he skillfully documents how this unique region and political culture came into being. Rise of the Paris Red Belt reveals that the very process of urban development in metropolitan Paris and the suburbs provided the most important opportunities for the local establishment of Communist influence. The rapid increase in Paris' suburban population during the early twentieth century outstripped the development of the local urban infrastructure. Consequently, many of these suburbs, often represented to their new residents as charming country villages, soon degenerated into suburban slums. Stovall argues that Communists forged a powerful political block by mobilizing the disillusionment and by improving some of the worst aspects of suburban life. As a social history of twentieth-century France, Rise of the Paris Red Belt calls into question traditional assumptions about the history of both French Communism and the French working-class. It suggests that those interested in working-class politics, especially in the twentieth century, should consider the significance of residential and consumer issues as well as those relating to the workplace. It also suggests that urban history and urban development should not be considered autonomous phenomena, but rather expressions of class relations. Rise of the Paris Red Belt brings to life a world whose citizens, though often overlooked, are nonetheless the history of modern France.

Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France

Many historians have, during the past several decades, been fascinated by that body of ideas called "eugenics." Small wonder. Eugenics made a not insignificant contribution to the conditions that made the Holocaust possible. While Nazi medical atrocities, for instance, can be passed over as the work of a handful of evil, mad, or corrupt men, eugenics, by virtue of its widespread popularity in elite scientific circles of Western democracies, raises fundamental questions about the nature of medical science and its impact on modern societies. Most histories of eugenics concentrate on its development in Germany, where it became something of an official ideology, and in the United States, which until the 1930s provided the major models of eugenic legislation. William Schneider has written an important study of eugenics in France, designed in part to demonstrate that the quest for "biological regeneration" was not limited to German- and English-speaking nations in the

William H. Schneider, Quality and quantity. The quest for biological regeneration in twentieth-century France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 392 p.

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Peasants and protest: agricultural workers, politics, and unions in the Aude, 1850-1914

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the sleepy vineyard towns of the Aude department of southern France exploded with strikes and protests. Agricultural workers joined labor unions, the Socialist party established a base among peasant vinegrowers, and the largest peasant uprising of twentieth-century France, the great vinegrowers' revolt of 1907, shook the entire south with massive demonstrations. In this study, Laura Levine Frader explains how left-wing politics and labor radicalism in the Aude emerged from the economic and social transformation of rural society between 1850 and 1914. She describes the formation of an agricultural wage-earning class, and discusses how socialism and a revolutionary syndicalist labor movement together forged working-class identity. Frader's focus on the making of the rural proletariat takes the study of class formation out of the towns and cities and into the countryside. Frader emphasizes the complexity of social structure and political life in the Aude, describing the interaction of productive relations, the gender division of labor, community solidarities, and class alliances. Her analysis raises questions about the applicability of an urban, industrial model of class formation to rural society. This study will be of interest to French social historians, agricultural historians, and those interested in the relationship between capitalism, class formation, and labor militancy.

A life of her own: a countrywoman in twentieth-century France

Carles autobiography is the tale of a world that has largely disappeared and of the one that emerged to take its place. Her account reflects the turbulent history of the twentieth century from the viewpoints of the many roles she played in it--teacher, farmer, feminist, pacifist, and political activist.

Review. Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. Roth, Michael S.

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. By MICHAEL S. ROTH. Ithaca-London, Cornell University Press, 1988. 264pp. Hb$28.50. MICHAEL KELLY MICHAEL KELLY UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLV, Issue 3, July 1991, Pages 361–362, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLV.3.361 Published: 01 July 1991

Quality and quantity: the quest for biological regeneration in twentieth-century France

Quality and quantity: the quest for biological regeneration in twentieth-century France

The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France.

The Politics of Survival: Artisans in Twentieth-Century France.