Reading Barthes

The Fédération des syndicats libres des travailleurs de la terre (FSLTT) was a trade union for farm workers established by the Christian confederation (CFTC) during the French Popular Front. Supported by two rural catholic action movements, the JAC and UCFA, it was a response to the wave of strikes in agriculture and viewed as a means to counter the perceived threat of communism in the countryside. Although the FSLTT remained small, its establishment and subsequent evolution is significant. Firstly, the union represented a break within social catholic thinking towards the rural world. Until the early 1930s, all wings of rural social catholicism supported the principle of syndicats mixtes—associations uniting workers, farmers and proprietors. The resulting clash between supporters of the FSLTT and the UNSA, the main association of agricultural syndicalism, whose leaders were also inspired by social catholic doctrine, left its mark on the future organisation of French agriculture under Vichy and during the Fourth Republic. Secondly, the FSLTT illustrates the contradictory nature of Christian trade unionism during the Popular Front period. During a decisive stage in its history, the CFTC's doctrinal and material link to social catholicism conflicted with the influence of pressures arising from the mass social movement. The article surveys the FSLTT from a national perspective, though much of the focus is on the Nord department, its strongest base.     

New countryside,old peasants? Politics,tradition and modernity in rural France

Since the publication of the volume Rural Studies in Britain and France (1990) by P. Lowe and M. Bodiguel, ‘la ruralitéfrançaise’ has become the object of intense scrutiny and has emerged as a political field where questions of national and collective identity, traditions, history, landscapes, the past and future of French society have all been debated. In the introduction to that volume, the editors declared: ‘The countryside and rural society, their past, present and future, are major preoccupations in Britain and in France. The urbanisation of the two nations has in no way diminished this interest; if anything, it has sharpened it. With the bulk of economic and social activity concentrated in towns and cities, the countryside has come to embody largely a cultural interest in both countries’, something that has been borne out by recent events. This special issue devoted to ‘Politics, tradition and modernity in rural France’ is the first issue of Modern & Contemporary France to be dedicated to a discussion of topics surrounding la question agricole. The recent publication of a short dossier on French agriculture in the journal French Politics, Society and Culture pointed the way to a number of the debates examined in the following articles about the past and the future of rural France, especially in the context of a more globalised and Europeanised economy.     

‘The Republic is lived with an uncovered face’ (and a skirt): (un)dressing French citizens

The title of this article refers to the campaign carried out by the French government, in April and May 2011, to publicize and promote the law banning the full veil from public spaces, ‘la République se vit à visage découvert.’ The article examines ways in which political discourses, during the 2009–2012 period over which this law was first discussed, and then applied, used specific norms of female dress in order to establish a certain understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Rancière's notion of the ‘police’ and Dikeç's theorization of ‘aesthetic regimes,’ the article discusses the entanglements of female dress with French republicanism. These are illustrated through controversial representations of ‘Marianne,’ the female embodiment of the Republic, which raise the issue of color, in a country where race remains taboo. Turning more specifically to the report produced by a Parliamentary committee prior to the discussion of the burqa ban, the article discusses the paradoxical promotion of skirts as the epitome of French femininity, and shows how the discussion of women's right to wear skirts challenged ideas about the location of sexism, and the subject of politics, in French society.     

Rural France in Europe: new challenges

This article examines the specificity of rural France in Europe and assesses the nature of the new challenges confronting it. Discussing the changes affecting the peasant world and French rural society, it aims to provide a balanced picture of the agricultural question by linking it to the issue of ruralité. Rural France has now become an object of debate not only for French society, but also for the future of European agriculture. The article also analyses to what extent France remains original in its position as the most ‘rural’ of the western European states by examining its relationship to its territoire and its integration into a global economy.     

Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century

This article recounts the stories told about Véronique Eugénie Allix‐Luce and her school for Muslim girls founded in Algiers in 1845. Drawing on English feminist writings, including correspondence and travel narratives, it explores how women, such as Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes, constructed this French schoolteacher as a modern day heroine. French colonial authorities and women's travel narratives provide a more complicated portrait and reveal the weight of cultural and gender politics within the French ‘civilising mission’ that ultimately erased the memory of this initiative. By retelling the story of Mme Luce's school through the double perspective of British and French contemporaries, the article offers insight into the disappearance of women's roles in the French story of Algerian colonisation.     

