Idées and mentalités; the case of the catholic reform movement in France

The connection between Godwin and Fénelon has traditionally been restricted to the famous and controversial moment in the first edition of Political Justice (1793) in which Godwin presents an example of the interdependence of rationality and ethical action. This paper argues, however, that Fénelon, and particularly his political and educational treatise Telemachus (1699), plays a significant role in a number of Godwin's subsequent fictional works. Employing Telemachus to explore the theories of education presented by Godwin in the various editions of Political Justice and The Enquirer (1797), this paper explores the manner in which Godwin's version of the Enlightenment transcendence of pedagogical power comes up against its limits. Reading this issue in relation to Godwin's argument, in ‘Of Choice in Reading’, that literature remains outside of socio-ethical corruption, three of Godwin's major novels are shown to demonstrate that Telemachus provides the chance for meta-textual moments in which the appeal to reason (the reader's rational capacity or ‘private judgement’) is at once reflected upon and produced. Reading educational theories and problems into Godwin's major fiction in this fashion helps to clarify aspects of the Godwinian (or ‘Jacobin’) novel.     

Urban law—II

This paper explores the political thought of Andrew Michael Ramsay with particular reference to his highly acclaimed book called A New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus (1727). Dedicated to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, to whom he was tutor, this work has been hitherto viewed as a Jacobite imitation of the Telemachus, Son of Ulysses(1699) of his eminent teacher archbishop Fénelon of Cambrai. By tracing the dual legacy of the first Persian Emperor Cyrus in Western thought, I demonstrate that Ramsay was as much indebted to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History (1681)as he was to Fénelon's political romance. Ramsay took advantage of Xenophon's silence about the eponymous hero's adolescent education in his Cyropaedia, or the Education of Cyrus (c.380B.C.), but he was equally inspired by the Book of Daniel, where the same Persian prince was eulogised as the liberator of the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon. The main thrust of Ramsay's adaptation was not only to revamp the Humanist- cum-Christian theory and practice of virtuous kingship for a restored Jacobite regime, but on a more fundamental level, to tie in secular history with biblical history. In this respect, Ramsay's New Cyropaedia, or the Travels of Cyrus, was not just another Fénelonian political novel but more essentially a work of universal history. In addition to his Jacobite model of aristocratic constitutional monarchy, it was this Bossuetian motive for universal history, which was first propounded by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon in his Chronicon Carionis (1532), that most decisively separated Ramsay from Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, author of another famous advice book for princes of the period, The Idea of a Patriot King (written in late 1738 for the education of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, but officially published in 1749).     

Celebrating Literature to Shape Citizenship: France's 2007 ‘Lire en fête’

Each year since 1989, France has celebrated Lire en fête, a literary festival initiated by then Minister of Culture Jack Lang. Like other national festivals created during the 1980s, such as La Fête de la musique and La Fête du cinéma, Lire en fête provides entertainment, but also directly relates to government democratisation efforts. This article analyses the 2007 version of Lire en fête, focusing on primary documents such as the Dossier de presse and the official website, and suggests that the French government uses this festival to increase public engagement in French society and to encourage responsible citizenship, in part by fostering the development of a literate public sphere.

Chaque année depuis 1989 la France célèbre Lire en fête, une fête littéraire lancée par Jack Lang qui à l'époque était Ministre de la Culture. Comme tant d'autres fêtes nationales créées pendant les années 80, telles que la Fête de la musique et la Fête du cinéma, Lire en fête est un divertissement, mais est aussi liée directement aux efforts du gouvernement de démocratiser la culture. Cet article analyse l'édition 2007 du festival, en se concentrant sur des sources comme le Dossier de presse et le site Internet officiel, et suggère que le gouvernement français utilise cette fête pour augmenter l'engagement public de la société française ainsi que pour encourager les citoyens à être des citoyens responsables, en partie en favorisant le développement d'une sphère publique instruite et cultivée.     

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.     

French antimilitarism before World War I: Gustave Hervé and L'Affiche Rouge of 1905

Gustave Hervé's political emergence occurred amidst the Dreyfus Affair. This accelerated his radicalisation. By 1901 he attained notoriety for an apparent image of the tricolour on a dungpile. Soon, his antimilitarist movement called Hervéism attempted to unite the revolutionary Left. After socialist unification, Hervé led the most extreme faction and created a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale. In 1905 he joined the Association Internationale Antimilitariste (AIA) which issued a poster based on his ideas. His experience with the AIA presaged several transformations on the French Left. Before 1914 Hervé was a strident voice within European socialism, advocating revolutionary means to prevent war. Years of incendiary campaigns failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé grew frustrated with leftist divisions. His disillusionment arose from a naive reading of an anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Hervé's sincere, yet romantic and eclectic, socialism exhibited atavistic features. Before the war Hervé rallied to ’la patrie en danger’; in 1919 he created a French national socialist party. Such shifts have been tied to Fascism. Though some recent scholars have stressed the dangers posed by antimilitarism, this article documents a more ambiguous picture of Hervé's experience with the AIA and his later antimilitarist activities.     

