War In France Research Articles

From the 8-Hour Day to the 40-Hour Week: Legitimization Discourses of Labour Legislation between the Wars in France and Belgium

In the interwar period both France and Belgium passed legislation reducing the number of working hours and established a hybrid regulatory regime lending a certain degree of official authority to collective agreements. The paper analyses discourses by scholars who, as experts, were close to the political elites, and who tried to legitimize this kind of co-regulation by pointing out the inefficiency of state intervention and the epistemic authority of non-state actors. Stressing the output dimension of legitimacy and the improved quality of legal norms, these discourses had a technocratic tendency and ultimately argued in favour of a shift of power from the legislative to the administrative branch of government.

L’Académie contre la langue française: le dossier “féminisation” par Éliane Viennot, et al.

Reviews 245 Viennot, Éliane, et al. L’Académie contre la langue française: le dossier “féminisation”. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016. ISBN 979-10-90062-33-7. Pp. 216. Viennot et al. trace a thirty-year war in France conducted, not on the borders of Alsace or Normandy, but within the esteemed halls of the French Academy. This book narrates “une croisade contre la ‘féminisation’, en dépit des besoins langagiers d’une société où l’égalité des sexes progresse” (back cover). The authors organize their argument via the metaphor of religion. Viennot and colleagues commence by outlining the history of the “Saint-Siège,” established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635. Though charged with assuring the purity of the language in order to render it capable of the greatest elegance, the Academy’s only significant activity by 1672 became awarding prizes for exceptional literature. The Academy’s first Dictionnaire, explicitly called for as early as the second gathering, finally appeared in 1694, some sixty years after the organization’s founding. Since then,“les Immortels”have managed to publish an average of two revisions each century—each, according to Viennot et al., obsolete upon arrival. The authors call into question the composition of the esteemed assembly from its genesis. Richelieu chose many who knew little about literature, assigning fauteuils to those whom he wished to thank or hoped to win over. Disbanded during the Revolution and reinstituted under Napoleon, the Academy remained devoted to conservative inclinations, its members, to their own interests. The few dictionaries that did emerge, according to Viennot, reflected only the language of conservatives (24). It was not until 1980 that a woman was finally invited to join the group. Since then, only seven have been elected: seven women and fifty-seven men. The Academy’s murky, monarchical origins and misogynistic heritage cast a dark shadow on the historically-revered institution. The authors’ indictment against l’Académie française is clear: “‘[D]onner des règles sûres’ à la langue française a pour beaucoup consisté à la masculiniser” (25). The remainder of the book builds a case for this contention. Viennot and contributors record the official positions penned by some of the Academy’s most notable crusaders alongside their refutations of the same. The book concludes with a summary of this “guerre sainte menée contre l’égalité des sexes et contre la langue française” (11). The volume contains a useful chronology of events related to the feminization of the French language. An extensive bibliography is helpfully divided into the subheadings“Études sur la langue française,”“Études sur l’Académie française,”and other cited sources. Appendices include guides to the French language from Belgium, Canada, France, Switzerland and UNESCO. The book provides a plethora of evidence that casts suspicion on both the enshrined organization and its willingness to come of age. While the authors’ impassioned tone, well-suited to the extended metaphor of religious zeal, rings on occasion with rancor and sarcasm, their argument needs no such raillery to win converts. This volume will prove stimulating to linguists, teachers, and scholarly Francophiles everywhere. Whitworth University (WA) Bendi Benson Schrambach ...

Charles Georges Thibault (1919-2003): inspirational leader in French reproductive biology.

The contribution of Charles Thibault in creating and developing a major international centre of animal research at Jouy-en-Josas (near Versailles) in post Second World War France is recorded in detail. Not only did he select a team of gifted young chercheurs, but he stimulated and supported their research in diverse ways. The projects covered were not only primarily of significance to animal reproduction, but they also became relevant to human infertility studies and to IVF treatments. Members of the team in Physiologie Animale gained international research reputations and seasoned overseas researchers were attracted to Jouy-en-Josas for their sabbaticals. Thibault himself was known especially for his studies on the mammalian oocyte, on fertilization both in vivo and in vitro, and for a key publication on parthenogenesis. Over and above leading the department of Physiologie Animale at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), he was Professor of Reproductive Physiology at the University of Paris VI and an influential member of national committees in Paris. His formal career reached a peak with his appointment as President of the French scientific research organisation (CNRS), and his overall contributions were celebrated both nationally and internationally, not least as Commander of the Legion d'Honneur and recipient of the Wolf Prize, the latter being presented in the Israeli Parliament, the Knessett. His influence continues to be strong, felt in France and beyond through his protégés and his publications.

