Les deux identite´s de la France

Regionalism is an important element in the representation of French identity. Often considered as a right-wing ideology, it appeared as a left-wing movement in the 1960s, and references to regionalism are to be found in much French political discourse today. This article highlights the place of the regionalist element in French identity by advancing the hypothesis that for more than a century there has been a dual French identity. The Third Republic asserted that France was 'one and indivisible', but also that the country was richly diverse. The exaltation of diversity permitted the reaffirmation of French superiority over other nations. In order to develop a mass education grounded on patriotic feeling, those responsible for education declared that this had to be based on children's spontaneous affection for their 'petite patrie'. The regional identities celebrated in republican France are not at odds with national identity. The process of constructing national identities in Europe led to the creation of a 'check-list' forming the basis of all national identities. Regional identities were constructed on the basis of a dual relationship between the local and the national: the model of the national as a perfect mosaic of diversity, or the model of the 'mise en abyme', that is, the local representing the national in miniature.     

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.     

Marring the Memory: The 1967 Vimy Ridge Commemorations and Canada-France Relations

Commemorating Canada's legendary April 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge has normally proven an emotive event of national importance, symbolic of shared Canadian and French wartime trials and given mostly to remembrance of Canada's war dead. Since 1936, the ridge has been graced by the massive Canadian National Vimy Memorial, for decades the site of impressive and solemn annual ceremonies. But Canada's 1967 50th anniversary celebrations of the battle – a showpiece of the national centenary celebrations – became mired in controversy. French President General Charles de Gaulle was deeply offended that Canada had invited Prince Philip to the event without consulting Paris. It was a stunning diplomatic blunder, especially since Canada's relations with France already were tense as a result of de Gaulle's tacit support for the cause of Quebec independence. Consequently, an opportunity to commemorate a signal event in Canadian history devolved into a fractious bilateral debate and led to a shocking and much-deplored French boycott of the ceremonies. This article adds to the history of commemoration as foreign policy and argues that the Vimy incident had major consequences on France–Canada relations and played a role in France's growing encouragement of Quebec separatists.     

POLITICIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE

The more highly politicized nature of French, as compared to British universities can be explained only partially in terms of such cultural and Political differences as the greater strength of the revolutionary tradition in France and the more conservative tenor of French governments in the l960's and 1970's. Political tensions in French higher education are also in Dart the result of policy choices, notably the greater speed of expansion of enrollments in France as compared to Britain and the form of French university elections, which strengthened politicized unions.     

The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life

Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual woman's desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and women's health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about one's own desires and hopes for the fate of one's body, a ‘delegated biopolitics’ of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to ‘choose wisely.’     

NE ME RACONTE PLUS D'HISTOIRES: DERRIDA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

This essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses.     

Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.     

Themes of the French Year 2000 celebration

France ushered in the Year 2000 with an ambitious year-long celebration that featured Ferris wheels on the Champs-Élysées, a special open university programme, an avant-gardist homage to Beauty, and a nationwide 14 July picnic. Like the Bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989, the French Y2K celebration attempted to reconcile the French 'exception' with certain postmodern realities— namely, by stressing both universalism and diversity, urbanity and ecology, citizenship and showmanship, modernity and memory. Above all, it hoped to show that the advent of the age of globalisation— the real meaning of Y2K—did not entail the end of the republican era.     

The road to modern Jewish politics. Political tradition and political reconstruction in the Jewish community of Tsarist Russia

This article examines how Maoist theory and practice were imported to France during the 1960s. A syncretic phenomenon, as notions developed in the Chinese cultural context were adapted to the very different Gallic situation, French Maoism proved to be especially influential among students at the École normale supérieure at the rue d’Ulm in Paris, where the Marxist theoretician, Louis Althusser, was teaching. Maoist philosophy facilitated critiques of the Moscow-aligned French Communist Party and its student union; it enabled Althusser's rethinking of the Marxist tradition, and it ultimately provided ammunition for his students’ eventual break with his “theoreticism.” Maoism's fecund contribution to French intellectual culture in the 1960s, helping to lay the groundwork for the events of May 1968, derived principally from its dual theoretical and practical nature. This article highlights two specific Maoist tenants—the inevitably violent nature of revolution and the ersatz-empiricist method of the “investigation”—and suggests how, after 1968, French Maoism ultimately surrendered the former as the latter proved more useful to direct democratic politics.     

