French State Research Articles

An Australian Perspective on Occitan and Breton Ethnoregionalism in the Post-war Period to 1981

In France, the student occupations and strikes of May ’68 are well known, but the period was also of immense significance to the country’s ethnoregionalist movements, who sought to increase power and self-determination. From a period of rebuilding following the Second World War, the Breton and Occitan movements, which campaigned against the perceived oppression of their regions by the central French state, were able to find new audiences and grow significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. Through an analysis of primary and secondary sources, this article charts the history of the movements throughout the era, demonstrating how the growth of the movements was linked to the broader societal politicisation of the era. As the period of radicalism waned, so did the Breton and Occitan movements, which saw many of their key demands implemented following the election of François Mitterrand as President, depriving the movements of their key reasons for existence. Nevertheless, the movements left a significant legacy in this period, through both the acceptance of regionalist political demands by the national left, and the ideological refoundation of Breton and Occitan ethnoregionalism. The author reflects on how these movements have some parallels in Australian history.

Connections / disconnections: on Alice Diop’s Nous

ABSTRACT This article considers how Alice Diop’s documentary Nous/We (2021) challenges the myopia of hegemonic colourblind constructions of France and its people. Its title both raises a question (who are we?) and implicitly asserts an inclusive answer. But the film is not a reductively integrationist project. Indeed, it challenges this central policy of the French state and stages an interrogation of contemporary France, where, as Trica Danielle Keaton et al have put it, ‘race does not officially reside, even as racism and discrimination are long-term residents’. The author examines how Nous maps out a discursive space between the poles of forced assimilation and ghettoisation (communautarisme) that acknowledges racialisation and the racial dimensions of exploited labour, urban planning and social housing, but also tracks some points of inter-ethnic connection. The article argues that the film is three things at once: a self-reflexive celebration of filmmaking as an act of creative geography that moves across time and space to forge connectivity as well as tracking disjunctions; a documentation of everyday life and social diversity, particularly among the frequently demonised or simply ignored Parisian banlieues; and an indictment of the failure of the French state to properly recognise and value this diversity.

Entangled migration states: mobility and state-building in France and Algeria

ABSTRACT This article develops the concept of ‘entangled migration states’ as a means of highlighting the centrality of migration governance to state-building processes, the constitution of state sovereignty, and interstate relations. Drawing on the example of France and Algeria, it demonstrates the key role that migration played in three phases of state-building: the colonial period of Algérie française; the Algerian nationalist independence movement; and postcolonial state-building. In the case of France and Algeria, at least three actors constructed and instrumentalised migration and mobility regimes as sources of power and control – the French imperial state; the non-state Algerian independence movement; and the newly sovereign postcolonial Algerian state. A focus on the entangled nature of migration management allows for a deeper historicisation of contemporary migration regimes and draws attention to the central role played by migration diplomacy and transnational governmentality in contemporary migration management regimes, thus calling into question some of the spatial assumptions undergirding the ‘migration state’ concept. The article traces the evolution of mobility patterns and control in the Franco-Algerian case; their relationship to state-building processes; and the implications for rethinking the ‘migration state’.

Troubled waters: Riparian ecosystem services and community opposition to the largest dam removal project in Europe, Vezins Dam, France

The largest Dam removal project in Europe occurred in 2019 with removal of the Vezins Dam on the Sélune River in Normandy, France. The French State ordered removal of the 36-m high Vezins Dam and the 16-m high la Roche-qui-Boit Dam along the Sélune River to restore ecological and longitudinal connectivity to improve riparian water quality, and especially to restore migratory species of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and eel (Anguilla anguilla). We examine community opposition to removal of the Vezins Dam through the lens of riparian ecosystem services and stakeholder values. Primary data sources includes fieldwork, interviews, and an online survey of local stakeholders. Text analysis and interview coding occurred with ATLAS.ti 22, and highlight themes related to federal-local communication and riparian ecosystem services. The French State ineffectively communicated with local communities regarding dam removal benefits and riparian stakeholder values. While the state focused on biophysical ecosystem services, experiential ecosystem services, such as place attachment, were more important to riparian stakeholders. Often portrayed as a positive benefit, here dam removal lacked community support. Failure of government authorities to effectively incorporate stakeholder values along a continuum of ecosystem services substantially compromises future large-scale federal environmental management projects dependent upon local community support. By examining how local actors experienced dam removal, study results increase understanding of environmental governance and the local consequences of national policy decisions, of use in future dam removal projects – including for large dams – in France and internationally.

The Skills of Citizenship

Abstract This article analyzes the history of adult vocational training (AVT) programs for Algerian migrants, funded by the French state, between the end of World War II in 1945 and the aftermath of Algerian independence in 1962. These programs responded to the postwar expansion of citizenship and rights of indigenous Algerians, including rights to migrate and to take jobs in metropolitan France. Across changing governments and diverse ministries, French officials were convinced that vocational training was necessary for indigenous Algerians to find stable employment, to mitigate the supposed risks of migration, and to enable migrants to transform themselves into an idealized version of the French citizen. The widespread adoption of AVT for Algerian migrants calls into question the pervasive image of the unskilled, interchangeable migrant. At the same time, the shortcomings of AVT programs shed light on how migrants frequently contributed to postwar economic expansion and economic modernization while enjoying the fruits of economic growth only meagerly and on an individual basis. More broadly, this study reveals the importance of skill, industry, and labor in French postwar conceptions of (social) citizenship.

Sarah Ann Frank, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France

Sarah Ann Frank, <i>Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France</i>

Rupture and reconciliation: the neoliberal logics of Emmanuel Macron’s colonial memory policies

ABSTRACT First as candidate and then as President, Emmanuel Macron has elevated colonial memory policy as a key site for the performance and enactment of the dual values of rupture and reconciliation that underpin his broader programme. While this has led to significant symbolic shifts in the French state’s narrative of its colonial history, this article argues that this memory policy cannot and should not be disaggregated from his wider neoliberal project. Through a detailed contextualisation and analysis of President Macron’s interventions in the field, I contend that colonial memory policy simultaneously reflects, legitimises, and constitutes the ‘neoliberal political rationality’ his administration seeks to perpetuate. Under Macron, a limited recognition of France’s responsibilities for colonial violence has been accompanied by an effort to neutralise the political potency of the past, obscure its enduring legacies, assign authority over it to designated experts and delegitimise those who contest this logic. The article illustrates how memory policy has become a means of sublimating contemporary political demands, arising in part from historic structural injustices, into the manageable and managed process of consensus-making that is the hallmark of neoliberal governmentality.

Royal Companies, Risk Management and Sovereignty in Old Regime France

Abstract Shortly after William of Orange arrived in Devon at the outset of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Dutch troops stationed in Dartmouth seized the Amitié, a ship laden with marble purchased for the French court at Versailles. This seizure precipitated an extraordinary insurance dispute in Paris between two little-known royal companies: the Royal Insurance Company and the Royal Marble Company. This article analyses the fractious dispute and the companies at its heart. In so doing, it reflects on the dispute as a product of the French state’s broader exploitation of companies as tools of risk management: the state leveraged private capital in order to spread the risks of its virulently anti-Dutch commercial policy. Yet the dispute also exposed the ambiguities of war and peace in seventeenth-century thought and practice. In justifying their refusal to pay out on the insurance policy they had signed on the Amitié, the Royal Insurance Company’s directors suggested that an insurer could decide unilaterally that France was in a state of war, thereby triggering a contractual clause that would shift the onus back onto the policyholder. Although Louis XIV himself stepped in to defuse the dispute at its most contentious moment, the state proved unable to respond to the challenge posed to its sovereignty, with significant consequences for the French insurance industry and maritime commerce up to the end of the Old Regime.

