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.     

Abroad and Home: Colonial Culture in France

Lehning, J.R., Peasant and French; Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239pp., £14.95, ISBN 0 521 46770 5

Sahlins, P., Forest Rites; The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth Century France (Harvard University Press, 1994), 188pp., £11.95, ISBN 0 674 30896 4     

Only Muslim: Embodying Islam in Twentieth-Century France

Apollinaire, G., Alcools, trans. Donald Revell (University Press of New England, 1995), 171pp., £20.50 hbk., ISBN 0 8195 2224 4, £10.75 pbk, ISBN 0 8195 1228 1

Bredin, J.‐D., L'Affaire (Fayard/Julliard, 1993), 856pp., 198F.

Burac, R., Charles Péguy. La révolution et lagrâce (Laffont, 1994), 347pp., 139F.

Freeman, E.T., Rostand: Cyrano de Bergerac (Glasgow Introductory Guides 34, 1995 76pp., £3.95, ISBN 0 85261 467 5

French Pocket Dictionary, English‐French, French‐English (Harrap, 1995), 712pp., £6.99, ISBN 0 245 60575 4

INSEE, L'Economie française (Librairie générale française, 1995), 282pp., ISBN 2 253 90520 8

Lloyd, H., Bonjour Tristesse (Glasgow Introductory Guides to French Literature 35, 1995), 60pp., £3.95, ISBN 0 85261 469 1

Raymond, J., Eluard (Seuil, 1995), 220pp., ISBN 2 02 023561 7

School French Dictionary (Larousse, 1994), 480pp., £5.50, ISBN 2 03 401761 7

Soulez‐Larivière, D., L'Avocature (Seuil, 1995), 350pp., 140F., ISBN 2 02 023510 2     

Napoleon's France: History and heritage

In 1992 a group of activists initiated a new project of citizenship aiming to give gay and lesbian couples in France the status and rights they had been denied. This project was a form of social contract also designed for heterosexual couples, whether or not they had a sexual relationship. The final version of this contract, the Pacte civil de solidarité, is now called the PACS. This article argues that the PACS activists were unable to formulate their project outside the principles of universal citizenship inherent in French republicanism. They also came to rely on the Left in power for support. The Senate rejected the PACS bill in March 1999 and again in May 1999. A final decision on the PACS bill is to be made by the National Assembly before the end of 1999.     

Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.