Cultural democratisation and popular music

The article examines ways in which the long-standing ambition to democratise culture in France can be applied to popular music, and to French pop particularly. Theoretically, pop should not need to be democratised at all since it is 'popular' by definition. But the rhetoric of 'popular culture' in France has traditionally been more to do with aspiration than reality. The analysis considers how French sociology and cultural policy have 'democratised' pop in one sense, by helping it find acceptance as a 'legitimate' practice, but have in the process constructed it as a social phenomenon, bypassing the much more complex issue of its aesthetic worth.     

Napoleon,Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase

Why did Napoleon sell Louisiana to the United States? Unfortunately, he left very few written traces of his Louisiana policy and, therefore, historians disagree. Their explanations tend to emphasise one of three factors: the diplomacy of President Thomas Jefferson; France's coming war with Britain; or the impact of the black rebels of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). The most heated disagreements revolve around the differing assessments of the role played by Jefferson. This article argues that Jefferson played no role in Napoleon's decision to sell the colony. It acknowledges that the British were crucial, because war with Britain meant that Louisiana would be lost to France. But why was Louisiana undefended? The troops Napoleon wanted to send there never arrived. They went instead to Haiti. And they remained there. If black resistance in Haiti had collapsed quickly, as Napoleon expected, there would have been thousands of French soldiers in Louisiana by the spring of 1803, when the French war with Britain began. By defeating Napoleon, the men whom Jefferson deemed ‘cannibals’ made it possible for him to acquire Louisiana and achieve what an eminent US historian has called his ‘greatest triumph’.     

L’Amour est dans le pré: cultural representations and social hierarchisation of farmers

In this article, the authors analyse socio-cultural representations of farmers conveyed by a popular French reality TV programme called L’Amour est dans le pré, which features ‘real’ farmers and is filmed in the countryside. Their objective is to determine the place and role assigned to farmers within contemporary French society. To study L’Amour est dans le pré’s televisual representation of farmers, they use Blanchard and Bancel’s articulation of the concept of ‘human zoos’ and, more specifically, its implications regarding reality TV. Based on content and discourse analyses of the Portraits episodes of season 7, the authors intend to engage competing representations and ideological appropriation of farmers in a French context, and, more broadly, to identify how this reality television programme illuminates tensions in reconfigurations of nationhood in contemporary France. They show that on the one hand, the programme challenges generic, geographical and social conventions with its carefully choreographed on-site interview, strategic post-production editing and, finally, its interactive weaving of subjectivity and objectivity, representation and observation that generates a sense of proximity and immediacy between farmers and viewers. On the other hand, they demonstrate that the programme reinforces and perpetuates a dichotomised national identity with its visual and discursive idealisation and marginalisation of farmers.     

L'écologisme français entre présent évanescent et avenir incertain

This article reviews the factors determining whether the ecology movement in France has been a success or a failure. Broadly speaking the French ecology move ment - l'écologisme français - came into existence to fulfil a dual ambition. First, through its incursion into the political arena - an incursion initially thought of as temporary - its purpose was to force other political parties and public bodies to pay greater attention to environmental issues. Second, in the swirl of ideas following May 1968, its ambition was to become a 'politics of the future': among other things, it would strive to displace the other parties and undermine or redefine the traditional divide between the Left and Right. These and other concerns are analysed in order to assess what role 'ecologism' plays in France today. This article is based on the author's latest book, L'introuvable écologisme français (PUF, 2000).     

Book Reviews

In early 1971, two Canadian unionists travelled to New Caledonia on a technical mission of assistance to the territory's unions. At the airport in Nouméa, however, the territorial authorities refused the unionists entry. For the French government, the interest of the United Steelworkers of America in New Caledonia represented a threat to the stability and competitiveness of the territory's nickel industry. The visit was also seen as a manifestation of growing American influence on New Caledonia's economic and political development at a time when the French were increasingly concerned about the territory's attachment to France. Yet efforts by the territorial authorities in Nouméa to prevent the visit were complicated by other French and Canadian concerns. Neither Canada nor the metropolitan government of France wanted an international incident that might jeopardise France–Canada relations, which were improving slowly after several years of acrimony.     

On Women's Reason,Education and Love: Women and Men of the Enlightenment in Spain and France

This article is an exploration of the ways in which Enlightenment discourse constructed the sentimental and intellectual ‘nature’ of women and of the ways cultivated women could situate themselves within this context. They were able to produce a discourse which shared Enlightenment arguments but also displayed a vital and intellectual distance from restrictive definitions of femininity. The lives and writings of three eighteenth-century French and Spanish women, Mme d'Épinay, Josefa Amar y Borbón and Inés Joyes y Blake are taken as case-studies. Their participation in the cultural debate of their time and their agreements and disagree-ments with intellectuals and politicians such as Rousseau, Thomas and Cabarrús are examined. The terms of the debate on gender were established in two different national contexts, particularly in regard to the thorny issue of the politics of love and feelings: the similarities and differences between France and Spain are discussed.     

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.     

Memory,history and national identity in Vichy France

Vichy France mobilised memory-managers to explain that the Revolution was over, to promote a deeper understanding of the French past and to help find a place in a European 'New Order' invigorated by the Germanic peoples. They demonstrated that a time of elites, or of 'knights', had returned. New people of old stock would displace the rabble risen in the Jacobin Empire and renew France by re-rooting her in her authentic past and collective memories. As Pe´tain toured the revered places of France's memory, the Republican rites and rituals were displaced by older symbols and ceremonies. Jewish and Masonic over-representation under the Third Republic encouraged a serene consensus for their exclusion. Vichy's search for a people's rooted, communitarian identity and heritage mustered prodigious, selfless, energies. The French wanted to be who they 'really were' and so vigorously sought themselves in their traditions and their past, with pernicious results.     

Interpreting foreign institutions. How the Italian academic culture dealt with the French Fifth Republic, 1958–1998

The interpretation by Italian scholars of the institutions of the French Fifth Republic was directly linked not only to the new French constitution and to the evolving practice of power in France, but also to the scholars' own judgement on the Italian constitution and on their changing perception of the role of the political parties within Italian republican institutions. Three main phases in the development of the interpretation of the Fifth Republic by Italian jurists and political scientists can be identified. During the first – extending from 1958 to the late 1970s – it was strongly criticized by most as anti-democratic. The second phase – from the late 1970s to the early 1990s – was marked by the end of anti-democratic suspicions; but only during the 1990s – the third phase – were the Fifth Republic's institutions proposed by some scholars as a model to be imported in to Italy.     

Anglophobia and anti-Semitism: The case of Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885)

Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885) was a utopian socialist who criticised the economic liberalism of the July Monarchy. He was a follower of Charles Fourier who denounced the ills of civilisation: individualism, egoism and class conflict. However, he was also the founder of modern French anti-Semitism. His writings inspired Edouard Drumont. The present article explores the links between Toussenel's brand of anti-Semitism, rooted in a revolutionary-nationalist reading of French history, and his almost equally aggressive Anglophobia. He described 'Londres-Juda' as an insatiable vampire sucking the lifeblood of France. In Toussenel's hands zoology became a vehicle for social criticism and his natural history books, as much as his political writings, were infused with anti-English sentiments. The English and the Jews represented external and internal threats to French national identity. An examination of Toussenel's writings helps to understand the joint presence of Anglophobia and anti-Semitism within social romanticism.