Five Decades of Canadian and Québec Content in French Textbooks in the United States

This study investigates the evolution of Canadian and Québec content in a sample of 65 first-year university French textbooks in the United States from the 1960s through 2010. Overall indicators of Canadian and Québec contexts and cultural notes were tabulated for each decade in addition to particular content such as Canadian history, Québec identity, and Canadian French language. The chronological analysis challenges the popular notion that teachers and textbooks authors are inherently uninterested in Canada. Instead, the analysis finds Canadian and Québec content increasing over the five-decade period reaching an all-time high point in the most recent decade. Results are explained by dynamic Québec-based factors of language politics and foreign relations initiatives rather than static US-based attitudes toward Canadian French. The analysis offers optimism for the role of Canadian and Québec Studies as a source of content for the teaching of French in the United States.     

Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Historians of rural societies should consider using folklore sources in order to understand rural families in nineteenth-century France. A source like the stories collected from seventy-year-old Nannette Lévesque by the judge Victor Smith offers a very different viewpoint to depictions of such families by historians. Nannette was extremely poor, and spent her life moving between the mountain village where she was born in the Massif Central and the town of Saint-Étienne. Her stories call into question the reality of family “strategies” and the control of women by patriarchal authority, posited by some scholars of rural French family life.     

Constructing,promoting and controlling the littérature coloniale of interwar France: an anatomy of the Grand prix de littérature coloniale (1921–1938)

In creating the Grand prix de littérature coloniale (1921–1938) and appointing the award’s panel, the Minister of the Colonies, Albert Sarraut, endowed littérature coloniale with its first institution and ushered in new synergies between the political centre of the Empire and writers self-identifying as ‘colonial’. Pan-colonial in scope and bundling all overseas territories into a single entity that only made sense in relation to the metropolis, the form of literary colonialism that the metropolitan Grand prix promoted and its claim to universal authority over the textual representations of the Empire were contested by regional cultural awards mushrooming across French colonies and protectorates in the interwar period. The author argues that the fast-changing politics and policies of the Grand prix and the discourse surrounding its attribution were all weapons through which this battle for the ownership of colonial literature between the métropole and its periphery was fought, quickly outweighing discussions about aesthetic merit. They also show why metropolitan colonial literature and its regional variants gain from being analysed jointly, in their interrelatedness, by exploring understudied links between geographical space (both real and imagined) and the distribution of financial and symbolic capital across the French Empire during the interwar period.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 6. December 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 6 Front cover LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE Most French towns have at least one street, avenue or square named after the Republic, in a tradition that dates back to the late 19th century. The Place de la République with its monumental statue is a familiar Parisian landmark, yet smaller towns would also adorn their squares, city halls and law courts with symbolic representations of the Republic, such as in this picture. A female allegory is taken to embody the values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity. Once brandished in the revolutionary struggle against the monarchy, against aristocratic and clerical privileges, these principles have retained their universal appeal. Liberté, égalité, fraternité are the common denominator that French politicians of all hues can agree on, apart from the far‐right Front National which is seen as standing outside this Republican consensus, as its policies would for instance openly deny equal treatment to residents with non‐European backgrounds. EU border policing practices show that the moral and political dilemmata epitomized in French politics have begun to affect the entire continent: How much freedom of movement are Europeans prepared to grant to those who want to partake in our relative wealth and freedom? What are the limits of liberty? How far do our feelings of fraternity extend in times of austerity? In this new Europe, with countries straining under unsustainable debt burdens, and seemingly less willing to share their remaining riches, discursive markers are shifting almost imperceptibly. Claims to freedom and equality may come from unexpected quarters, as Anne Friederike Delouis writes in her article on the French far‐right fringe. Back cover FORTRESS EUROPE Protesting asylum seekers and irregular migrants face police in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta, August 2010. The protest erupted amid migrants’ uncertainty over the length of time they were kept in the enclave before transfer to mainland Spain, enacted here in the protesters’‘shackling’ of each other in front of the cameras. Ceuta and its sister enclave Melilla have been key outposts in the EU's swiftly evolving border regime since 2005, when sub‐Saharan migrants launched what the media called a ‘massive assault’ on the territories’ perimeter fences. The ensuing crackdowns led to a displacement of routes towards the Canary Islands and an unprecedented naval operation in response. Still, migrants kept coming – across the Greek‐Turkish border in 2010 and to Italy in 2011. As a result, the EU is fast‐tracking a ‘European external border surveillance system’ involving further investments. For the border guards and defence contractors involved, clandestine migration has become big business. The high stakes in controlling migration stoke increasing tensions, however – as seen in Ceuta's 2010 protest and the desperate mass entry attempts across Melilla's high‐tech fence in 2012. As Ruben Andersson argues in this issue, such tensions highlight larger contradictions in the EU's border regime, which conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to the external border – while feeding on this very risk. An anthropological lens on this ‘game of risk’ reveals how the business of bordering Europe is a fraught enterprise in which border guards, defence contractors, migrants and smugglers are stuck in a feedback loop, generating ever stranger and more distressing sights at the southern frontiers of Europe.     

