The architecture of power: François Mitterrand’s Grands Travaux revisited 1

Building on earlier research, this paper proposes a more refined analysis of how the main decision‐making processes pertaining to the grands travaux were established in the very early stages. Informed by consultation of official archival sources to which access was obtained by special permission (dérogation), it shows the manner and extent of the personal intervention by François Mitterrand, and offers new insights into his attachment to the Grand Louvre project, which drove the wider programme of architectural and cultural projects. It shows how and why a set of disparate projects were packaged into a flagship policy, and sheds light on the conflicts of power within the machinery of government under the Fifth Republic, especially relating to cultural policy during the Lang years. It shows how the highly politicised context motivated Mitterrand’s drive to circumvent normal administrative processes in order to mark his presidency with a cultural stamp.     

Modernity versus postmodernity: The philosophy of Jean‐François Lyotard

Benjamin, A., ed., Judging Lyotard (Routledge, 1992), 211pp., £10.99., Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature, ISBN 0 415 5257 1

Norris, C., The Truth about Postmodernism (Blackwell, 1993), 333pp., £12.99., ISBN 0 631 18718 9     

Illusions of revolution: François Furet's critique of Marx

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.     

The human comedy of Antoine Doinel: from Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut1

The focus of this paper is the intertextual relationship between the work of François Truffaut and that of Honoré de Balzac. It explores Balzac's influence on the shaping of Truffaut's voice and argues that Balzac's Human Comedy served Truffaut as a model for some of his cinematic innovations. This applies to Truffaut's total oeuvre, but particularly to his series of autobiographical films, “The Adventures of Antoine Doinel”: The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959), Antoine and Colette, Love at Twenty (Antoine et Colette, L'Amour à Vingt Ans, 1962), Stolen Kisses (Baisers Volés, 1968), Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal, 1970), Love on the Run (L'Amour en Fuite, 1979).

In examining Truffaut's “rewriting” of Balzac, I adopt—and adapt—the intertextual approach of Harold Bloom's theory of the “anxiety of influence.” My paper applies Bloom's concept of misreading to an examination of the relationship between Truffaut's autobiographical films, and Balzac's Human Comedy, both thematically and structurally.     

Mister Unpopular: François Hollande and the Exercise of Presidential Leadership, 2012–14

This article examines the first two years of François Hollande's presidential term from a leadership perspective. The central argument is that while Hollande has sometimes been unlucky in the face of unanticipated events and severely constrained by contextual factors outside of his control, notably France's low levels of economic growth, he has also displayed a lack of certain essential leadership qualities. He failed to grasp the scale of the economic situation in the early months of his tenure and so lost precious time in fully addressing the need for structural reforms and engaging in a persuasive pedagogic narrative. In addition, his public communication—an essential leadership quality in the era of mediatised politics—has been poor. Hollande's attempt to relaunch his presidential leadership following the disastrous set of mid-term election results in 2014 marks the start of a new phase in his tenure of the office.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

Instrument transfer as knowledge transfer in neurophysiology: François Magendie's (1783-1855) early attempts to measure cerebrospinal fluid pressure

Fran?ois Magendie's (1783-1855) experimental model for measuring blood pressure in animals, which he developed in 1838, had a major impact on French physiology in the nineteenth century, especially upon Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) in Paris. In due course it was also adopted by other European investigators, such as the Leipzig physiologist Carl Ludwig (1816-1895), and by clinicians who developed it into a major measuring tool. Historians of science, however, have paid hardly any attention to Magendie's further laboratory investigations conducted with the assistance of Jean-Louis Marie Poiseuille's (1799-1869) sphygmomètre (blood pressure meter). After having used the apparatus to conduct his experiments on a variety of blood vessels, Magendie also applied the sphygmomètre in 1840 to the ventricular system of the brain in order to measure cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure. But the scope of this new procedure had yet to be defined: the new measuring device invited many speculative interpretations about the meaning of CSF flow for the physiology of the ventricular system in healthy and diseased brain function. As such, Magendie's experiments produced phenomena in very heterogeneous knowledge areas, and CSF measurement was situated at the interface of quite disparate investigative spaces regarding the structure and function of the brain. In his textbook Le?ons sur les Fonctions et les Maladies du Système Nerveux (Lectures on the Functions and Diseases of the Nervous System), Magendie described extending application of the measuring "apparatus of Poiseuille" from blood vessels to parts of the brain. The instrument thus became something of a liquidodynamomètre (liquor dynamometer), that paved the way for later applications, including (after 1896) diagnostic intracranial pressure (ICP) measurement by Theodor Kocher (1841-1917) and Harvey Cushing (1869-1939). The current paper focuses on the experimental contingencies that prompted the instrument transfer in Magendie's laboratory and opened up new epistemological perspectives for research in neurophysiology.     

Ano te mahara e reka,how sweet the memory: The changing remembrance of Bishop Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier in the Twentieth Century*

In 2001, Catholic pilgrims, led by Māori priest Henare Tate, travelled to France to exhume the remains of Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier (1821–1872), the first Catholic Bishop of Aotearoa New Zealand. Placed in a lead-lined coffin, the remains were taken back to New Zealand and laid to rest in Motuti, Hokianga. The interment — 131 years after Pompallier's death — marked the end of an extraordinary renovation of the Bishop as a historical figure, shaped by the tides of Māori and non-Māori Catholic life, and fulfilling, it seemed, a sentiment expressed in this memorial song which Pompallier himself had composed as a parting gift to his Katorika (Catholic) faithful: “Ano te mahara e reka/a ki nga motu o Nuitireni i/sweet is the memory I hold/for the islands of New Zealand.” This article explores the shifting remembrance of Pompallier that underpinned the repatriation and its legacy for New Zealand Catholic communities, especially Hokianga Māori. Three interrelated themes emerge: locally, Hokianga as a foundational place of Māori Catholicism, and the institutional remembrance of Pompallier as the apostolic Bishop of Auckland; and, globally, the reshaping of collective memories in the theological and social changes of the Catholic Church.