New countryside,old peasants? Politics,tradition and modernity in rural France

Since the publication of the volume Rural Studies in Britain and France (1990) by P. Lowe and M. Bodiguel, ‘la ruralitéfrançaise’ has become the object of intense scrutiny and has emerged as a political field where questions of national and collective identity, traditions, history, landscapes, the past and future of French society have all been debated. In the introduction to that volume, the editors declared: ‘The countryside and rural society, their past, present and future, are major preoccupations in Britain and in France. The urbanisation of the two nations has in no way diminished this interest; if anything, it has sharpened it. With the bulk of economic and social activity concentrated in towns and cities, the countryside has come to embody largely a cultural interest in both countries’, something that has been borne out by recent events. This special issue devoted to ‘Politics, tradition and modernity in rural France’ is the first issue of Modern & Contemporary France to be dedicated to a discussion of topics surrounding la question agricole. The recent publication of a short dossier on French agriculture in the journal French Politics, Society and Culture pointed the way to a number of the debates examined in the following articles about the past and the future of rural France, especially in the context of a more globalised and Europeanised economy.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

Changing partnerships: Firms and the French state

Lindblom's hypothesis that in market‐oriented systems businessmen predominate over statesmen is tested in relation to the way French firms have switched partners since the 1980s. Instead of a dirigiste—style special relationship with government, they have formed multinational partnerships. The implications of the new competitive context, under the pressure of delocalisation panic, are considered, prior to the examination of the effects of nationalisation and privatisation on the national identity of firms. The virtual bankruptcy of Crédit Lyonnais is examined as an example of state‐dependent capitalism, and the impact of EC competition policy is considered. The partial industrial disengagement by the French government in favour of market competition reinforces the applicability of Lindblom's hypothesis to the relations between firms and state in France.     

Crusade narratives in French and German history textbooks, 1871–1914

This article is a comparative study of crusade portrayals in French and German history textbooks published between 1871 and 1914. The crusades had been events that had moved practically all of Europe in the Middle Ages. In the course of the nineteenth century the crusades once more became a matter of scientific, cultural and therefore public interest. Crusade narratives portrayed these events as the climax and the heroic period of the Middle Ages and thus offered highly varied patterns of interpretation. Although in this nationalist age France and Germany consigned themselves to national history and thus the glorification of one's own nation, this article will not only analyse the national and sub-national (denominational, Laicist …) images conveyed via this European event. It will also ask if and how the tension between nationalism and concepts of Europe were made subject of discussion in this historical ‘European event’. Therefore, it focuses on school textbooks as a source that, during the period in question, was responsible for a significant portion of national mythology and cultural memory as conveyed by media.     

French: a language for everyone in Québec?*

Abstract. With the realisation that the future of French in Québec depends on its adoption by a growing number of immigrants, efforts have intensified in recent years to promote a less ethnic and more civic conception of Québécois identity. As attested by the title of the final report of the Commission des États généraux sur la situation et l'avenir de la langue française au Québec (French, a Language for Everyone), a key component of this new conception is the idea that French should be a langue publique commune (common public language) for all those residing in Québec, irrespective of ethnic origin. This article examines the notion of langue publique commune in more detail. While the concept assumes that language can somehow be ‘de‐ethnicised’ to become the property of all ethnic groups, observations made in other contexts only confirm the inextricable link between language and the ethnic, as opposed to the civic, dimension of national identity. The article also investigates the issue of language motivation, in particular the related challenge faced by the Québécois authorities of how to encourage so‐called new Quebecers to adopt French as their language of public communications.     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

Not just civic or ethnic,but mostly cultural: Conceptions of national identity and opinions about immigration in Quebec

It is well documented that individuals' conceptions of national identity influence their opinions about immigration. The most well-known ideal types to capture conceptions of national identity are the civic and ethnic conceptions. Yet, this dichotomy does not reflect contemporary debates about immigration, which are framed in cultural terms. Scholars have thus proposed a cultural conception of national identity. The relationship between this conception and immigration, however, remains contested. Using an innovative approach to studying public opinion, this research analyses qualitative interviews conducted with individuals from the general public to investigate how each conception of national identity influences opinions about immigration in the context of Quebec, Canada. It shows that the cultural conception of national identity is related to both positive and negative opinions about immigration. This is explained by an evaluation mechanism whereby individuals evaluate if immigrants are included or excluded from the national group based on their (non)conformity to specific markers of identity. This evaluation is subjective and is often informed and substantiated by mediatised information about immigration-related issues.     

Histoire littéraire et mémoire nationale 1

The object of this article is to analyze the birth of literary history defined as the awareness of an evolving body of a nation's works and writers. Note is taken of the part played in the process by monarchical power, which saw in its role as guardian of the country's culture a means of asserting legitimacy, and attention is given to the evolution of the status of writers and their idea of their mission.

To illustrate his thesis, the author examines the publication in 1733 of the Histoire littéraire de la France by the Benedictine monks of Saint Maur. He defines its aims and its approach, demonstrates therein the emerging sense of a national culture and discusses the project's political implications. The commercial failure of the Histoire littéraire belies its overall importance, for the movement it effectively began led to the compulsory teaching of literary history in the place of rhetoric, to the establishment of a national pantheon of writers and to confrontations and concerns whose significance far surpassed the mere accumulation of a body of knowledge.     

Catholicisme,protestantisme et laïcité: Réflexion sur la trace religieuse dans l'histoire contemporaine de la France

This article examines the traces of Protestantism in contemporary French history and political culture. After contextualising the legacies of Protestantism and Catholicism and recalling the latter's primary role in conceptions of French identity, the study focusses on how Protestant cultural influences came to bear. The article weighs the contributions of renowned Protestant historians and politicians, in the case of the latter, right down to the contemporary period.     

Approaching selfhood

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking.     

DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

Présidente: le grand défi. Femmes,politique et médias

Mathieu, J.‐L., La Défense de l'environnement en France (Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 128pp., 45F., ISBN 2 1304 5939 0

Prendiville, B., Environmental Politics in France (Westview, 1994), xiii‐190pp., $27.00, ISBN 0 8133 8822 8. Translated from L'Ecologie, la politique autrement? Culture, sociologie et histoire des écologistes (L'Harmattan, 1993), 200pp., 110F., ISBN 2 7384 1864 3     

Comics and the Demystification of France's Immigration ‘Problem’: Reading Christophe Dabitch's Immigrants

While universalism constitutes the foundation of French republicanism, public discourse and changes in immigration law have revealed that racial and/or ethnic discrimination and exclusion are necessary for cultural assimilation and for the protection of France's ‘universalist’ model. Studies have also shown that at least 40% of the French population is of foreign origin. So how has France justified the reconciliation of universalism and particularism (now referred to as communitarianism) in certain instances but not others? Christophe Dabitch's collaborative comic-book project, Immigrants (2010), aims to deconstruct the French republican narrative of universalism by using a popular medium that is both transcultural and transnational. An effective collage of visual styles, reproduced testimony and scholarship on immigration in France, Dabitch's album proposes writing an alternative French history of immigration and invites readers to question founding mythologies which have erected France as the country of human rights. This article has three objectives: to present Immigrants as a serious historical and artistic project on immigration; to critically examine this publication's purpose (can comics effectively demonstrate that immigration is a common but significant aspect of nation building?); and to explore how comics can positively re-imagine France as a métropole cosmopolite, as an international point of convergence.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

Performing the nation in anti‐colonial protest in interwar Morocco

This article applies a process approach to the study of nationalism, analysing anti‐colonial protest in interwar Morocco to address how and why elite‐constructed national identity resonates for larger audiences. Using Alexander's social performance model to study nationalist contention, it examines how a Muslim prayer ritual was re‐purposed by Moroccan nationalists to galvanise mass protest against a French divide‐and‐rule colonial policy towards Moroccan Berbers that they believed threatened Morocco's ethno‐religious national unity. By looking at how national identity was forged in the context of contentious performances and why certain religious (Islam) and ethnic (Arab) components were drawn on to define the Moroccan nation, this study offers a model for answering why national identity gets defined in specific ways and how the nation gains salience for broader publics as a category of collective identity.     

The Thai Lao – Thailand's largest unrecognized transboundary national ethnicity

In 1900, the Lao ethnonym, and thus the Lao, ‘officially’ disappeared from Siam. However, Lao culture and identity persisted at local, regional, and national levels. As Keyes (1967) discovered, ‘a Northeast Thailand‐based ethno‐regionalism’ emerged post‐World War II. This regionalism, which we re‐term ‘Thai Lao’ and specify to the majority ethnic community, exists in a contested relationship with both ‘Thai’ and ‘Lao’ identity. The survival of the Lao ethnic community's cultural identity occurred despite the best efforts of the Royal Thai Government (RTG) to eradicate aspects of Lao culture. These aspects included Lao language, religion, and history, using the school system, the Lao Buddhist Sangha, and the bureaucracy. Beginning in the 1990s, buoyed by a multitude of factors, the Lao ethnic community reappeared as the ‘Thai Lao’ or ‘Lao Isan’. This reappearance was noted in the RTG's Thailand 2011 Country Report (RTG 2011) to the UN Committee responsible for the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. For nearly four decades now, ‘Laoism’ has recurred in Thai academia, the media, the public sphere, popular traditions, and even Lao apocalyptic millenarianism. Following Smith (1986, 1991, 1999), this article utilizes a historical ethno‐symbolist approach to analyse this recurrence.     

Promoting multiculturalism and tolerance: Expanding the meaning of “unity through diversity” in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has sought to establish a national identity among its nationals since its inception in 1971. Contrary to the pessimism in its first few years, the UAE was able to create a national identity among its nationals despite their initially differing loyalties. The UAE has now embarked on a phase of creating a new national identity that includes non-nationals, encompassing migrants and expats. This study argues that this new identity aims to include, at least discursively, non-nationals, presenting them as an integral part of society. It should be noted that this new identity does not seek to standardize or assimilate the whole population, in contrast to the first identity, which aimed to standardize the nationals. Its primary aim is rather to express its appreciation of the migrant population through the notions of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism, while also preventing complaints from the nationals. This study analyses the ways of including non-nationals in a new national identity through national gatherings (national days), institutional activities (heritage festivals, cultural gatherings, cultural center visits and activities), media analyses (state-sponsored media), and foreign policy initiatives that emerged (or presented) due to domestic diversity, such as Pope's visit.     

Franco Venturi's ‘crisis’ of the Old Regime

This paper discusses Franco Venturi's concept of a general European ‘crisis’ in the period 1768 – 89, which is covered in volumes III, IV and V of Settecento riformatore. With this concept Venturi allied himself with R. R. Palmer, A. Sorel, J. Juarès and others who sought to explore the larger context of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Critics of the English translation of Venturi's volumes III and IV (1989?–?91) have failed to perceive a European political crisis in this period. However, Venturi's concept also involved a birth of European public opinion, a development that has been affirmed in English, French and Italian studies more recently, despite a tendency to substitute a cultural for a political history of the Enlightenment.     

Constructing a national identity from a created literary past: Giosuè Carducci and the development of a national literature

Giosuè Carducci's conception of Italian literature differed from those of Francesco de Sanctis and Benedetto Croce. He argued that Italian literature, together with a concomitant cultural identity and political mission, developed along a continuous, progressive and evolutionary path. This study analyzes Carducci's creation of an Italian cultural and political identity through literary history and his construction of a plausible model for its historical development by incorporating literary,scientific and political theories. Carducci gave Italians a past of which they could be proud, proof of Italy's leading role in Europe's civilizing mission, and a strategy to accomplish it. Carducci's conception of italianitÀ, defined in terms of a historic mission of grandezza , was one of several brands of Italian nationalism. His linking of literary history to aspirations of national unity and aggrandizement implied that the mantle of the Risorgimento now belonged to the educated elite. This linkage of literature and national identity to aspirations of cultural and political hegemony explains why Carducci was so popular with the Nationalist Party whose leaders invoked his literary history to legitimize their political program and to discredit their political opponents prior to World War I and under Fascism.