驻村工作队与乡村精英互助作用下的乡村治理研究

基于乡村“公”、“共”、“私”三分领域的治理理论，以G省F贫困村为例，运用实地考察、深度访谈等质性研究方法，结合F村实证特征和问题分析，探讨政府（驻村工作队）与社会（乡村精英）互助作用下的乡村治理特征。研究指出，驻村工作队代表政府权威，领导并协助村两委工作；新乡贤利用自身社会资本，与驻村工作队在项目确定、资金使用、村庄发展等方面协商互助，降低治理成本；村两委则以维持乡村生产、生活秩序为主，并领导/协助新乡贤参与村中事务。总体而言，驻村工作队嵌入乡村，代表上层政府的外部政府权威，乡村精英代表乡村内生权威，二者作为“中间者”在乡村层面协作互助，实现“上、中、下相结合”的较为均衡的乡村治理。     

Taming the Minotaur: Bertrand de Jouvenel on Liberty and Authority

Bertrand de Jouvenel remains one of the most original and elusive thinkers of twentieth-century France. Known for the most part as a “conservative liberal,” his ideas represent a merger of political liberalism with a strong emphasis on communal and public association as means of expressing and sustaining individual freedom. Jouvenel's work is also characterized by a complex treatment of the question of political authority: he is wary of the notion of authority as a means of organizing and planning society, while at the same time he opposes its reduction to a merely technical legal instance. As this article argues, Jouvenel's complex ideas on freedom and authority remain entrenched in the tradition of French liberalism, which since the early nineteenth century advanced the conception of the dual nature of power and politics.     

A Hierarchy of Geographies: A Skinnerian Model of Indochina’s Overseas Chinese Congrégations and Their Influence on French Colonialism

In Indochina, overseas Chinese were organized by dialect group into associations called congregations, which shared many of the functions of huiguan in China. The spread of overseas Chinese economic and social networks followed a Skinnerian model in which large urban con?régations wielded more political and economic authority than did smaller, rural con?régations. By examining the impacts of French colonialism upon overseas Chinese networks within Indochina and upon overseas connections with their Chinese native places, this paper proposes that the Skinnerian model of local-system hierarchy fits quite comfortably when applied to the world of French colonial Indochina and its overseas Chinese. Furthermore, it argues that French colonialism actually reinforced the Skinnerian hierarchy of politics and markets in ways that endured long after the collapse of Imperial China.     

Sur les traces de Cortés: L'expédition du Mexique d'après Le Monde illustré

Unlike L'Illustration, with which it competed under the Second Empire, the weekly Le Monde illustré, which first appeared in 1857 and which was protected by the imperial government, did not count among the political newspapers overtaxed under Napoléon the Third's repressive regime. For this reason, it made great strides thanks to its blind allegiance to a French imperialism that had asserted its authority during the Crimean war, but which spent itself during the war against Juárez and his republican partisans in Mexico. While the French liberal press criticized the Second Empire foreign policy, Le Monde illustré persisted in turning the Mexican war into an antijuarist pacification favorable to a new Latin colonial empire, as well as to an application of the Saint-Simonian doctrine on Mexican industry and economy. In order to achieve this, the illustrated reports on the expeditionary force, military operations, and French victories were a warmongering that aimed to place this campaign in the afterglow of the conquistadors' era, as well as to idealize the imperial army as a symbol of the French nation.     

论邓小平的"三农"思想对中国农村改革的重大意义

邓小平高度重视农业发展、农村改革和农民生活,"三农"思想非常丰富。主要有: 农业是国民经济的基础;农村改革的首要任务是解放和发展生产力;农村改革的核心是充分调动农 民的积极性;农业发展的根本出路在于科技进步;农村改革和农业发展要有"两个飞跃",等等。 这些思想对中国农村改革具有重大的积极意义。     

The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.     

关于发展海东地区现代特色农业的思考

加快现代特色农业的发展是农村经济发展的核心和关键。现代特色农业是海东农业和农村经济发展中最具竞争优势和发展潜力的产业。随着我国农业产业结构调整的不断深化,海东现代特色农业的发展必须立足区情,突出重点,实施农业结构战略性调整,大力培育独具特色的主导产业。     

Indifferent but Mobilized: Rural Politics during the Interwar Period in Eastern and Western Europe

What did peasants discuss at party meetings? Were they mobilized by ethnic politics or indifferent to them altogether? The end of the First World War brought about universal male suffrage in much of Europe, and with it the process of mass politics began. The concept of national indifference is important in understanding interwar politics, because this period is often studied teleologically with attention focused on extremism and nationalism as the primary mobilizing issue

Agrarian movements have been under-researched, and when Agrarians have been studied, it has been through the prism of elite politics. This comparative paper seeks to redress this omission by looking at grassroots rural politics. The interwar countryside was marked by profound political, economic and social transformation but also in terms of what Robert Paxton has described as the ‘triple crisis of the countryside’ – worsening economic conditions, the declining status of the countryside and inadequate political representation. The paper will explore how reform and crisis impacted how agrarian politics functioned at a local level by asymmetrically comparing cases from Romania, Poland and Ireland, with the final case helping to contextualize Eastern Europe within the wider European experience This paper argues that the rural population was mobilized, but primarily in the context of local issues rather than national ethno-political questions. Local party organization was, to paraphrase James C Scott, the site ‘of an exchange of small arms fire’ in rural class conflict, as questions regarding the control of public space, generational conflict and power within the village mobilized peasants. Thus, I argue that it was the underlying socio-economic issues that mobilized the rural population, not nationalism. The dynamics of these conflicts were shaped by local economic, political and social power dynamics, and by using indifference as a concept, we can look more deeply at interwar politics from a grassroots perspective and develop a more nuanced understanding of local, national and European politics.     

Transnational blackface,neo-minstrelsy and the ‘French Eddie Murphy’ in Intouchables

The 2011 French film Intouchables is an interracial buddy film about a black caregiver from the suburbs and a quadriplegic white aristocrat. Éric Tolédano and Olivier Nakache’s film broke box office records in France and abroad, becoming the second highest grossing French film of all time in domestic release and the most successful non-English film on the export market. However, the film’s critical reception was mixed; some celebrated the film’s social conscience while others denounced its racism. In this article, the author analyses the film’s treatment of race, specifically the ways in which Tolédano and Nakache draw on tropes of American blackface, neo-minstrelsy and 1980s Hollywood interracial buddy comedies starring Eddie Murphy to visualise racial inequality and discrimination in contemporary France. The author tracks the ways in which these American tropes align and do not align with representations of cultural diversity and the banlieues in France, and he ultimately argues that the film’s financial success and ambivalent reception track with the contradictory politics of American tropes for representing blackness.     

COMPLEXITY IN THE RURAL CANADIAN HOUSING LANDSCAPE

Rural housing conditions and needs across Canada are as complex as the rural landscape itself, yet within the research literature rural housing is often treated as a single and unproblematic unit. This paper makes two arguments about rural housing research in Canada. The first is that the ‘rural’ is a complex housing landscape, not simply an undifferentiated ‘other’ in comparison to urban housing. The second is that this complexity has important implications for assessing changes to the local housing stock. The empirical content of the paper is drawn from three study areas in Canada where there is a mix of rural / agricultural and cottage area properties. Questions of housing stock change within these rural-recreational countryside examples are examined using questionnaire and building permit data. The findings presented here support the contention that the rural landscape is in fact a complex housing landscape, and also support the view that unless this complexity is recognized, a coherent portrait of rural housing will not emerge. Les conditions et les besoins d'habitations rurales au Canada, sont aussi complexes que le paysage lui-même, même si la littérature traite I'habitat rural en tant qu'unité“unique, dénuée de problèmes. Cet article présente deux arguments concernant la recherche sur I'habitat rural au Canada. En premier lieu, ‘rural’ decrit un paysage contenant des habitations complexes et pas simplement une ‘autre chose’ non-déstincte par rapport a I'habitat urbain. Deuxidmèment, cette complexité a des conséquences importantes qui ont un rapport avec les changements dans I'inventaire local des habitations. Le contenu de l'article est basé sur trois Études de cas au Canada où il y a un mélange de propriétés rurales, agricoles et vacancyères. Les questions concernant le changement dans I'inventaire des habitations pour ces examples ruraux et vacanciers, sont reliées à des donnés de questionnaires et aux permis de construction. Les résultats présentés ici, confirment l'argument qu'un paysage rural est en fait un paysage complexe d'habitations. lis confirment aussi I'idée qu'un portrait cohérent de I'habitat rural n'apparaitra pas, sauf si cette complexity est reconnue.     

约曼与英国资本主义启动

农业是英国资本主义的基础,约曼又是农业资本主义的发动者、农村社会的“脊梁”。在英国农业资本主义发生的时候,约曼是先行者。“约曼”经历了由一个带有荣誉感的职业名词向具有经济与社会含义的名词的转变;约曼阶层经历了由采邑制度下的农民向资本主义农场主的演进。约曼是社会转型时期英国农村的精英群体,对经济、政治、教育文化、日常生活等方面都产生了重大而深远的影响,为英国率先成为第一个工业化国家提供了最初的、最基本的经济力量和政治力量,是英国资本主义的启动者。