A geographer in heritage. Responding to ‘decennial reflections’

This article is a comment on: Tubridge et al., 2012. Decennial reflections on a ‘geography of heritage’ (2000). International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2012.695038     

A nineteenth-century Mediterranean union: Michel Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée

This article examines one of the nineteenth-century’s most revolutionary schemes for establishing a union of Mediterranean states. In 1832, Michel Chevalier set out a startling scheme that would bring to an end armed conflict in Europe through a confederation of European states and a subsequent alliance between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. His plan envisaged a vast infrastructure network of railways, canals, roads and shipping lanes that would link the major ports of the Mediterranean with Europe’s capital cities and those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The infrastructure network at the heart of Chevalier’s Système de la Méditerranée was conceived by him as the basis for a system of economic integration that would foster political harmony throughout Europe – anticipating by over one hundred years Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s plans for a European Union – but also between Europe and the Ottoman world. Harboured within Chevalier’s infrastructure scheme for the Mediterranean was one of the earliest and most complex nineteenth-century theories of networks ever devised. This article examines the centrality of the Mediterranean to Chevalier’s theory of networks, and explores the multiple dimensions of this complex theory, including the intimate connection he identified between networks as expressions of human creativity and the kind of unalienated human relations that would result in the end of conflict both between and within nations.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

Tenue de soirée de rigueur: Incursion chez les warocqué

The Warocqué family, “nouveaux bourgeois”, were characterised by their constant intention to change the world in which they lived. They were thus industrialists and businessmen and political representatives as was appropriate, but also inventors, paternalist, philanthropists and employers. The Warocqués thus present a multitude of facets and possibilities for study. It was necessary to give greater importance to one of them, particularly as everything could be encompassed as family business. It is precisely the evolution and progression of the family in its local, Belgian and even international contexts that is analysed here—family, tradition and dynasty even: inaugurated by Nicolas, it progresses, develops and reaches its apogee with Raoul, who benefited from the power of the name. This social rise was also interpreted on the level of traditions, of family, of prestige or of a way of life. The article aims to study this particular aspect while successively reviewing some ‘chapters’ in the life of this dynasty: the family (taken as it should be in the broad sense, joining the very current concept of ‘network’), its sociability and passions.     

Conservatism under Napoleon: The political writings of Joseph Fiévée

Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769) is known as the thinker who raised a whole generation of Southern Italian intellectuals, among them Francesco Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. One of the most influential of his works was the notoriously difficult Diceosina, o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto (1766), a textbook destined for use in the universities. The Diceosina was a powerful, if controversial, attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand, and the specific problems encountered by eighteenth-century commercial society on the other. In fact, it contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought; a synthetic guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development. This essay explores the work's context, rich intellectual origins, and ultimate significance through its long and complicated reception. The cultural and political connotations of Genovesi's Diceosina become particularly evident through an engagement with the works of Ermenegildo Personè, one of the book's most arduous critics.     

La Pensée Comme Expérience Vécue

The core of our essay is the “psychology of thought” (Denkpsychologie), which was elaborated by the Würzburg School at the beginning of the 20^th century. We will show how this School synthesized two contemporary trends: Brentano’s project of a psychology from an empirical point of view and the use of experiments beyond the limits of perception. Through the works of Karl Bühler, we will criticize the legitimacy of the psychologistic approach, which was applied to all psychological schools of thought participating in the debate on the nature of thought. We will also discuss the Bühlerian idea of a present knowledge, which aims to avoid the consequence of mind localization, a very tempting issue for the psychology of thought.     

Lasthénie de Ferjol’s Syndrome: A Tribute Paid by Jean Bernard to Jules Amédée Barbey D’Aurevilly

Abstract

The idea that memories could be transferred from one organism to another by administration of a “trained”; donor brain to a naive recipient seized both scientific and public attention in the 1960's and early 1970's. Georges Ungar was one of the earliest and strongest proponents of this idea, and he provided it extensive theoretical and experimental support. This paper reviews Ungar's work on memory transfer (and in particular on the scotophobin molecule), with an analysis of its successes and failures.     

Histoire embrouillée: Making material histories in Southern Africa

This article examines how historical knowledge about Southern African chiefdoms was produced in D.F. Ellenberger's research archive (c. 1860–1913) and archaeology drawing on his scholarship. I describe a historiographic approach detailing how Ellenberger's work co-opted the material world to create historical facts, obscuring diverse meanings of home, movement, and authority.     

L'arrivée des premiers métallurgistes sur l'Ogooué, Gabon

Résumé Au Gabonca 2400–2300 BP, les dernières cultures néolithiques des savanes de la moyenne vallée de l'Ogooué, succombent face à une rapide expansion de populations porteuses de fer. Cet événement, identifié sur des critères céramologiques et des mesures radiométriques, paraît situer l'arrivée des premiers métallurgistes — probablement Bantu — sur les berges de l'Ogooué.

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In the savannas of the middle stretches of the Ogooué valley in Gabon,ca 2400–2300 bp, the last neolithic cultures succombed to the rapid expansion of ironworking populations. This event, identified on ceramic criteria and radiocarbon dates, may represent the arrival of the first Bantu ironworkers on the banks of the Ogooué.

     

Droit et Théologie Dans la Pensée Scolastique

What place is made for the right of men in a christian society? We will first study the entry of right in exegesis, with Hugues de Saint-Cher, than the case, privileged, of the oath and lie, analyzed here in the work of Jean Olivi (ca 1280). We will see emerging the notions of engagement and obligation — toward our neighbor and toward God. The obligation is realized through the pronunciation of words which take precedence over all other circumstance of the act. It rests upon the recognition of a norm which refers back not only to expressed propositions, but also to implications implicit in a community.