Prediction of cesarean delivery in class III obese nulliparous women: An externally validated model using machine learning.

class III obese women, are at a higher risk of cesarean section during labor, and cesarean section is responsible for increased maternal and neonatal morbidity in this population. the objective of this project was to develop a method with which to quantify cesarean section risk before labor. this is a multicentric retrospective cohort study conducted on 410 nulliparous class III obese pregnant women who attempted vaginal delivery in two French university hospitals. We developed two predictive algorithms (a logistic regression and a random forest models) and assessed performance levels and compared them. the logistic regression model found that only initial weight and labor induction were significant in the prediction of unplanned cesarean section. The probability forest was able to predict cesarean section probability using only two pre-labor characteristics: initial weight and labor induction. Its performances were higher and were calculated for a cut-point of 49.5% risk and the results were (with 95% confidence intervals): area under the curve 0.70 (0.62,0.78), accuracy 0.66 (0.58, 0.73), specificity 0.87 (0.77, 0.93), and sensitivity 0.44 (0.32, 0.55). this is an innovative and effective approach to predicting unplanned CS risk in this population and could play a role in the choice of a trial of labor versus planned cesarean section. Further studies are needed, especially a prospective clinical trial. French state funds "Plan Investissements d'Avenir" and Agence Nationale de la Recherche.

The Gendered Consequences of Abolition and Citizenship on Nineteenth-Century Gorée Island

Abstract: In the spring of 1848, the French Second Republic abolished slavery and made citizens of most adult male residents in its overseas territories. Gorée Island (Senegal) became a French exclave, where free and freed women experienced socioeconomic and political decline. The patriarchal French state that “liberated” enslaved women and “enfranchised” former female slave owners simultaneously limited Goréen women’s avenues to economic prosperity and political authority. French republicanism unsettled a significant sociopolitical distinction, the slave–nonslave divide, making gender a more salient factor mediating Goréens’ access to liberty and the public sphere. Goréen women experienced their formal integration into the Second French Republic—with the regime’s patriarchal republican laws and institutions—as colonialism. Goréens became members of a French Republic that championed universal equality, gendered difference, and patriarchy. French republican tenets excluded Goréen women from civic politics and the public sphere and created female colonial subjects on an island of citizens.

The Price of Isolation: Fascism, Vichy and the Holocaust in French History

The historiographical debate about France during the Second World War has long been dominated by two foreign historians. On the one hand, the Israeli intellectual Zeev Sternhell notoriously placed the origin of fascism in France's Belle Epoque and saw Vichy France as the paradigmatic example of a fascist regime in his book,Neither Right nor Left, four decades ago. Year after year, Sternhell, who had studied in Paris, made criticisms of the Parisian intellectual milieu and denounced its egocentrism and provincialism. On the other hand, American historian Robert Paxton reigned over the history of French collaboration with Nazi Germany. Although it raised certain controversies when it was translated into French in 1973, hisVichy Francehas been since accepted as the key reference on the subject, as well as an indispensable pedagogical tool against apologetic views of Marshall Pétain's regime, which enjoy periodic revivals in the country. Despite their age – Sternhell died in 2020 and Paxton is ninety years old – these two historians have remained the unavoidable cornerstones in the discussion on French attitudes during the Second World War – the first as a competitor, the second as a paternal figure.

State of Nature

Abstract Scholars have argued for the importance of industrial accidents and urban precarity in laying the groundwork for the European welfare state in nineteenth-century France. Given the central role that farming played in French economic, political, and cultural life, however, agricultural insurance was among the first and most frequently debated aspects of nineteenth-century attempts to apply insurance to the “social question.” This article explores what François Ewald has termed the “insurantial imaginary” of agricultural insurance by examining debates about which threats could or should be insured and who should insure them. Despite widespread consensus on the virtues of expanding insurance into the countryside, there remained huge areas of disagreement: What counted as an insurable risk in agriculture? How should that risk be assessed? And whose responsibility was it to insure such risks—that of private individuals or the French state? This article argues that the repeated failures of the various proposals designed to protect peasants against the vagaries of nature had as much to do with practical impediments as they did with ideas about the “naturalness” of certain dangers. This perception of the “natural” would inform the construction of the French welfare state.

Do Income and Employment Uncertainty Affect Couple Stability? Evidence for France During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Economic uncertainty and family dynamics are strictly connected. The increasing uncertainty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic is thus likely to affect couple relationships and stability, with potential opposite effects. Using data from the nationally representative EPICOV survey, that followed individuals throughout the first year of pandemic in France, we examined separation rates and how these were associated with different measures of employment and income uncertainty, including both pre-pandemic conditions and changes occurred during and after the first lockdown in Spring 2020 in France. Our results show increased rates of separation, especially among younger people, during the 6 months after the first lockdown, and a return to rates more similar to those observed in usual times, afterwards. Individuals who were unemployed and had lower income before the beginning of the pandemic were more likely to separate soon after the lockdown, while changes in employment conditions due to the lockdown were not linked with a higher separation risk. The job protection and the income compensation provided by the French state, as well a less stigmatising effect of unemployment occurred during the covid crisis, may explain the absence of effect. Self-declared deterioration in financial condition, especially when declared by men, was associated with higher separation risk for the whole year of observation.

La représentation de Jeanne d’Arc dans la France du XVIe siècle: Politique, religion et genre dans L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orléans (1580)

This article proposes an interpretation of Fronton du Duc’s L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orleans (1580), an important early adaptation of Joan of Arc’s story partially based on contemporary records of her trial. Through a close reading of this little-known work, the article shows that the Jesuit playwright consciously made use of three types of discourse—politics, religion, and gender. As this piece was written for the French king’s visit to Lorraine, Fronton du Duc underlines the alliance between France and Lorraine and highlights the image of a united France. By calling attention to the divide between Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, the author anachronistically makes use of Joan of Arc’s story to emphasize the religious dimension of late sixteenth century French nationalism. Besides, Fronton du Duc brings a gender discourse into play to underscore Joan of Arc’s “feminity,” and thus maintains Joan’s mystical role without affecting the masculinized image of the French state. This specific portrayal of Joan of Arc corresponded to the historical context of the French wars of religion in the second half of the sixteenth century and marked a crucial step in the early representation of Joan of Arc as a national heroine.

Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Heroism on Autocratic Values and Nazi Collaboration in France

We measure how a network of heroes can legitimize and diffuse extreme political behaviors. We exploit newly declassified intelligence files, novel voting data, and regimental histories to show that home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated under Philippe Pétain’s generalship through the heroic World War I battlefield of Verdun diverge politically thereafter, particularly following Pétain’s own overt espousal of authoritarian views. Further, under Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy regime (1940–1944), they raise 7 percent more active Nazi collaborators per capita. These effects extend across all forms of Nazi collaboration and diffuse beyond the veterans themselves. (JEL D72, D74, N34, N44, Z13)

The racialisation of sexism: how race frames shape anti-street harassment policies in Britain and France

Femonationalism, that is, the use of women’s rights rhetorics to further racial stigmatisation and promote nationalism, has been of growing interest to social scientists on European contexts. While previous studies have provided insights on the racialisation of sexism in gender equality policymaking, there is still a limited understanding of how policy frames in particular national contexts can either exacerbate or mitigate femonationalism in the making of anti-gender-based violence policy. In particular, how do frames on race and racism impact the framing of anti-street harassment policies and, by extension, the ability to prevent femonationalism? The article explores this issue by comparing the cases of France and Britain through empirical data with policymakers and activists intervening in policymaking against street harassment in France and Britain. Findings suggest that, even though French state actors claim their colour-blindness allows them to avoid a racist framing of the problem, it actually enables it. This in turn favours a racialised framing of street harassment and leads to an inability to address the potential risk of racial targeting in the criminalisation of street harassment. Conversely, the acknowledgment of racism in Britain favours an intersectional framing of street harassment and leads to greater consideration of the risk of racial targeting. By analysing how race repertoires unfold in policy pre-adoption phases, the article therefore suggests that nationally embedded assumptions about race have a significant impact on the framing of anti-gender-based violence policy and, in turn, on femonationalism.

Globalization of Cinematographic Communication

The article examines the globalization – in its Americanization format – of the international cinematic communication within the perspective of the cultural diversity issue. The globalization process is comprehended as a result of the historical succession of market formations: from free competition in American cinema to an oligopoly and on to a national and an international monopoly. During the period of polipoly, the trail for globalization was blazed by the grande dame of the cinématographe: France. The United States, where in 1908 the market share of French films equaled 70%, mounted a resolute challenge. Under consideration are three factors – institutional, geopolitical, and creative – of the loss by the French of their domination over the American and, then, their own market. To the soft power of American cinema, the French state responded with the quota stimulation for the exhibition of national films, motivating it, among other things, by the necessity of providing for the external and internal security of the state, by the guardianship of customs and national traditions. To the quotas as a means of mitigating the soft power of the United States did recourse some other countries too: larger ones, for economic considerations; smaller ones, for cultural. The globalizational might of the American film industry is explained through the rational choice of the main line for its stylistic development and the filmmakers’ masterfulness, as well as through the professionalism of managemental and marketing actors, investment from big capital, and through support from government in its push for the «cultural hegemony» of the United States. The major studios that emerged during the period of oligopoly (1909– 1929) competed with one another on the terms of a certain accord. With the means of competing by supercostly investments, far beyond the capabilities of smaller studios, the majors established for the domestic market a regime of national monopoly (1930–1946). On the world market the elected method of competition enabled the American film industry, in the second half of the 1940s, to gain the position of the international monopolist. An important role in the process was played by Motion Picture Export Association, established in 1945: a sort of «a diplomatic service» that functioned with permission from and under the support of the U.S. government. From its position of the global monopolist the American film industry strives not only to dominate in the intercultural cinematic communication, but, in this status and as a means of the popular geopolitics, to control it through lobbying and by exporting capital and goods. The transborder circulation of products by various national cinemas and cultural diversity of cinematography have largely fallen prey the globalization process. On the basis of vast factual research is recreated the state of the art for the imbalance in the intercultural film communication. When, in a social­functional respect, the importing of films mainly supplants their production in a certain country, the socium, by a large magnitude, is deprived of the chance to reproduce its culture and, accordingly, its identity with the means of depicting its own image and of mastering it. The making of national cinematic picture of the world and its integration into the communicative process becomes a topical task of providing for cultural diversity.

Équivoques de l'oubli après Vichy

Abstract Through a reflection on the ambiguous facets of Holocaust oblivion that has lasted for generations, the article examines how the official politics of memory in France instrumentalized historical oblivion as an ideological tool. To this end, the essay analyzes Fabrice Humbert's 2009 novel, L'Origine de la violence, to examine the essential role of literature in pinpointing the dynamics of memory and forgetting while exploring the ambiguity of oblivion, pardon and reparation. The unveiled family secret is explored as an allegory of the cryptic national history that reflects the amnesia imposed after the Vichy regime (1940-1944) by the “resistancialisme” promulgated in the post-war period in France; amnesia decreed years later by President Georges Pompidou when he pardoned the French war criminal Paul Touvier in 1972. This politics of forgetting comforted a generation of citizens implicated in collaboration during WWII, resulting in conflicts with the younger generations, as portrayed in Humbert's text.

Monumentalizing “The Collective”

Abstract By analyzing the public mural paintings sponsored by the French state to help artists survive the economic crisis around the time of the Popular Front, this article intends to contribute to the study of the relationship between mass politics and mass culture in the 1930s. After addressing French and foreign views on mural art as well as state agendas behind mural commissions, the study examines the social and political significance of state-financed mural projects. Frequently large-scale and realized in a figurative style, murals portrayed collectivities in instants of conviviality and extolled the solidaristic ties binding them. State-financed mural paintings, I contend, monumentalized “the collective” so to create unity and collective spirit. Thereby, they created a visual politics that helped bridge the gap between art and the people and became agents of mass politics at a time of political instability.

Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France

The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.