Au Revoir les Enfants: Wartime Evacuation and the Politics of Childhood in France and Britain, 1939–45

Few people in France today remember the wartime evacuation of children from Paris. But in 1938–40, the evacuation of urban schoolchildren and other ‘useless mouths’ from likely targets of bombing was central to French plans for the ‘passive defence’ of the civilian population. Moreover, the size and duration of such large-scale child migration schemes increased after the defeat and Occupation, as (allied) bombing raids over industrial cities like Ivry-sur-Seine or Boulogne-Billancourt put their children at risk once again. Why did an event so important in British memories of the Second World War leave so little trace in public memories of the war in France? This article explores the public debates around wartime evacuation respectively in Britain and in France and the convictions about relationships between families, children and the state that underpinned them’ For these debates suggest two very different ways of understanding the nature and needs of children in mid twentieth-century Europe and the relationship of those needs to understandings of children's present or future citizenship.

Law and Human Suffering: A Slice of Life in Vichy France

This essay discusses three diaries from the Vichy era, the period of the Nazi Occupation of France: Jean Guehenno’s Journal des annees noires 1940-1944, Helene Berr’s Journal, and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar’s Ceux qui ne dormaient pas. Guehenno was an educator and writer who entered the Resistance in 1940. His diary offers deep moral reflection as well as accounts of the dishonorable peace Vichy imposed and the ignoble servitude to which the new collaborationist French State and the Nazi occupier subjected France. In the final pages, as Leclerc’s army marches into Paris, with a victory he understands to be thanks to the help of the Allied forces, Guehenno dares to rekindle his former faith in humankind. Berr was a young university student born into a wealthy old French Jewish family, the daughter of a famous scientist. Sensitive and generous-spirited, she lived an unusual life inasmuch as her family seemed to suffer no material hardship throughout the years that culminated in their deportation in the spring of 1944. Among the memorable events of her diary is her experience of the first day she was forced to wear the yellow star. Finally, Mesnil-Amar’s diary spans just one month at the end of the war in France, the month in which her husband has been detained and is about to be deported on the last train to leave Paris. The diary evokes her embracing of Jewish identity as a result of being identified as Jewish by anti-Semites. The lyricism of her writing approaches poetry in a work that is both a retrospective and a love letter to her husband. These diaries show us a slice of life of the times, but they also spur us to reflection on law and humanity, their limitations, potentials and fluctuations.

‘No More Fears, No More Tears’?: Gender, Emotion and the Aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in France

This article investigates why royalist popular culture in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars often depicted young mothers anxious for peace. Such representations reflected the brutality of the wars, women's relative prominence in anti‐conscription resistance and a cultural shift from revolutionary injunctions to wives and mothers to sacrifice their menfolk for the good of the nation to Napoleonic images of women as tremulous counterparts to virile soldiers. But the image of peace‐loving mothers in 1814 and 1815 was not simply a response to the devastation of war or a continuation of Napoleonic gender roles. Instead, it served distinctive purposes in a period of peace‐making and political transition, which entailed not only disentangling masculinity from martial valour but also strategically invoking feminine anguish or joy. The focus on Louis XVIII's role in rescuing mothers helped legitimise an unpopular monarch, who had gained power only with the help of foreign armies, and was returning to a country that had executed its last king. The image of grateful women and happy families also deflected attention away from contemporary problems – including the difficult return of veterans to a defeated country and the lasting grief of those who had lost loved ones in war – by focusing on the joy of mothers whose sons would remain safely home. This article draws on two different bodies of scholarship, rarely considered together – the growing literature on the history of emotion in the era of the French Revolution and studies of gender and war in the twentieth century, especially the First World War – and uses a variety of sources, from recruitment propaganda to songs, to show the specific ways gendered and emotional images could be deployed at transitional moments.

