Monitoring the French Panthéon: From Rondelet’s Historical Surveys to the Modern Automatic System

The damage of a historical structure can be today controlled with many sophisticated instruments. Nevertheless, this type of monitoring can give information only over a very short period of time compared with the long life of the building. This approach can be insufficient to reconstruct the whole evolution of the damage, and thus to understand the stress distribution inside the structural elements, particularly in cases for which long-term phenomena (such as viscosity or soil settlements) are present. To reach this more complex aim, an approach of historical monitoring should be applied, both looking at technical historical documents and surveying the traces of history directly on the monument itself. The case of the French Panthéon is presented in this study, showing the usefulness of this approach also for the present stability assessment. The comparison among the plentiful historical documentation (including 18th-century surveys, monitoring, and technical reports), the present surveys of deformations and the “modern” structural monitoring allowed a complete quantitative reconstruction of the main damages evolution from the construction till now, laying the base for a possible future conscious intervention.     

‘The Scum of France’: Australian Anxieties towards French Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1860s and the early decades of the twentieth century, escaped and liberated French convicts from the penal colony in New Caledonia arrived on Australian shores, raising concerns about physical as well as moral contamination. This article combines Australian sources with French consular and ministerial archives to examine the impact this little-known episode of trans-imperial history had on the early Australian federal process. The arrival of the convicts and former convicts played on at least two levels. It highlighted the colonial authorities’ weak powers in asserting their territorial sovereignty and policies and pitted them against both Great Britain and the French. Further, the constant nudging of these unwelcome neighbours disrupted the ongoing disavowal of the colonies’ convict past.     

Children’s citizenly participation in the National Revolution: the instrumentalization of children in Vichy France

Children held a privileged place in Vichy France. They became the subjects and objects of a vigorous propaganda which recognized their ability to contribute to the National Revolution. This article discusses three ways in which children were instrumentalized by the regime, showing their reciprocal engagement with it, which is understood as ‘citizenly’ behaviour. First, drawn into the maréchaliste leadership cult, they were used to embed the values of the regime. Second, children’s compassion was co-opted in various campaigns which contributed to national(ist) solidarity. Third, they engaged with a gendered duty to national population growth, now and in the future. The article uses ‘public’ written sources (for example, letters and essays sent to Marshal Pétain and thus archived in public collections, not diaries or drawings for private eyes, in private hands) produced by children. Although it recognizes these as epistemologically unstable, such sources present opportunities for understanding elements of children’s agency, which is seen in conformity as well as dissent. By recognizing children as historical actors, we can identify them as ‘beings’ active in their own lives, and not just adults-in-waiting.