The Six Fevrier 1934 and the 'Survival' of the French Republic

The Paris riots of the six février 1934 are rememberedchiefly as the event that provided the initial spark and theeventual rationale for the anti-fascist Popular Front. However,most French historians have tended to downplay the importanceof the riots themselves, arguing that the Republic was not underserious threat, and that the Left at the time greatly exaggeratedthe danger. Indeed, the fact that the regime ‘survived’these events has often been cited as proof of its resilience,of France’s deep-rooted ‘democratic political culture’,and its inbuilt ‘immunity’ to fascism. This historiographicalreview argues that the standard interpretation of the six févrieris deeply flawed, especially in its tendency to deduce the intentionsof the actors from the outcome of the events. The six févrierconstituted a serious challenge to the regime, and created adangerously fluid situation in which a variety of ‘outcomes’became possible. It should be analysed not as a discrete andtemporally circumscribed event but as a key moment in an ongoingprocess of political radicalization on the French Right.     

The United States, Algeria, and the Fall of the Fourth French Republic

The relative alacrity with which the United States accepted the collapse of the Fourth Republic in France in May 1958 stands in marked contrast to the obsessive concern with French internal stability that characterized the earlier postwar period of U.S.-French relations. Indeed, the Americans appear to have played a considerable role in undermining the very stability of the regime they had done so much since 1947 to help preserve. Much had changed in the intervening period that helps explain the revised American attitude. The French economy, precarious and dependent on American assistance in the years 1947 to 1952, was now robust and growing, and the threat of the French Communist party, which the Americans believed strong enough to seize power virtually at will in 1947, was now much reduced. The French army had been built by Washington into a powerful military force, meant to be the linchpin of European defense against a Soviet invasion, but it was now heavily embroiled in Algeria, and its role was on the way to being assumed by a restored German army, negotiated on the heels of the failure to construct a European Defense Community in 1954.¹ Finally, in the immediate postwar period, Paris and Washington had acted as allies, the United States offering military assistance and almost fully financing the Indochina War by 1953, although the French goal, to preserve their crumbling empire, became obscured by the American obsession with the possible expansion of Soviet power. In Algeria, in contrast, the conflict began in November 1954, following the humiliating French defeat at Dien Bien Phu and withdrawal from Indochina. In the absence of communism as a salient issue, American anticolonial attitudes came into play, and frustration grew with the French inability to bring a conclusion to a war that, as viewed in Washington, increasingly appeared to play into the hands of Soviet ambitions.     

Japheth's World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today

This essay explores what it means to say that we live today in “a secular age.” A distinction between two kinds of secularism is introduced and the proposal is made that the secularity that characterises our age belongs to a distinctively Graeco-Christian heritage. This proposal is elaborated and developed in the context of the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God and against the background of the decline in theodicial conceptions of history. However, rather than see these issues as connected to a growing nihilism in European society or in terms of a movement towards a widespread atheism, they are interpreted, in many respects optimistically, in terms of the awakening and ongoing movement of a distinctively democratic desire.     

Latour,Prepositions and the Instauration of Secularism

Abstract

Bruno Latour's understanding of different modes of existence as given through prepositions offers a new approach to researching "secularism," taking forward attention paid in recent scholarship to its historically contingent formation by bringing into clearer focus the dynamics of its relational and material mediations. Examining the contemporary instauration of secularism in conservative evangelical experience, I show how this approach offers a new orientation to studying secularism that allows attention to both its history and its material effects on practice. This shows how Latour's speculative realism extends and provides a bridge between both discursive analysis of religion and secularism and the recent turn towards materiality in empirical study of religion.