Figures des passions: La pathognomonie de Charles Le Brun

King Louis XIV's official painter, Charles Le Brun, elaborated two models of “reading”; the body. The first one, inspired by the ancient physiognomists, surveys the analogies between human and animal features. The other, ushering in a modern pathognomy partly inspired by Descartes, codifies the signs of passion displayed on human faces: in such a perspective, the movements of the body (and more specifically those of the eyebrows) are supposed to express clearly and distinctly all the emotions of the soul by which they are produced. Thus, using the cartesian physiology as his starting point Le Brun built a semiology of gesture and a rhetoric of emotion that he systematized in the illustrated lectures held at the Royal Academy in 1668. They exemplify how classicism joined the picturesque and the discursive, the natural and the convention, the meaning of gesture and the meaning of words.     

Vattel's theory of the international order: Commerce and the balance of power in the Law of Nations

Vattel's Law of Nations (1758) claimed that a system of independent states could maintain the liberty of each without undermining the ideal of an international society. The chief institution serving this purpose was the balance of power. In Vattel's account, the balance of power could be stabilized if it operated primarily through a process of commercial preferences and restrictions. These limits on how states ought to defend themselves were grounded in Vattel's thoroughly forgotten writings on the mid-eighteenth-century luxury debates, which addressed the political economy of reforming the state and pacifying the international order. An examination of Vattel's Law of Nations in this context shows that his approach to the law of nations should not be dismissed as a capitulation to the harsh reality of international politics.     

Living With the Other's Pain: The Ethical Implications of Mitsein in Simone de Beauvoir's Le sang des autres

This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel.     

中国国际私法的司法解释

司法解释是中国国际私法的渊源。中国国际私法的司法解释的数量、所涉范围、具体内容,都大大超过国　　际私法的立法,呈现出解释范围的广泛性与性质的造法性、内容的不协调性与缺漏性、形式的多样性等特点。为此,本文以为,应采取积极措施,努力完善中国国际私法的司法解释。     

Le Conte de deux cités1 : Analyse comparative des conflits urbains de Montréal et Valence, 1995–2010

A tale of two cities: 9 Comparative analysis of urban conflicts of Montreal and Valencia, 1995–2010 Metropolization processes at work in contemporary societies produce social and spatial change, which can raise strong opposition from a variety of urban actors, leading to acts of dissent. While such urban conflict has been examined in the past, geographical analysis of urban conflicts as sociospatial processes is more recent. Systematic quantitative research on urban conflict is virtually nonexistent in terms of comparative analysis conducted with an international perspective. Systematic comparative analysis sheds light on the existing relationship between urban conflicts and the socio‐territorial contexts in which conflicts emerge and evolve. This article presents a comparative analysis of urban conflict that occurred in a selection of boroughs in two cities characterized by different geographical realities, Valencia (Spain) and Montreal (Canada), between 1995 and 2010. Spatial autocorrelation techniques applied to a conflict database show a significant relationship between the emergence of urban conflict and the spatial distribution of some contextual variables. Indeed, for Montreal as for Valencia, the concentration of urban conflict is the greatest in the most deprived neighbourhoods. Also, regarding the management and regulation of urban conflict, results shed light on important differences between Montreal and Valencia. These differences include the outcome of urban conflicts, repertoire of action of actors involved in conflict activity, and the type of contestation faced by actors who promote the challenged urban projects.     

国际文化遗产保护理念的发展与启示

虽然以中国、日本、越南为代表的亚洲地区的文化遗产的特殊性受到国际社会的重视,但是作为主导世界文化遗产保护运动主流的欧洲经验与理念,仍然具有普遍意义。本文以研究一系列文化遗产国际准则诞生的社会背景为内容,在追寻国际文化遗产保护理念发展历程的时候,努力探索与之密切相关的社会原因,如经济的、战争的因素等等。每一次大的社会巨变,都有可能对极其脆弱的文化遗产造成这样或者那样的影响,但是随之而来的便是人们对遭受损害的文化遗产的倍加爱护,有时甚至是抢救性的行动;对文化遗产保护的理念就是在一次次的应对社会巨变中发展、丰富的。这对于处在社会巨变中的中国来说,建立起既遵循国际准则精神又具有自己特色的文化遗产理念体系具有重要的借鉴意义。     

Cleansing Les Halles: Discourses of Health and Disease in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris

The analysis of hygiene and nutrition in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre will guide us to the relationship his characters establish with their own bodies and with existence, as well as clarify the liaison between that of the intimate and the social. Undoubtedly, Beckettian bodies are willingly badly known, poorly treated, and continually exposed to degradation. However, scorn over nutrition and sleaziness toward hygiene allow an époché of the body that consents to the enlargement of the space of consciousness.     

The Power of International Positioning: The National Woman's Party,International Law and Diplomacy, 1928–34

Between 1928 and 1934, Doris Stevens and Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party (NWP) embarked on a strategy to use international law to gain domestic rights for women in the United States. They sought to pass the equivalent of the 1923 Equal Rights Amendment by treaty at international conferences in Europe and the Americas. The pre‐eminence of the United States in the Americas granted them diplomatic access through the Inter‐American Commission of Women (IACW) that, paradoxically, strengthened the NWP's position when the US administration opposed its proposed reforms. When the US signed the Nationality Rights Treaty in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1934, the NWP won a significant nationality reform, namely the right of US women to transmit citizenship to children born abroad. In exchange for its support, the Roosevelt administration required them to shelve their proposed Equal Rights Treaty. The article also demonstrates a nascent presence of American women in unofficial diplomatic circles. In this, as in other stories, women's history has taught us to search for the influence of women that institutional histories miss.     

The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Corneille's Le Cid

This article theorizes that it was an aesthetic motivation that prompted Corneille to leave Le Cid open-ended, despite his assertion in the 1660 examen that it was respect for the bienséances that obliged him to close the tragedy on such an uncertain note. While moral reservations may have played a role, surely an artist as committed to his craft as Corneille was motivated by some overriding aesthetic goal as well. In consequence, Chimène's defiance at the play's end must be viewed as an integral component of the tragedy and not just a reflection of the author's reluctance to violate dramaturgical precepts. I argue that by leaving the dénouement in doubt, Corneille draws deliberate attention to his aesthetic manipulation of the well-known historical/literary precedent. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, his aesthetic manipulation of history shields Chimène's heroism from the quotidian reality of degradation and devolution that are the defining traits of non-aesthetic realities.     

Le Creux de la Vague: Authorship,Adaptation and Sexuality in Les Godelureaux (1961)

Les Godelureaux (directed by Claude Chabrol, 1961) was one of the least successful films of the French New Wave. Almost universally derided by critics, the film did poorly at the box office and was seen to signal the decline or death of the Nouvelle Vague. Adapted from a novel by Éric Ollivier, the film alters its narrative in order to resemble other New Wave films, especially Les Cousins (Chabrol, 1959). But in doing so it also elides an intriguing sexual tension and a galvanising homophobia at the heart of the novel. This article considers various authorial influences over Les Godelureaux (Chabrol and Ollivier, but also Paul Gégauff and Jean-Claude Brialy) in order to investigate how the film attained the form that it did, and why this may have been responsible for its failure.