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Through the end of the Third Republic, only tiny numbers of West African students managed to study at France's universities. Barriers to higher education began to fall after World War II, especially after African populations collectively gained citizenship. Higher education became a high-stakes policy area, as French officials and West African students and politicians vied to influence the parameters and possibilities of the postwar order. Amid escalating concerns about West African student migrations to the metropole, French officials eventually opened an Institute of Higher Studies in Dakar. However, this inchoate institution ended up highlighting the fundamental ambiguities of overseas citizenship. As West African students turned increasingly to anti-colonial activism, French authorities finally committed to establishing a full university in Dakar. Paradoxically, the construction and consolidation of this French university took place during the period of active decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1893 and 1901, the Parisian traiteur Potel et Chabot catered a series of gala meals celebrating the recent Franco-Russian alliance, which was heralded in France as ending its diplomatic isolation following the Franco-Prussian War. The firm was well adapted to the particularities of the unlikely alliance between Tsarist Russia and republican France. On the one hand, it represented a tradition of French luxury production, including haute cuisine, that the Third Republic was eager to promote. On the other, echoing the Republic's championing of scientific and technological progress, it relied on innovative transportation and food conservation technologies, which it deployed spectacularly during a 1900 banquet for over twenty-two thousand French mayors, a modern "mega-event." Culinary discourse therefore signaled, and palliated concerns about, the improbable nature of the alliance at the same time as it revealed important changes taking place in the catering profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses an 1881 revolt by settler students at the normal school of Algiers to explore issues of settler identity formation, anticlericalism, and racism. It argues that in the early Third Republic, settlers began to see the public school as a key site for creating a distinctly "Algerian" identity, one that excluded both Algerian Muslims and even new arrivals from the metropole. In this effort, settlers sought to implement radical versions of French republicanism and anticlericalism that were in reality highly restrictive, as they combined both metropolitan disdain for Catholicism and colonial scorn towards Islam. The investigations precipitated by the revolt reveal a colony and metropole whose fundamental concepts took shape in circuit between France and Algeria. The version of republicanism that emerged in Algeria served as an important precursor for the exclusive republicanism and its prohibitions on the public expression of faith in the ascendency in France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early Third Republic, southern wine producers in the Aude confronted a new competitor: Algerian wine. This article explores Audois efforts to curtail Algerian wine production in the aftermath of phylloxera, the wine crisis, and the 1907 strikes. Focusing on the actions of the Confédération générale des vignerons, this article shows how local winegrowers transformed the Algerian wine industry into a symbol of industrial, profit-driven agriculture and global integration. Cast as a civilizational struggle that pitted "French" traditions and cultural practices against the unsavory and immoral habits of colonial competitors, the fight against Algerian wine provided southern wine growers with a way to distinguish and add value to their own wines. The result was a new myth of southern viticulture that, despite hybridized vines and industrial production methods, recast the Midi as the guardian of true "French" agricultural production and a rural culture based on age-old traditions and a moral economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When shipping companies first experimented with transporting wine in steel containers in the 1930s they promised to revolutionize the way French Algeria sent its most important export to metropolitan France. What capitalists saw as a rational and efficient use of new technology, however, dockworkers and barrelmakers saw as a dire threat to their livelihoods in a time of intense economic hardship. This article traces the social conflict that followed the introduction of the wine tanker and the declining use of wine barrels in port cities in both Algeria and France. In doing so it illustrates the wide range of people and places that held a direct stake in economic activity arising from France's colonization of Algeria, from the rural environments in which wine was produced all the way to distant urban spaces such as Rouen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1939, there were an estimated 150,000 immigrant Jews in Paris: half the entire Jewish population of France. More than seventy-five percent of them came from Eastern Europe. Scholarship on the immigrant Jewish community in Paris primarily focuses on the role that the Yiddish-language immigrant press played in demarcating political affiliation. Less explored, however, are the roles that the Yiddish press played in creating a Jewish community rooted in both French and Jewish cultural norms. This article analyzes Naye prese through its use of culture and gender constructs to understand more fully the larger implications of the Yiddish press in Paris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In French history textbooks published after France's defeat in the Franco- Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, the presentation of the war and its outcome frequently include the myth of France's revanche and depictions of the Prussian enemy as barbarians. Other textbooks presented a narrative of progress in which the French Third Republic is shown as the endpoint of a process of advancing civilization. While the idea of a French revanche can be regarded as a founding myth of the Third Republic, the narrative of progress can be seen as an echo of this myth, cleansed of the concept of the enemy as barbarian, which constitutes a national master narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes representations of the Dreyfus Affair in the private diaries written between 1898 and 1901 by Henri Vever, a prominent Art Nouveau jeweler, art collector, and small-town mayor. The important place accorded the Affair in these "ordinary writings" by an individual with no direct engagement in it offers an opportunity to assess how historical events become enmeshed with private life, mentalités, and sociability. Further, Vever's notebooks reveal position taking during the Affair as a complex phenomenon, in Vever's case influenced by circumstances encompassing his identity as both a native of Lorraine, marked by France's defeat in 1870, and a Republican notable and Parisian businessman. While Vever's notebooks corroborate some standard themes of Dreyfus Affair historiography, including the importance of the press and the eclipsing of the Affair by the 1900 World's Fair, they also nuance the idea of a rigid ideological division between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no other French historian led such a sordid academic career as that of Bernard Faÿ, who held the first European chair in American history at the Collège de France from 1932 to his removal in 1944. Celebrated as the leading interwar specialist on America, Faÿ was a steadfast ally of the Catholic political Right. His conservatism, however, never threatened his international stature or his domestic academic standing until 1940, after which he led the Vichy regime's assault on Freemasonry. He succeeded as a historian by employing research on the United States to reject traditions of popular sovereignty, while also embracing new methodological trends that critiqued scientific positivism, often as an attack on the intellectual foundation of the Third Republic. His legacy suggests how the conceptual legitimacy of secular, egalitarian society could be contested through the very ideas that "cosmopolitan modernity" had sought to support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an assessment of notes generated by France's surveillance of African and Afro-Caribbean migrants during the interwar years to analyze how black men made use of racial terms such as nègre and mulâtre. It is suggested that this racial language was infused with new political, social, and cultural meaning after World War I. How workers and intellectuals developed a race awareness that was both a response to colonialism and as a reaction against those who did not appear anti-imperial enough in their politics is discussed. It is argued that racial language expressed the nuances of black political and ideological stances with respect to the French Empire. The meanings granted to race are traced through organizations such as the Union des Travailleurs Nègres.

