'We've never had a voice': memory construction and the children of the harkis (1962-1991)

When riots broke out in the Bias Camp east of Bordeaux in May1975, few in France had heard of the harkis, the Algerian auxiliarieswho fought for the French during the Algerian War of Independence(1954–62). This began to change, however, as the rapidlyspreading protests instigated by their children garnered increasingmedia coverage. Seeking to end their status as les oubliésde l'histoire, the children of the harkis sought recognitionfor the history of their parents, particularly the sacrificesthey had made for France and the suffering endured as a consequence.What is particularly interesting about this campaign is thatthe children of the harkis were not alone in this desire andin fact were relative latecomers to the harki activist scene.The years since the end of the Algerian War had witnessed arange of representations offered by a series of self-appointedspokespersons who, in the absence of direct testimony from withinthe harki community, and often serving their own objectives,took it upon themselves to speak on behalf of the harkis. Thisarticle seeks to analyse the relationship between these externalnarratives, put forward by actors including the Algerian andFrench governments, the former Muslim elite of colonial Algeria,French veterans and the pied-noir community and those offeredby the children of the harkis in order to illustrate some ofthe issues pertaining to the mobilization and transmission ofFrance's colonial past in a postcolonial context.     

The Six Fevrier 1934 and the 'Survival' of the French Republic

The Paris riots of the six février 1934 are rememberedchiefly as the event that provided the initial spark and theeventual rationale for the anti-fascist Popular Front. However,most French historians have tended to downplay the importanceof the riots themselves, arguing that the Republic was not underserious threat, and that the Left at the time greatly exaggeratedthe danger. Indeed, the fact that the regime ‘survived’these events has often been cited as proof of its resilience,of France’s deep-rooted ‘democratic political culture’,and its inbuilt ‘immunity’ to fascism. This historiographicalreview argues that the standard interpretation of the six févrieris deeply flawed, especially in its tendency to deduce the intentionsof the actors from the outcome of the events. The six févrierconstituted a serious challenge to the regime, and created adangerously fluid situation in which a variety of ‘outcomes’became possible. It should be analysed not as a discrete andtemporally circumscribed event but as a key moment in an ongoingprocess of political radicalization on the French Right.     

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Journalism, it has been said, is the first rough draft of history. In The Race Beat, Pulitzer prizewinning journalists Gene Robertsand Hank Klibanoff have come as close as anyone could to a final,definitive draft of the history of the role of the press inthe civil rights movement. Their research is exhaustive andtheir writing is compelling, resulting in a book that readslike a hybrid: part scholarly treatise and suspense novel, partadventure tale and Greek tragedy. It sets the scene with a detailed and informative history ofthe Negro press in the U.S., long predating the     

Evaluating the geographic concentration of industries using distance-based methods

We propose new methods for evaluating the spatial distributionof firms. To assess whether firms are concentrated or dispersed,economists have tradi-tionally used indices that analyse theheterogeneity of a spatial structure at a single geographiclevel. We introduce distance-based methods, Besag's L function(derived from Ripley's K function) and Diggle and Chetwynd'sD function to describe simultaneously spatial distribution atdifferent geographical scales. Our empirical applications considerthe distribution of French manufacturing firms in the Parisarea and in France generally. For some geographic levels, resultsshow significant concentration or dispersion of firms accordingto their sector of activity.     

THEMATIC REVIEWS

Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 Moira Ferguson (ed.) The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney (eds) Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women's Writing, 1783-1823 Michael Moon and Cathy N. Davidson (eds) Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill     

Commerce before crusade? France, the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates (1661-1669)

French and Islamic forces clashed with an unprecedented frequencyduring the first decade of Louis XIV's personal rule. This articleexamines France's troubled relations with the Ottoman Empireand the Barbary States in the 1660s, with the aim of sheddinglight on the real motives of Louis XIV in sending his forcesagainst those of the ‘Infidel’. It finds that farfrom having a single policy towards their Muslim neighboursin the Mediterranean, the French government's behaviour wasin fact characterized by chronic inconsistency. In essence,French strategy was driven by the Bourbon government's long-termobjective of developing commerce in the eastern and southernMediterranean, but this programme of commercial expansion wasfrustrated—and repeatedly jeopardized—by issuesof power politics, in particular the king's avid pursuit ofprestige and personal gloire.     

Money, majesty and virtue: the rhetoric of monetary reform in later sixteenth-century France

Monetary inflation accompanied the period of the French civilwars of the later sixteenth century. It provoked an animateddiscussion among France's notables, especially its monetaryexperts. The debate is largely known through Jean Bodin's famousResponse de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit (1568). Thisarticle seeks to recover the moral and intellectual dimensionsof that debate, placing then in the context of how public policywas arrived at in this period. It analyses a lengthy memorandumon monetary issues, prepared for the Estates General of Blois(1576–1577). Hitherto ignored, it is ascribed here toJean Bodin. The article situates the great monetary reform ofSeptember 1577 and the introduction of the écu as theFrench money of account, within the moral and intellectual frameworkswhich underlay wider attempts at the reformation and pacificationof the French kingdom in this period.     

The ‘French’ mill in medieval Tuscany

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the territory of Florence possessed three types of grain mill: the floating mill, found particularly on the River Arno in the immediate vicinity of the city of Florence itself; the suspension mill, located on the Arno as well as the free-flowing Elsa to the southwest; and the horizontal mill situated primarily along the streams throughout the Florentine countryside. The floating mill and suspension mill were run predominantly by the Vitruvian gearing system while the horizontal mill was operated by the apparently less efficient ritrecine or horizontal walerwheel. An examination of the notarial chartularies lodged in the Archivio di Stato of Florence shows that after 1250 the Florentines, while incorporating northern- European methods for the manufacture of woolen cloth, began to use overshot and undershot mills, the former being designated as French and the latter as orbital. The orbital mill was constructed along the banks of navigable rivers like the Arno and the Elsa and soon was partly responsible for the disappearance of the floating mill. The French mill, on the other hand, was located by the erratic torrents of the hills and mountains of the countryside. It did not by any means replace the horizontal mill. In many cases, it simply became part of a pre-existing complex housing a ritrecine. In others, particularly in the latter half of the fourteenth century, there was a successful symbiosis of the principal mechanisms of the overshot and horizontal types, creating the French horizontal mill. By the end of the fourteenth century the territory of Florence thus had five types of grain mill and thereby anticipated the basic milling technology of the High Italian Renaissance as illustrated in Agostino Ramelli's compendium of machines completed in 1588.     

The French Colonial Policy of Assimilation and the Civility of the Originaires of the Four Communes (Senegal): A Nineteenth Century Globalization Project

This article analyses French assimilation policy towards the four communes of the colony of Senegal, placing it in a new conceptual framework of ‘globalization’ and ‘post-colonial studies’. Between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, the four cities of Saint-Louis, Gorée, Rufisque and Dakar were granted municipal status, while their inhabitants acquired French citizenship. However, the acquisition of these political privileges went together with a refusal on the part of these ‘citizens’ to submit themselves to the French code civil. Their resistance manifested itself in particular in the forging of an urban culture that differed from both the metropolitan model and the Senegambian models of the independent kingdoms on the colony's fringes or the societies integrated as protectorates. This article argues that, at the very heart of this colonial project and despite its marked assimilationist and jacobin overtones, a strong project of cultural and political hybridization developed. The inhabitants of the quatre communes forged their own civilité which enabled them to participate in a global colonial culture on the basis of local idioms.     

Innovative Trends in Women's and Gender Studies of the National Socialist Era

The text is less a review of the new literature than a reflectionon significant and innovative current trends in the historiographyon women and gender in the National Socialist era. The firstpart deals with various women's activities within milieus andprofessions, including their room for manoeuvre: midwives, socialworkers, female Nazi functionaries, and female auxiliary workersof the Nazi Wehrmacht. The second part of the article addressesspecific features of biopolitics, targeted not only againstJews but also against asocial women, homosexuals and prostitutes.It also looks at visual images of bodies. Although the Nazistried to create strongly determined binaries to categorize ‘we’and ‘the others’ in the arts and other propagandamaterial, there existed, in fact, a broad spectrum of body images,especially among media stars. A third trend in the history ofthe Third Reich deals not only with the politics of exclusionbut also of inclusion, as found in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft(national community), a concept that had many facets, such asthe Volksfamilie, comradeship and home front. And it was themedia that had the task of ‘translating’ this conceptto the people in many appealing ways. The fourth part considersthe gendering of memories after 1945 and the dominance of malenarratives and points of view. The four parts of the articleare intended to contribute to intersectional history and thehistory of social engineering.     

Chicanas in Charge: Texas Women in the Public Arena

Chicanas in Charge is a collection of individual profiles ofsignificant women in Texas politics and activism from the 1940sto the present. The book is arranged in four parts—"Adelitas:Warrior Trailblazers," "The Chicano Movement Activists," "Puentesy Lazos: The Hispanic Connectors," and "Twenty-first CenturyEntorchas/Torchbearers." Each part features a short introductionthat identifies the period's historical zeitgeist, identifiessimilar themes in the women's stories, and points out uniqueaspects of the leaders followed by from five to eight individualprofiles. The profiles of each woman are somewhat concise: they includea sketch of the background     

Editor's Introduction

Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. xvii + 448 pp. including chapter references and index. $19.95 paper.

Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. New York: Houghton Miffin, 1997. xxvi + 341

Williams, Vernon J., Jr. Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. ix +152 pp. including chapter references and index. $34.95 cloth.

Wolpoff, Milford and Rachel Caspari. Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 463 pp. including chapter references and index. $26.00 cloth.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Manning Marable , The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life
Martin Powell (ed) , Evaluating New Labour's Welfare Reforms
Philip E Steinberg , The Social Construction of the Ocean
Don Mitchell , The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism: From the Middle Ages to the Present. P. M. Kitromilides, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy: Studies in the Culture and Political Thought of South-Eastern Europe Richard Caplan and John Feffer (eds.), Europe's New Nationalism: States and Minorities in Conflict. Tom Garvin, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy. Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism. Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945. Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia During World War I. Paul B. Rich, Prospero's Return? Historical Essays on Race, Culture and British Society. Stephen Haseler, The English Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe. Timothy D. Sisk, Power-Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts. Stephanie Lawson, Tradition versus Democracy in the South Pacific. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds.), Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature, and History in South Africa and Australia.     

Military justice under the Directory: the Armies of Italy and of the Sambre and Meuse

The military justice records of the Armies of Italy and theSambre and Meuse reveal that, despite their contrasting militaryfortunes during the campaigns of 1796–97, their experienceswere very similar in many respects. The records of the conseilsmilitaires of the year IV (1795–96) and the conseils deguerre of the following year reveal both conditions of servicein the two armies and the circumstances and attitudes that regulatedthe relationship between soldiers and civilians in Italy andGermany. The conseils de guerre, instituted to remedy the perceivedlaxity of the conseils militaires, operated on similar principlesto their much-maligned predecessors. Occasional instances ofexemplary severity apart, these conseils frequently mitigatedboth charges and sentences, reserving the full severity of thelaw for soldiers who were not present to receive punishment.The councils protected miscreant soldiers more effectively thanthey did vulnerable civilians, but they nonetheless affirmed,if only in principle, the idea that revolutionary warfare shouldbe contained within legal limits.     

Contemporary French philosophy

Scholarship on the French Atlantic empire traditionally and uniquely focuses upon Africa as a source of slave labour for the American colonies. However, this article explores how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africa emerged as a viable alternative for colonial expansion. Uncertainties about a colonial future in the New World directed French expansionist attention away from the Americas and towards the African continent, expanding its role beyond a source of labour. The intellectual underpinnings for a transfer of empire first surfaced within the Physiocratic School of political economy. The article examines the emergence of such ideas and their reception within the colonial administration of the Ancien Régime. It also shows how expansion into Africa became central to the imperial agenda of the first French Republic. Exploring Africa as a substitute to colonial America helps expand the lens through which Africa is examined as part of the Atlantic World. It also reveals continuities between Ancien Régime colonialism and later French republican imperialism.     

Beyond ‘Parade Ground Soldiers’: French Army Assessments of the British in 1918

When the Germans launched their Spring Offensives of 1918, they placed tremendous pressure on the alliance between Britain and France. While French and British soldiers had formed strong relations through mutual cooperation at the Somme in 1916, the French experiences at Verdun and during the mutinies of 1917 had changed the way they viewed the war and, most crucially, how they would view any allied failures. When the British were forced to retreat following the beginning of Operation Michael in March 1918, the French reacted with fury. This article examines the nature of the French evaluations of the British during 1918 and the extent to which they judged their ally to have failed them. By using the collections of the Commissions de contrôle postal for the French army during the war, it will show the depths to which French opinion of the British fell in the first half of the year but also how British actions towards the war’s conclusion managed to restore some of their honour in French eyes.     

Masculinities,Race and Nationhood – Critical Connections

Books reviewed in this article: Hazel V. Carby, Race Men Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in aWhite‐Collar Union, 1944‐1994 Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and theImagined Fraternity of White Men     

Books in Summary

Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and NaturalTheology in the Nineteenth Century, by Stephen G. Alter La Mythologie du Matriarcat, L'Atelie de Johann Jakob Bachofen, by Philippe Borgeaud with Nicole Durisch, Antje Kolde, Grégoire Sommer Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods, by MilesFairburn Reflections on Revolutions, by Mark N. Katz Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder, by Donald R. Kelley Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World, Philip Nicholson