The Court of Marguerite de Valois in Rebellion, 1585–87

This article examines the phenomenon of the marginal, then rebellious and simultaneously fleeing court of Marguerite de Valois, queen of Navarre, from 1585 to 1587. It takes a fresh look at her household, her courtiers, her finances, and how the Queen relied on families with local connections in the regions of exile as a means of maintaining her status as a royal figure. By acquiring the nature of a political phenomenon, in the conditions of the decisive phases of the Civil Wars in France, her flight was, undoubtedly, a destructive factor for the Valois monarchy. In these circumstances King Henry III, the Guise family, Philip II of Spain, and later Henry IV, all recognized the political importance of the figure of Queen Marguerite (and her court) in the processes of preserving cohesion for the country and the legitimacy of royal power.

“Engelond” and “Armorik Briteyne”: Reading Brittany in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale

Abstract This article argues that Chaucer's imaginative depiction of the topographical and cultural otherness of Brittany and the fraught triangular relationship of the main characters in the Franklin's Tale is influenced by his awareness of Brittany's entanglements with England and France in the Hundred Years' War. Fourteenth-century Brittany was a strategic border region, differentiated from other French territories by its Brythonic language and culture, yet inextricably bound to England by ties of kinship, fealty, and occupation extending back to the Norman Conquest. The Franklin's Tale explicitly links each of its main characters with one of the three polities involved in this conflict, associating Dorigen most strongly with Brittany itself. The love story between Dorigen and Arveragus and the challenge posed to it by Aurelius play out in an emphatically Breton colonial setting, where the erotics of sexual conquest become conflated with territorial and political conquest.

Jérémy Jammes. Les Oracles du Cao Đài: Étude d'un mouvement religieux vietnamien et de ses réseaux [The Cao Dai oracles: Essays on a Vietnamese religious movement and its networks]. Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2014, 614p.

Les Oracles du Cao Ðai: Etude d'un mouvement religieux vietnamien et de ses reseaux[The Cao Dai oracles: Essay on a Vietnamese religious movement and its networks]Jeremy JammesParis: Les Indes savantes, 2014, 614p.This book, which I would describe as monumental, is the adaptation of an academic dissertation. It distinguishes itself from previous work (French and Anglo-American) on the subject because it does not situate that subject in a single isolated perspective: neither that of ethnology nor that of historical sociology. With this book, Jeremy Jammes has responded to the archaeologist Bernard Philippe Groslier, who in 1960 called for a necessary alliance between history and ethnology in the study of Asian countries (Groslier 1960), and he has done so by linking, and even closely intertwining, the ethnological approach with the historical.The author identifies and highlights three vectors of Caodaism: the historical vector, by inscribing the phenomenon in several religious traditions of the beginning of the twentieth century: a matrix of Sino-Viet mediums (phoenix writing or fuluan) (Do 2003) combined with French- Viet spiritualism, Freemasonry, and Theosophy; the sociological vector, by describing and analyzing the socio-professional environments (the urban and rural bourgeoisie of southern Vietnam) from which Caodaism originated, as well as the networks of kinship and patronage (somehow nepotistic) that it wove or reinforced in order to take root and spread; finally, the author does not neglect the political vector, in particular French colonial domination and the post-independence period.Far from contenting himself with an analytical description of Caodaist beliefs and faith, Jammes seeks to grasp their meaning: the affirmation of an original identity while simultaneously claiming equality with the colonial masters. This led the founders, the clergy, and the faithful (whose number swelled to the hundreds of thousands in the aftermath of World War II) to follow the Catholic model with regard to ecclesial organization. These initial goals of the new religion's promoters lent Caodaism a subversive character that made its actors sensitive to the temptation of political engagement-first against the French colonization, then against the communist hegemony within national resistance and today within the reunified nation and state.Jammes does not limit his historical investigation to the past; he continues it in a history of the present day of the Caodaist religion, a history that has unfolded in time (since 1975) and in the space of communities that were born out of the dispersion following the Vietnam War-in France, the United States, and Australia. He observes that this expansion was accompanied by an aggiornamento, with the Cao Dai religion emerging refined or renewed from all the trials (bans, persecution, and repression). It cast off its spectacular apparatus of worship to place greater importance on meditation than on oracular spirit-mediumship seances. This process has been characterized by a tension between the aspiration for unity and a continued tendency for fission, a tension between the ambition to be a marker of identity (a national religion) and that of acquiring universal scope through missionary activity.Finally, to take up the appellation of politico-religious sect that was popularized by French authors during and since the Franco-Vietnamese War (1945-54), and then in a jiffy borrowed by US scholars and journalists for the next two decades, Jammes demonstrates that Caodaism is a hybrid form, a sect-church alloy. …

A powerful political platform: Françoise Giroud andL’Expressin a Cold War climate

Founded in 1953 by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud, L’Express was a politically committed outlet predominantly led by Giroud’s strong editorial direction until its rebranding in 1964 along the lines of Time magazine. Its goals were clear: to encourage modernization in French cultural and economic life, to support Pierre Mendès France and to oppose the war in Indochina. This article investigates Giroud’s vision of the press, her politics and her journalistic dialogue with other significant actors at a complex and pivotal juncture in French Cold War history. Giroud opened up the columns of L’Express to a diverse range of leading writers and intellectuals, even to those in disagreement with the publication, as the case study of Jean-Paul Sartre highlighted here shows. In so doing, Giroud’s L’Express constituted a singularly powerful press platform in Cold War France.

‘A Jolly Romp We Were Always Destined to Win’: The BBC's’Allo ’Allo!and British Memories of Downed Aircrew in Occupied France during the Second World War

AbstractThe long-running BBC sitcom,’Allo ’Allo!, has been thoroughly criticised for its use of various racial, gendered and sexualised tropes, not to mention its cynical view of the French experience of the Second World War. This article, however, reassesses the programme in light of what it highlights about the lived experience of Anglo-American airmen who were forced to bale from their planes over Occupied France. It uses the comedic aspects of the programme to investigate escape and evasion training, the use of language, ‘fitting in’ and the prominence of peasants in the wartime lives of Anglo-American aircrews in France. The programme, rather than being just another example of Gaullophobia, accurately represents some elements of the Second World War in France. In addition, changes in the plot over its nine seasons suggest that the sitcom reflects broader British concerns, as well as the Anglo-French relationship.

What the Liberator Saw: British War Photography, Picture Post and the Normandy Campaign

This article examines the photographs of British Army stills photographers who accompanied Allied infantry, tank, and airborne units on the Normandy campaign from June to September 1944. These photographs are rarely commented upon as aesthetic objects in their own right or interrogated as primary historical documents. This article aims to make visible this substantial body of work, held today in the Imperial War Museum, and to identify and analyse the multivalent narratives of the Normandy campaign such images represent. It will contend that such photographs and their captions are traversed by and constructed through British scripts of war that go beyond the photograph's role as visually marking actual historical events. Such photographs helped shape interpretations of not only the prosecution of war in Normandy but also of France as an ambivalent wartime ally — both victor and victim of the Second World War. They were an important vector for the cultural construction (and rehabilitation) of France in the summer of 1944 and played a vital role in establishing the coordinates of France's war story for British readers. By examining these and other front-line photographs published in the popular illustrated magazine Picture Post, this article will argue in favour of a contextual approach to British war photography and its representations of the Normandy campaign. It will analyse how, in this case, rather than representing the Norman population as the passive recipients of liberation, a view prevalent in Allied historical accounts of the period, Picture Post mobilized official British war photographs to depict the common humanity of French and British experiences of war. In so doing, Picture Post's visual narrative promoted the value of intercultural understanding and tolerance at a critical juncture in Anglo–French relations.

The Politics of Grief in the Outbreak of Civil War in France, 1407–1413

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Politics of Grief in the Outbreak of Civil War in France, 1407–1413Emily J. HutchisonEmily J. Hutchison Search for more articles by this author Emily J. Hutchison is Assistant Professor of History at Mount Royal University, Calgary (AB), Canada (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 91, Number 2April 2016 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685405 Views: 326Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jean-Pierre Hérubel Recent Articles on French History, French Historical Studies 40, no.11 (Feb 2017): 161–174.https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-3686092

Marx’s Civil War in France

Marx’s Civil War in France

Народная война 1870-1871 годов во Франции в исторической и художественной литературе

Народная война 1870-1871 годов во Франции в исторической и художественной литературе

The Indian Army on the Western Front: India's expeditionary force to France and Belgium in the First World War. By George Morton-Jack

The Indian Army on the Western Front: India's expeditionary force to France and Belgium in the First World War. By George Morton-Jack

