A Once and Future Greatness: Raymond Aron,Charles de Gaulle andthe Politics of Grandeur

Charles de Gaulle devoted his life to cultivating French grandeur, a politics that attempted to carve out an equal and independent role for France among the great powers of the world. One who frequently criticized de Gaulle's ideas of grandeur was the eminent social theorist, Raymond Aron. Although Aron was generally supportive of de Gaulle and supported him ‘every time there was a crisis’, he never hesitated to criticize de Gaulle, sometimes quite sharply. Aron's lifelong friendship with de Gaulle was thus marked by alternating bouts of mutual irritation and respect: Aron worried that de Gaulle's theatrics were sometimes detrimental to French national interests while de Gaulle fretted that Aron's commitment to French greatness was less enthusiastic than it should havebeen.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Aron's reaction to de Gaulle's politics of grandeur. Despite his reputation for ‘lucidity’, Aron was often ambivalent about de Gaulle's ambitions for France. We argue that Aron's ambivalence stemmed from his political creed, or from his commitment to a political philosophy that - as de Gaulle sensed - allowed for few settled convictions. This paper reviews Aron's assessment of two issues at the heart of de Gaulle's politics of grandeur, namely, the effort to promote a sense of national unity and the effort to create a nuclear force. In both areas, we witness a remarkably ambivalent Aron, one who struggled to soften the harsher edges of the excesses of what he considered to be the excesses of grandeur and find his way to a more moderate and coherent position.     

Patagonian Cinnamon and Pepper: Blending Geography in Alonso de Ovalle’s Tabula Geographica Regni Chile (1646)

ABSTRACT

The context and conditions under which early modern Europeans created images and maps that blended Asian and American geographies have recently received the attention of scholars. In this article I explore an example of this practice in the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle’s mapping of Asian spices as it affected the southern region of his Tabula geographica regni Chile (Rome, 1646). I examine Ovalle’s inclusion of cinnamon and pepper in the Patagonian landscape as a persuasive allusion to the crucial role of the Strait of Magellan in his proposed revision of the trade route of the Spanish galleons.     

The World under the Stars: Astrological Geography and the Bologna 1477 Edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia

ABSTRACT

This article is a re-examination of the first complete printed edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia (Bologna, de Lapis, 1477), hitherto considered flawed and defective. An investigation of the status and priorities of the team of court astrologers responsible for this edition, and an examination of the alterations they made to Ptolemy’s maps, suggests that their aim was a redaction intentionally different from existing versions of the Geography. It is suggested that the editors sought to adjust the arrangement of provinces from that recommended in Ptolemy’s Geography (book VIII) to the astrological arrangement detailed in his Tetrabiblos (book II) and that they modified the content of the key regional maps accordingly. In this light, the Bologna 1477 edition underlines the importance of assessing the reception of Ptolemy’s geographical work against a cultural background in which astrology prevailed as an integrated system of knowledge, practices and beliefs.     

Der erste Europäische Straßenatlas

ABSTRACT

Imitations of famous Dutch wall maps originally produced in Amsterdam by F. de Wit and W. J. Blaeu have recently been rediscovered in Italy. In Bologna, in the archive of Opera Pia dei Poveri Vergognosi, is a set of Blaeu's four wall maps of the continents, engraved on new plates by Pietro Todeschi and published by Giuseppe Longhi. The value of the discovery lies in the completeness of the exemplars, which also bear the publisher's imprint and date of publication, hitherto unknown: Europe 1677; Africa 1678; Asia 1679; America 1679/1680(?). An undated version of de Wit's world wall map, also published by Longhi, has come to light in the same archive. A copy of the same map, this time published by Giovanni Giacomo de' Rossi in Rome in 1675, was then found in Modena in the Seminario Metropolitano. Comparison of the two copies has provided a date for Longhi's undated issue; Longhi's map came after de' Rossi's, that is after 1675.     

Sacred,but not surveyed: Nineteenth‐century surveys of Palestine

Abstract

Nineteenth‐century Palestine mapping projects based on systematic land surveying reached a peak with the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, conducted on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corps. Various other nineteenth‐century proposals for an organized survey of the country—some of which bore partial results while others were never implemented—are also presented. The surveying of one region, Mesopotamia, during the 1830s and 1840s, forms the basis for the discussion of the reasons for the relative lateness of the topographical survey. The sacredness of the region seems not to have been a sufficiently convincing motive for entrepreneurs to organize and finance such a survey. The main reason for the delay in mapping the country as a whole was that it was not especially important, either strategically or geo‐politically, for the European nations engaged in the international struggles in the Middle East until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.     

Controlling the Waters of Granducal Florence: A New Look at Stefano Bonsignori's View of the City (1584)

ABSTRACT

A striking feature of Stefano Bonsignori's Nova pulcherrimae civitatis Florentiae topographia accuratissime delineata, printed in 1584, is the pre-eminence of the Arno River and the detailed depiction of a variety of often quite minor water-related structures. This large (nine-sheet) map was dedicated to Francesco I de' Medici, Granduke of Florence. Contemporary initiatives and legislation as well as works of art and literature reveal that water management had been an important aspect of the policies of Francesco's father, Cosimo I, whose achievements had transformed the city's landscape and whose efforts earned the Medici ruler the title of Granduke of Tuscany in 1569. Bonsignori's portrayal of urban structures was created as a celebration of Cosimo's architectural legacy, and the depiction of the Arno, with its embankments and riverside structures, along with some of the city's fountains and wells, acknowledged granducal ambition to control its waters.     

Here We Go Again: Presidential Elections and the National Media

The fear of death is a major preoccupation in the West. This is not surprising given the debt we owe to Hobbes, who encourages this fear and makes it a central feature of his account of human nature. Rousseau, in contrast, wishes to reduce this fear as much as possible. Amour propre and the humanity Rousseau encourages are incompatible with excessive concern for self-preservation. This accounts for his antipathy to doctors and the medical arts. Rousseau, through his presentation of Emile and the savage, initially claims that the fear of death is unnatural and that humans should take a stoic stance toward it and all human attachments that lead to our "feeling death twice." A closer reading reveals that humans always have an awareness of death and that modern humans cannot entirely avoid these attachments. We can, however, avoid making preservation our highest goal, and this is essential to our happiness and ability to have compassion for others.     

Becoming imperialist: Italian colonies in Fascist textbooks for primary schools

The essay explores the way in which primary school textbooks in Fascist Italy played an important part in disseminating the colonial discourse. Starting from a brief overview of the education system and textbooks in Liberal Italy, the essay reviews the changes made by the Fascists after 1922: Gentile's reform; the national commission for primary school textbooks; the introduction of the testo unico di Stato (single state-approved texts). These changes reveal the increasing emphasis on colonial topics and the development of the ‘new Italian man’. The impact of 1936 as a turning point in Fascist colonial policy following the conquest of Ethiopia and the proclamation of the empire of Italian East Africa is highlighted by the ways in which primary school textbooks reflected Fascist ambitions to imbue pupils with a new imperial consciousness.     

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture.     

Ardent Service: Female Eroticism and New Life Ethics in Gertrude Dix's The Image Breakers (1900)

Gertrude Dix's socialist-feminist novel, The Image Breakers (1895) has perplexed twentieth-century critics by its brief, short-circuited representation of homoerotic affection between the two female protagonists. In answer, this essay roots the women's relationship in the wider social, historical context of New Life politics and ethics in the 1890s. Members of the Fellowship of the New Life heralded not merely a variety of alternative lifestyles including vegetarianism and co-education, but also extensive discussion about sexual mindfulness and generosity. The charismatic seer and inspiration for the FNL, James Hinton, preached that utopia could be achieved by practicing an erotically-charged altruism. If, as Sharon Marcus has claimed, such female mutual devotion was common and perceived as normative, it was particularly affirmed by ethical-socialist culture. In the novel, Leslie Ardent's loving service to Rosalind is fuelled by her political mission and desire for self-realization. Through this female intimacy, Dix evokes the initial phase of New Life socialism as Hinton and his followers had espoused it. By contrast, the women's heterosexual relationships are more troubling, as male comrades pressure them respectively into heterosexual marriage and free love. In order to discredit heterosexual free love, Dix paints its proponent as a disturbed anarchist, rather than admit that historically some in ethical-socialist circles had advocated polyamoury. Nor does she acknowledge the philosophical convergences between collective anarchism and ethical socialism at the fin de siècle, though she herself was engaged in radical communities. Through her indictment of free love, Dix punctures the utopian vision of a pure, selfless, erotic affection flowing between individuals; figuratively, the novel re-enacts the collapse of Hinton's own reputation from seer to seducer. Echoing scenarios by other female ethical-socialist writers, the early intimacy between Rosalind and Leslie then serves the function of nostalgia, symbolizing a now-lost stage of New Life optimism and association.