‘Les routes entrecroisées’: trajectoires et engagements des antiquisants français au XXe siècle

A key trend in post-1995 French cinema has been the return of the social. Analysing this trend, this article seeks to evaluate its politic impact. Using Herve´ Le Roux's Reprise (1997) and Agne ¤ s Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) as key meta-texts, it suggests that the current wave of politically engaged cinema needs to be approached in new ways that recognise how films trace the impact of a politically unmediated, 'raw' real on groups or individuals. It further suggests that the withdrawal of political mediation gives the films an essential ambiguity and a melodramatic quality that, rather than mere cliche´, may be a privileged way to engage with the violence of the real. Film is now not so much in the van but dans le bain of a diverse socio-political stirring.     

Réseaux huguenots et espace Européen (XVIe–XXIe siècle)

Among the examples of the «principle of circulation» in European space, the Huguenot phenomenon is one of the most significant cases, by its duration, four centuries, its scale and the diversity of its expressions. It begins as early as the XVI^th century with the persecution of the first French Protestants who start emigrating to Holland, confirms its dimension after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685: 200,000 French Protestants take refuge mainly in Switzerland, in the United Provinces, in the British Isles and in Protestant Germany, continuing to have connections with their co-religionists who remained inside the French Kingdom. Throughout the XVIII^th century, three networks, religious, cultural and economic, in constant interaction without superimposing themselves, define a Huguenot circularity which marks European space. During the XIX^th-century nationalisms, this circularity strongly weakens without completely disappearing, in particular among the French Huguenots. From World War II on, a reactivation based on memory occurs, which leads in France the Huguenot areas to receive many of Nazism's victims, then facilitates religious and cultural exchanges between Huguenots from France and from the «Refuge».     

La république universellè des francs-maçons entre «culture de la mobilité» et basculement national (XVIIIe–XIXe siècle)

In 1723, the Charter of the Grand Lodge of England defines the project of the Masonic order: to become «the center of the union and the means of tying a faithful friendship among men who without that would have remained at a perpetual distance». From this aspiration to rebuild Babel, proceed the attempts to chart the Masonic Republic, to set up a network of truly universal correspondence and language — this last building site leading to Esperanto. The order developed throughout the XVIII^th century this universal utopia on the mode of a true citizenship of the Masonic Republic with its passport, its rights and its duties. Then it had to answer the formidable upheavals resulting from 1789 and the awakening of nationalities, while being directed towards a more committed design of the universal Republic of the freemasons, sensitive to the liberal ideals and the emancipation of the nations, with the risk of giving arguments to its detractors, convinced of the masonic involvement in a world-wide conspiracy.     

« <Emphasis Type="Italic">What is the best theory of generation</Emphasis>? » : Argumentation et débats d’étudiants en médecine à La Société Royale de médecine d’Édimbourg au dix-huitième siècle

This article proposes a different approach to the long generation controversy that divided naturalists in eighteenth-century Europe between those in favour of preformationism, on the one hand, and supporters of the theory of epigenesis on the other. This controversy has mostly been studied through the publications of the intellectual elite, that was constituted of medical doctors, natural historians, philosophers, and theologians. Rather than reviewing the ideas and antagonisms of the direct agents of the controversy, I will attempt to approach it from the margins. What is the legacy of a long-term controversy when it seems to be over? How was such an extended controversy perceived by contemporaries that would only have a fragmented access to quarrel? What is the role of scientific disputes in the education of doctors? I will address these questions by analyzing four essays written by medical students of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.     

Der gescheiterte Frieden von Münster: Spaniens Ringen mit Frankreich auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongress (1643–1649)/La paix des Pyrénées. Vingt-quatre ans de négociations entre la France et l’Espagne (1635–1659)/Mazarin's Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the coming of the Fronde

WALTER LAFEBER. The Clash: US-Japan Relations throughout History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Pp. xxii, 508. $29.95 (US); PATRICK SMITH. Japan: A Reinterpretation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997. Pp. 385. $27.50 (US); MICHAEL SCHALLER. Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 320. $44.50 (CDN); STEPHEN D. COHEN. An Ocean Apart: Explaining Three Decades of US-Japanese Trade Frictions. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Pp. xi, 256. $65.00 (US). Reviewed by Warren I. Cohen