«Unclear Enemy»: Why the Guerrilla War in France in 1814 Failed

Abstract: Author of the article analyzes the reasons of the fail of Napoleon’s attempts to set the guerrilla war in France during the campaign of 1814. While the forces of anti-Napoleonic coalition were standing near the border of France, Napoleon did his best to recruit his new army. But the human resources of France were exhausted, and that’s why Napoleon decided to set the guerrillia. But all his proclamations and even his orders were disobeyed - French people were too tired of incessant war, and Napoleon again decided to gain his goals on the battlefield. Besides author shows great efforts of Russian headquarters to avoid the guerrilla war. Alexander I and his allies in theirs proclamations declared that they were fighting only with Napoleon, but not with the French nation. That tactic gave a brilliant result and helped to avoid the patriotic uplift in France in 1814. In this propagandistic war Napoleon was defeated and that cost him his throne. The reasons of Napoleon’s fail, firstly, was the unclear image of the enemy. French emperor didn’t manage to unite French nation against the rival. On the contrary the French Emperor, his enemies managed (in their proclamations and personal conversations) to persuade the French people, that the allies had one enemy - the Emperor Napoleon, not the French nation, and the ultimate goal of war - to set peace on the European continent. That was exactly how the allies did set the disunity between Napoleon and his people. Ultimately, the combination of these factors was the reason that a guerrilla war never broke out in France.

Communist Veterans and Paramilitarism in 1920s France: The Association républicaine des anciens combattants

This article investigates the French communist veterans’ association the Association républicaine des anciens combattants (ARAC) during the 1920s. Historians have paid little attention to the ARAC, preferring instead to investigate both larger Republican associations and the extreme right-wing leagues of the period who appealed to veterans for support. The ARAC differed from other veterans’ associations: from its founding in 1917, it denounced the war as a needless sacrifice in which millions of men had been duped into fighting for international capitalism. It associated the material demands of the veterans with those of the broader working class and the ARAC persistently challenged the view that veterans deserved a special status in society. However, despite its internationalist and anti-war stance, in the mid-1920s, the group threw itself into paramilitary politics. In response to the founding of fascist-style leagues in 1924, the ARAC established the Groupes de défense antifascistes (GDA), uniformed shock squads intended for street confrontation with right-wing thugs. The article argues that the legacy of the war in France was therefore complex. The ARAC can neither be subsumed into notions of a ‘culture of victory’ in the postwar years nor can its paramilitarism be traced solely to the conflict. The GDA emerged in the postwar context of extremist politics, while bearing resemblance to pre-war manifestations of left-wing activism.

Migration, Resilience and Security: Responses to New Inflows of Asylum Seekers and Migrants

The ubiquity of resilience—the process of patterned adjustments adopted by a society or an individual in the face of endogenous or exogenous shocks—across the broad social sciences spectrum is undisputable. Yet, migration scholars have been relatively absent from this vibrant discussion. The present article suggests a theorisation of the link between migration, resilience and security by examining ways in which resilience precedes a socially constructed understanding of international migration as a security issue. The article explores how the surge in worldwide refugee numbers and associated mass migration phenomena were not only interpreted as a shock in post-Cold War France, but also instrumentalised by dominant discourses to underscore the necessity of adopting a particular pattern of adjustments to uphold the status quo against changes provoked by these migratory events. The social construction of refugee movements and mass migration as a significant disturbance requiring France to opt for a resilient strategy has led, ultimately, to the securitisation of migration. In a broader sense, the article presents a new lens through which to analyse situations and conditions in which resilience has led to and induced the securitisation of migration.

The New Resistance? French Intellectual Realignments after the Liberation: the Case of Armand Petitjean

The chaotic aftermath of the war in France conceals a complex range of intellectual positions, conditioned by the Épuration, a purge of those who had to one degree or another collaborated with the Nazi Occupier after July 1940, and well as the onset of the Cold War. Armand Petitjean, who had been one of the young hopes of the liberal cultural review, the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF), before the war, was one such writer to be purged in September 1944. Following the advice of Jean Paulhan, his former mentor at the NRF, he re-joined the army to help mitigate his case. However, embittered by his treatment at the hands of the communist-dominated Writers' Committee, the Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE), he, Paulhan, and others were rapidly mobilized in favour of the anti-communist cause, as the Cold War gathered momentum in 1947. This paper, using unpublished papers in the Petitjean archives — including book-publishing projects and unpublished correspondence with that guru of anti-communism, Arthur Koestler — will offer a case study on what was conceived as the ‘New Resistance’.