Ema is by Nature a Political Animal: Politics and Capitalism in César Aira's Ema,la cautiva

Where much research focuses on comic and playful elements in César Aira's work, or on the forms of Aira's literature and its relationship with Argentine or Latin American literary tradition, this paper constructs a political reading of Aira's novel Ema, la cautiva. I consider the historical circumstances of the periods in which Aira set and published his novel (immediately prior to the culminating episode in the Conquest of the Desert in 1879 and during the military government of 1976–1983 when references to the Conquest of the Desert were utilised to justify the ‘dirty war’) to argue that, although Aira's ironic mode of writing makes the development of parallels between historical periods fraught with difficulty, the novel contains a latent critique of the military government, of the dirty war and of Peronist economic policies prior to the coup of 1976. Additionally, I argue that Ema, la cautiva contains a political critique of the arguments for the capitalist system at its inception and that the novel can be read together with the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore the development of capitalism and expose the apparent freedoms gained through it as allusive and as substitutes for a new type of subjection.     

Nuclear Physicists in a New World. The Émigrés of the 1930s in America

Kernphysiker in einer neuen Welt: Die Emigranten der dreißiger Jahre in Amerika. - Unter der großen Anzahl derjenigen, die durch Nationalsozialismus zur Emigration gezwungen wurden und zwischen 1933 und 1941 in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika einwanderten, befanden sich auch mehr als hundert Physiker, und unter ihnen einige der genialsten Kernphysiker der Welt. Die Physik in Amerika hatte damals den Status einer voll ausgereiften Wissenschaft erreicht, und so kam es zu einem bedeutsamen und facettenreichen Zusammenwirken zwischen den emigrierten und den einheimischen Kernphysikern, zumal sie die verschiedenen Forschungsgebiete vertraten, die sich durch die Entdeckungen und Erfindungen des Jahres 1932 (Neutron, Deuterium, Positron, Cockcroft-Walton-Beschleuniger, Zyklotron) aufgetan hatten. Von besonderer Bedeutung Für die Konsolidierung und Entwicklung der gesamten Kernphysik war dabei die Veröffentlichung von drei Artikeln in den Reviews of Modern Physics von 1936 und 1937, bekannt als die ?Bethe-Bibel”?. Nach der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung von 1938 und dem Ausbruch des Krieges 1939 in Europa wirkte die Befürchtung, daß Hitler eine Atomwaffe erhalten könnte, als mächtige, Emigranten und Nicht-Emigranten gleichermaßen erfassende einigende Kraft unter den Atomphysikern in Amerika, und die meisten von ihnen stellten ihre Fähigkeiten in den Dienst der US-Regierung und arbeiteten am Manhatten-Projekt und an anderen militärischen Forschungsvorhaben mit. Bei Kriegsende waren die in den dreißiger Jahren emigrierten Kernphysiker wie so viele Flüchtlinge vor ihnen Amerikaner geworden, und keiner von ihnen kehrte in sein Geburtsland zurück. Among the large number of refugees from Nazism and Fascism entering the United States between 1933 and 1941 were more than 100 physicists, including some of the most gifted nuclear physicists in the world. By that time physics in America had come of age, and a remarkable and multifaceted symbiosis occurred between the émigré and native-born nuclear physicists as they pursued the many avenues of research opened up by the discoveries and inventions of 1932 (neutron, deuterium, positron, Cockcroft-Walton accelerator, cyclotron). Of particular importance for the consolidation and development of the entire field of nuclear physics was the publication in 1936–37 of the three articles in the Revieus of Modern Physics known as the ?Bethe Bible”?. With the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the fear that a nuclear weapon might fall into Hitler's hands served as a powerful unifying force among nuclear physicists in Amerika, émigrés and non-émigrés alike, and most placed their talents in the service of the United States Government working on the Manhattan Project and other wartime research. By the end of the war, like so many refugees before them, the émigré nuclear physicists of the 1930s had become Americans, and not one of them returned to the country of his birth.     

Sociability and Hugo Grotius

Summary

Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilité]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.     

About‐Face: Gender,Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918–24

This article examines the role of facially wounded soldiers and prosthetic masks in the post‐First World War reconstruction of a gendered French nation. In contextualising the work of Anna Coleman Ladd, who sculpted facial prosthetics to ‘re‐humanise’ disfigured French veterans, I aim to shed light on larger post‐war tensions between the accommodation and rejection of social and cultural change. By submitting to Ladd's efforts and donning her devices, the French mutilés who sought her help articulated, through their bodies, a conservative vision for the French nation – highlighting the resonance of the traditional masculine ideal in post‐war France and a desire to reconstruct an idealised past. The exposure of the ‘surreal’ face, conversely, signalled the futility of a return to the status quo ante and the creation of the Union des Blessés de la face et de la tête allowed veterans to renegotiate the bounds of acceptable masculinity. Collectively, the facially wounded suggest the ways in which the face serves as a site of gender work, a means by which to challenge or reify masculine norms of behaviour and appearance.     