This section presents abstracts of articles in this issue, many of which discuss French historian Eugene Weber's work. Articles include "André Siegfried and the Complexities of French Anti-Americanism," by Sean Kennedy, "Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic," by Jennifer Boittin, and "Rethinking the Nation at the Periphery," by Laird Boswell.

This essay explores Jean Benoît-Lévy and Marie Epstein's box-office success La Maternelle and their lesser-known Maternité in the context of interwar debates over women's roles in society. Reflecting natalist-familialist conceptions of motherhood and femininity, the films magnified three pervasive cultural icons in French social and political discourse: the monstrous, childless "modern woman," the exalted mother, and the "single woman" who fell somewhere in the middle. As both products and vehicles of these tropes, La Maternelle and Maternité not only illustrate how popular cinema disseminated and justified certain value- laden assumptions about female identity in the late 1920s and early 1930s; they also reveal the limitations of French feminism and socially-engaged, progressive art of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the proposition of a hygienic reform concerning the lifestyle of French people by doctors during a period called the Belle Époque, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of World War I, in reaction to industrial and urban development and its effect on health. According to the article, naturopathy enthusiasts and vegetarians agreed with this program and shared the idea that a lifestyle far from the laws of nature was the main cause of diseases. The Société Végétarienne de France, the French society of vegetarianism, is mentioned as a key player in the promotion of this reform.

The article focuses on the two short letters written in 1898 by French sociologist Emile Durkheim in connection with the 1894 Dreyfus Affair political crisis that occurred while Durkheim was in Bordeaux, France. Topics include Durkheim's strong support of the Dreyfus cause as told in Pierre Birnbaum's "Destins juifs," an overview of the events in the Dreyfus Affair that gave rise to these letters and the focus of the letters on violations that emerged in the successful prosecution of Dreyfus.