Pilote ‘hebdomadaire’ and the Teenager Bande Dessinée of the 1950s and 1960s

Launched in 1959, Pilote magazine was an original bande dessinée publication. Unlike most other magazines read predominantly by children, Pilote's unique collaboration with Radio Luxembourg facilitated its recruitment of ‘teenager’ readers captivated by the transistor craze that had rejuvenated radio by the end of the decade. The magazine also sought to endear itself to parents and the increasingly powerful educationalist lobby by adopting a sober pedagogical profile both in strips and accompanying textual content. Pilote thus sourced a new category of BD reader in the school-going teenager and, as the 1960s progressed, the volatile tastes and radicalisation of this category of reader necessitated a near ceaseless revision of the magazine's content to enable it to maintain market share. This article concerns itself with Pilote's struggle to align itself with dissident youth discourse of the 1950s and 1960s and analyses the socio-cultural impetus for thematic departures in bande dessinée it published.     

War and peace in the contemporary French film ecosystem: Valérie Donzelli’s La Guerre est déclarée

This article analyses Valérie Donzelli’s film Declaration of War (La Guerre est déclarée, 2011), in the context of the contemporary French film ecosystem. The article argues that Donzelli’s film exemplifies the French miniaturist mode of production; demonstrates the modern conceptual notion of applied cinephilia; highlights the idiosyncratic uses possible for French popular genres, particularly the comedy and the musical; and embodies the French film industry’s export mission by representing on-screen the French national healthcare system.     

Fin de millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis

Foucault, M., Dits et écrits I 1954–1969 (Gallimard, 1994), 855pp., 215F., ISBN 2 07 073844 2

Foucault, M., Dits et écrits II 1970–1975 (Gallimard, 1994), 838pp., 215F., ISBN 2 07 073987 2

Foucault, M., Dits et écrits III 1976–1979 (Gallimard, 1994), 836pp., 215F., ISBN 2 07 073988 0

Foucault, M., Dits et écrits IV 1980–1988 (Gallimard, 1994), 896pp., 215F., ISBN 2 07 073989 9

Halperin, D.M., Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford University Press, 1995), 246pp., £14.99 hbk, ISBN 0 19 509371 2

Jones, C. and Porter, R., eds., Reassessing Foucault: Power, Medicine and the Body (Routledge, 1994), 225pp., £45.00 hbk, ISBN 0 41 507542 4

McNay, L., Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Blackwell, 1994), 196pp., £39.50 hbk, ISBN 0 74 560990 2, £11.95 pbk, ISBN 0 74 560991 0

Sennett R., Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (Faber and Faber, 1994), 431pp., £25.00 hbk, ISBN 0 57 117390 X     

Conservatism under Napoleon: The political writings of Joseph Fiévée

Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769) is known as the thinker who raised a whole generation of Southern Italian intellectuals, among them Francesco Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. One of the most influential of his works was the notoriously difficult Diceosina, o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto (1766), a textbook destined for use in the universities. The Diceosina was a powerful, if controversial, attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand, and the specific problems encountered by eighteenth-century commercial society on the other. In fact, it contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought; a synthetic guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development. This essay explores the work's context, rich intellectual origins, and ultimate significance through its long and complicated reception. The cultural and political connotations of Genovesi's Diceosina become particularly evident through an engagement with the works of Ermenegildo Personè, one of the book's most arduous critics.     

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.     

Histoire embrouillée: Making material histories in Southern Africa

This article examines how historical knowledge about Southern African chiefdoms was produced in D.F. Ellenberger's research archive (c. 1860–1913) and archaeology drawing on his scholarship. I describe a historiographic approach detailing how Ellenberger's work co-opted the material world to create historical facts, obscuring diverse meanings of home, movement, and authority.     

On Will and Reason in L'astrée

This article sheds light on the technique of amplificatio by which Boccaccio expands the stories of famous women he finds in Valerius Maximus's De fide uxorium. Boccaccio's work on famous women situates itself between the genres of fiction and the historical treatise. It analyzes in philological detail Boccaccio's citation technique and his elaboration of the ancient model, showing how the greatest narrator of the Italian Middle Ages revitalizes and actualizes it and crafts an original literary product.     

Between Regionalization and Centralization: The Creation of the Musée Léopold II in Elisabethville (Musée national de Lubumbashi), Belgian Congo (1931–1961)

Since “museumland” was revisited in the 1980s, different authors have studied the history of colonial museums in Europe within a broader discussion on colonial bias, the creation of traditions and the theory of representation. It has become clear, for example, how African utensils were exported to Europe, where they were exhibited as curiosa, ethnographical objects or art. But what happened when the very notion of the museum was exported back to Africa? Who created these institutes and in what context? Was the relationship between colonizers and colonized altered? Did the “social life” of the objects on show change? And what was the relationship between the “old” museums in Europe and the “new” ones created in the colony? These questions have rarely been studied. In this article, the creation of the Musée Léopold II will be used as a basis to offer insight into the links between colonial “science” and “policy”, which proved not to be as monolithic as often portrayed, but rather were complex amalgamations of different opinions and even conflicting interests.     

Opération Amérique: Québec’s Soft Power Applied to French Language Teaching in the United States

ABSTRACT

Opération Amérique refers to the coordinated efforts of René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois government beginning late 1970s to promote Québec’s interests in the United States. The general goals and strategies of Opération Amérique suggest that it presents a case of soft power. However, the specific actions implemented as well as their effects have barely been explored. An analysis of original documents pertaining to Opération Amérique indicates that specific groups in the United States—namely, French professors—were targeted with the hope that they would improve perceptions of Québec in the United States. An examination of French textbooks used in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s shows an increase in Canada/Québec content, which may reflect the influence of Opération Amérique on French teaching practices.     

Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction

This article analyses literary mediations of francophone Jewish attitudes towards Israel, and particularly towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its primary corpus comprises two female-authored novels published during the Second Intifada: Olivia Rosenthal's Les Fantaisies spéculatives de J.H. le sémite (2005) and Chantal Osterreicher's L'Insouciance d'Adèle (2006). It demonstrates how these two texts represent antithetical stances towards Israel, the former intermittently critical and even censorious, the latter defensive and at least partly valorising. Given the status of both authors as French-born Jews (although Osterreicher now lives in Israel), both of these texts can be seen to mediate heterodox attitudes to the conflict. But the heterodoxy depends upon the context in which the reader places the two authors. In the context of the twenty-first-century France in which it was published, which, like most other countries in the global mediasphere, is heavily critical of Israel, Osterreicher's text is acidly contestatory of default-position anti-Zionism. On the other hand, in the context of the French Jewry to which Rosenthal belongs, which has traditionally evinced unflinching solidarity with Israel, her own critique of that country's dealings with Palestinians is equally contestatory, and, despite its ludicity, is no less impactful than Osterreicher's reverse discourse. A final axis of enquiry is the extent to which there may be some consensus as well as obvious dissensus between these two ostensibly antinomous texts.