Jacob Vernet and ‘The Religious Enlightenment’: ‘Rational Calvinism’, the Pastors of Geneva and the French philosophes

Summary

In this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence.     

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.     

Chopsticks,phone bells and farms: Fuyuko Taira's diasporic spatial practice

In this article, I revisit my earlier project on local poetry practices by Japanese ‘war brides’ from the Second World War and explore a creative, transnational home-making activity by focusing on one of my informants, Fuyuko Taira's senryu poetry. Drawing on theories of global space and diasporic home-making practices, I suggest that her engagement in senryu involves a transnational spatial practice through the use of familiar everyday language. While the experience of displacement among Taira and other so-called ‘war brides’ cannot be understood without a consideration of socio-historical and economic constraints that characterized their emigration, my aim here is not to analyse how Taira's senryu simply reflects her diasporic victimhood but to explore how she exercises her creative agency to make her new home familiar and habitable by engaging with the everyday poetry practice of alternation between ‘pause’ and ‘move’ in the midst of changing landscapes. I argue that to a member of the Japanese diaspora like Taira senryu can be thought of as a different mode of experiencing at once the local and the global in an organic way.     

The Humanism of André Malraux

In this essay, I explore the influence of Byzantine literature in the New World from a transatlantic perspective. Specifically, I examine the Scala paradisi of Juan Clímaco (570–649) as it is found in the Peregrinación de Bartolomé Lorenzo (1586) by the Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600), a text from the colonial period. Surprisingly, this text has received almost no critical attention. I focus on the study of the text (and the context in which it was produced and received), basing my analysis on a comparison of Acosta's text with other similar works. By using a comparative method, I explore the ideological and aesthetic tensions that underlie Acosta's work. Moreover, this analysis makes manifest the cultural and literary continuities (or traditions) and ruptures which, coming as much from the East as from the West of Europe, arrived in the Vice-regency of Peru in the second half of the sixteenth century.     

Meaning in a Changing Context: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach to Authorial Revision

Summary

In this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty.     

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation,Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

Branded as “Africa's first luxury perfume”, the Scent of Africa perfume is a “scented declaration of progress”. Particularly fascinating is the commercial advertisement for the perfume, which I argue to be an “Afropolitan Imagineering” project that is intended to signal Africa's rise and its new association with global cosmopolitanism. At first glance, the Scent of Africa perfume advertisement seems to point to the ways in which Imagineering projects can reproduce colonial discourses about Africanness. However, in this article, I suggest that we complicate the advertisement and examine its subversive potential to decentre whiteness and celebrate Africanness while writing Africa into the world. Despite this subversion, I conclude that African worlding practices should disinherit the familiarity of Eurocentric geographic determinism that is embedded in Afropolitan Imagineering and instead become informed by afro‐futuristic imaginings and disidentification politics.     

Pocock,Machiavelli and Political Contingency in Foreign Affairs: Republican Existentialism Outside (and Within) the City

SUMMARY

In this essay, inspired by J.G.A. Pocock's appropriation of Machiavelli's theory of political contingency, and building upon my previous engagements with Pocock's ‘republican existentialism’, I focus on the role played by ‘accidents’ in Machiavelli's analysis of war and foreign affairs within The Prince and the Discourses. In so doing, I consider the following issues: the ways through which a potential imperial hegemon might consolidate control over nearby lesser powers—and, conversely, how such less powerful polities might resist imperial encroachments on their autonomy; the contrasting military modes and orders characteristic of ancient and modern republics; and the extent to which Machiavelli actually thought that accidents in foreign affairs were ever truly ‘accidental’ in light of his determinations concerning well- versus badly ordered domestic institutions.     

Jean Monnet: Unconventional Statesman

Béroud, S. et Mouriaux R. (eds), Le souffle de décembre (Éditions Syllepse, 1997), 203 pp., 120F., ISBN 2 907993 61 5

Fédération des cheminots CGT, Voix libres. Le conflit des cheminots de novembre‐décembre 1995, préface de Bernard Thibault (L'Atelier/VO Éditions, 1997), 189 pp., 120F., ISBN 2 606004 191     

Equal Rights and Individual Freedom: Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Lascasian Apology for Black African Slavery

Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Bartolomé de Las Casas's writings, Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolome de las Casas, defensor de la libertad de los Americanos, illustrates how Las Casas was perceived and condemned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this article, I seek to explain why and in what ways Bartolomé de Las Casas's early propositions on African slavery played a fundamental role in Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Colección, an ambitious editorial work that involved much more than selection, editing, and publication. By approaching the Colección's production and reception from the perspective of book history, I explore how Llorente's Colección reflects the role that colonial affairs and race had in the challenges faced by European rule and white hegemony.     

The Société Européenne de Culture's Dialogue Est-Ouest 1956: Confronting the ‘European Problem’

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw.