‘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.     

The Querelle Between Alain Badiou and Éric Marty,Contrasted With Régis Debray's Lettre Ouverte to Élie Barnavi and Barnavi's Response

This article contrasts two major debates in book form on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, so central to French political discussion today—the ‘quarrel’ between Alain Badiou (with Cécile Winter, in Circonstances 3: Portées du mot ‘juif’) and Éric Marty (Une querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe), and the debate between Régis Debray and Élie Barnavi (À un ami israélien, by Debray with a response from Barnavi). The Badiou/Marty exchange is hostile and polarised, Badiou arguing strongly against the existence of a separate Israeli state and Marty vehemently in its favour, while À un ami israélien evidences what I describe as Debray's post-Zionism in dialogue with Barnavi's Left Zionism. What emerges from the two exchanges is, it is argued, a taxonomy of attitudes towards Israel substantially more complex than the traditional, and often misleading, polarity between ‘Zionist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.     

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.     

The Political Transfer of English Parliamentary Rules in the French Assemblies (1789–1848)

France has often been perceived as the most resilient country to political transfers from abroad. This view does not withstand close scrutiny and political realities tell a different story. This article argues for a reinterpretation of the role of political transfers in modern French political life (since 1789). Through the study of the introduction of rules inspired by the British parliamentary system, this article seeks to show that transfers did take place and gave rise to controversy. The July Monarchy represents the best example. There was an effective transfer but the resistance to this transfer was also very effective. This resistance shows the structural specificity of the French parliamentary system. Political transfers are thus double edged: it is simultaneously an import into a system and a way of reorganizing the system that modifies the nature of the transfer (in this instance the ‘recipes’ of the British parliament).

Résumé La France a souvent été vue comme le pays du refus de toute importation politique venue de l'étranger. Mais, une telle idée appartient plus au monde des représentations (que les Français ont abondamment nourri) qu'au domaine de la réalité politique. Cet article plaide pour une réévaluation du rôle tenu par les transferts politiques dans la vie politique française moderne (à partir de 1789). A travers l'étude de l'introduction de règles inspirées du modèle parlementaire britannique, l'article tente de démontrer que les transferts ont été à la fois effectifs et sujets à de très fortes controverses. La période de la monarchie de Juillet, de ce point de vue, offre un exemple remarquable. Le transfert eut bien lieu (la publicité des votes principalement) mais la résistance opposée à ce transfert fut elle aussi très efficace. Cette résistance est un révélateur des spécificités structurelles du parlementarisme français. Un transfert politique se révèle donc ici ambivalent: il est à la fois un phénomène d'importation à l'intérieur d'un système d'accueil (ici, la monarchie de Juillet) et une forme de recomposition de ce système qui vient modifier à son tour la nature initiale du transfert (ici, les ‘recettes’ du parlementarisme britannique).     

The Newer New Life: A.S. Byatt,E. Nesbit and Socialist Subculture

This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.     

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave,pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.     

The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.     

Écrire la (non-)violence : le cas de Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes d’Ivan Jablonka

This article analyses Ivan Jablonka’s Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, which garnered three major prizes in the fall of 2016 (Le Prix Littéraire du Monde, Le Médicis et Le Prix des Prix) while also receiving quasi-unanimous acclaim from French press and media. My purpose is to explain how Jablonka’s writing contributes to exposing, denouncing and even, as far as possible ex post facto and by means of a text, undertaking a kind of reparation of the masculine violence inflicted on the 18-year-old young woman not only at the end, but throughout her entire life. To this end, the paradigm of violence laid out by Lévinas and Derrida will allow us to explore the ethics and poetics of non-violence. If on the one hand Jablonka’s text reveals the subjective involvement of the researcher and writer, we will see on the other hand that his project carries social, political and human stakes: his writing of a ‘crime story’ constitutes a manner of understanding the tragedy in the context of French society, with its social, judiciary and political institutions.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

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.     

Cultural insecurity and its discursive crystallisation in contemporary France

This article analyses the emergence in French public discourse since 2010 of the term ‘insécurité culturelle’ (‘cultural insecurity’). It traces firstly the take-up of the term outside France since the 1980s in anglophone written news media. It establishes four received meanings for the term: a ‘pure’ cultural insecurity expressing simply a relation to the arts world; a nationally refracted cultural insecurity that expresses that relation through the prism of relations between nations; an anthropologico-political conception; and a conception related to the human development paradigm. The take-up in France of the term has conformed to the anthropologico-political conception. Developments after 2002 in France created propitious conditions for coupling the semantic fields of ‘culture’ and ‘insecurity’. The term itself was launched from 2010 through the work of two quite different ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ associated with the erstwhile ‘popular left’ current close to the French Socialist Party (Christophe Guilluy and Laurent Bouvet). The article analyses in both linguistic and political perspectives how the expression has been taken up since 2012 in the national press in France. In particular, it explores the debate concerning the purchase of the term on reality, and its current discursive fit with the agendas of the mainstream and far right.     

French radicalism through the eyes of John Stuart Mill

The paper attempts to highlight some under-researched aspects of the interaction between British and French radical political thinkers and activists during the period between the July Revolution of 1830 in France and the early years of the Third Republic. It focuses in particular on the decisive impact that the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 had for the perception of French politics by the most Francophile British radical, John Stuart Mill. In this context, Mill's astonishingly dense coverage of French affairs in The Examiner and the relation between that coverage and Mill's radical agenda at home are explored. The Revolution of February 1848 and the establishment of a Republic in France raised new hopes and led to a new round of Anglo-French radical co-operation and manifestations of fraternity. However, it was the frustration of the expectations raised by 1848 (fatally by the time of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état in December 1851) that had the most profound effect on the perception of French radicalism outre-Manche. A detailed analysis of which French ‘radical’ parties, factions and personalities attracted Mill's sympathies and support from 1830 to the beginnings of the Third Republic is offered, along with the reasons why Mill was attracted by some of the people and factions in question and not by others. The paper winds up with a few comments on Mill's strenuous efforts to contribute to Anglo-French mutual understanding and fellow-feeling and his strategies to that effect.     

Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France

On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli state's occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the other hand. The ‘reason’ it calls for is thus a negotiated two-state settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the organisation urges EU governments to apply pressure on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to this end. This article looks at JCall within the French context, first in distinction to J Street in the USA, with which JCall shares a political position but not organisational links, and second in relation to the broader French political debate about Jewishness, Muslimness and the Middle East. Criticised by the right for its supposed disloyalty to Israel and even ‘anti-Semitism’, and by the left for its non-support of boycott, divestment and sanctions and its ongoing support of the Israeli state, JCall at first appears as somewhat middle-of-the-road in the French context. It also, from this writer's point of view, regrettably lacks a strong female presence or gendered perspective. It has, however, emerged as a serious political voice in the debate over the Middle East and could be less of a lightweight in the French political battles over Israel and Palestine than it may have first appeared.     

Book review

In his main work, The Science of Legislation (1780–1783), the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri proposed a set of extensive political and cultural reforms. These reforms were necessary to free eighteenth-century societies from the remnants of feudal institutions that obstructed international peace and economic growth. Filangieri's ideas were shaped by the international political climate between the seven Years’ War and the eve of the French Revolution. Reinterpreting Montesquieu and Genovesi through the influences of French radical and Enlightenment thought (Helvétius, Raynal, l’Encyclopédie), as well as the economics of Hume, Verri and the Physiocrats, he concluded that European modernity was inherently contradictory.

From this perspective Filangieri set out to force a clean break between the technical horizons of mercantilism and enlightened absolutism and a society based on civil rights, a fair distribution of wealth and resources, and free trade. Proper ‘scientific’ knowledge of the rules and principles of legislation would allow governments to balance out the natural and cultural factors that characterise individual states, and to identify the appropriate model for social and economic development. If all states acted on their proper interest, international free trade and peaceful competition between states would emerge and the potential for general economic growth be materialised. Thus, the natural equilibrium and ‘universal consensus’ among nations could be restored.     

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.     

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 (Jean) Nouvel Other: Primitivism and the Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, located beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in June 2006. Constructed to house France's important collection of non-western art, the museum has been promoted as ‘decidedly post-colonial’ and a place of ‘reconciliation and sharing’. Historians have situated the creation of the museum within political debates over the restructuring of several of France's museums and, more broadly, the country's position in a post-colonial world, while focusing little critical attention on the building itself. The author argues that Jean Nouvel's architectural program for the Musée du Quai Branly—a ‘primitive shelter’ surrounded by a ‘sacred wood’—gives physical form to a primitivist aesthetic. The unproblematised binaries of self versus other and culture versus nature evident in Nouvel's design reveal a surprisingly unsophisticated theoretical standpoint. As a frame in which to view and understand the objects on display, the Musée du Quai Branly invites a primitivist—and colonial—reading of its collection.     

Balancing the Constitution: Bicameralism in Post-revolutionary France, 1814–31

After the defeat of Napoleon, representative institutions were introduced in many European states. In France, as in other countries, this new institution was modelled on the English example: a bicameral legislature with an elective and a hereditary chamber. However, the Chamber of Peers failed to live up to its model: it soon became clear that it did not behave as an independent, aristocratic chamber capable of holding the balance between the king and the popular Chamber. Restoration liberals concluded on the basis of this failure that the English political model was simply unsuitable for a levelled society such as that in post-revolutionary France. In 1831, the hereditary Chamber of Peers was abolished. The experience of the French with the Chamber of Peers therefore seems to confirm the idea of a French ‘Sonderweg’ developed by historians such as François Furet and Pierre Rosanvallon. However, it should be noted that even after 1831 the idea of a balance as such did not disappear from French political culture. French publicists suggested that the balanced constitution of the English could be imitated in France in different ways, without necessitating the creation of an aristocratic institution. Thus, the example of the French Chamber of Peers shows that institutional transfers had an important impact on French political culture.

résumé: Après la défaite de Napoléon, des institutions représentatives furent introduites dans beaucoup d'états européens. En France comme dans d'autres pays, la nouvelle institution fut modelée sur le modèle britannique du bicaméralisme avec une chambre élue et une chambre héréditaire. Cependant la chambre des pairs ne réussit pas à imiter son modèle. Il devint rapidement évident qu'elle ne représentait pas une aristocratie indépendante capable de servir de lien entre la chambre et le roi. Les libéraux de la restauration conclurent de cet échec que le modèle britannique ne correspondait pas à une société nivelée comme la France post-révolutionnaire. En 1831 la chambre des pairs hereditaire fut abolie. Cette expérience de la chambre des pairs semble confirmer l'idée d'une exception française telle que François Furet et Pierre Rosanvallon la décrive. Cependant l'idée ne disparut pas et cette notion d'équilibre resta dans le discours politique français. Les publicistes Français suggérèrent qu'une constitution équilibrée puisse être imitée sans une institution aristocratique. Cet exemple montre à quel point les transferts institutionnels eurent un impact dans la culture politique française.