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This article aims to explore the particularities of American movies about Devil's Island during the 1930's but also to analyse how this specific interworld war context had a deep impact in the depiction of this penal colony. We refer to the methodological tools of cultural history to look at the United States and France internally and externally, using the movies as axes of interpretation regarding penal colonies, penal systems and old empires, but also to understand how a social imagery of Devil's Island was slowly created through photos, documentaries, articles, features and memoirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how one of the most popular French celebrities of the twentieth century, Mistinguett (née Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois), used the medium of memoir to narrate a self and to produce her posterity. Located at the intersection of commerce and culture, celebrity memoir provides public figures a commodified textual stage for enacting, performing, and disseminating their brand. But to dismiss celebrity memoir as mere publicity, as simply another form of self-promotion and brand management, undermines its broader cultural value. As Mistinguett's memoir, Toute ma vie (1954), demonstrates, celebrity memoirs offer much more than a stylized recounting and commercial packaging of a life; they illuminate the production of celebrity itself. Ultimately, by exploring how Mistinguett negotiated the competing personas through which she produced her performative self, this article argues that celebrity memoir divulges the complex and concerted ego performances through which modern celebrity is fashioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In offering a 'view from the lycée', my paper examines a relatively under-researched and un-synthesised aspect of France's Second World War experience of occupation and liberation, namely the extent to which the ideological dimensions of the conflict between resistance and collaboration impacted upon and were refracted by the secondary school environment, which functioned as a forum for the development and expression of opposing, often highly-charged, political attitudes. My principal sources are a combination of published individual memoirs and a recent archival-based survey of a particular Parisian lycée during the war. By identifying pre-war aspects of the phenomenon, and revisiting post-war cultural representations of the period, the analysis steps outside the conventional chronological parameters of June 1940-August 1944 in which liberation/the Liberation are subsumed into the overarching narrative of the resistance movement, and offers a personal perspective on otherwise familiar events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using memoirs can be a vital way of supplementing archival evidence or indeed of overcoming a shortage of contemporaneous sources, and they offer insights into the attitudes and motivations of participants as well as how they recorded and remembered events. Memoirs retain an inherent value that must not be ignored, particularly in the study of intelligence liaison which addresses the kinds of personal and cultural aspects which are often especially well illuminated through autobiographical writing. This paper explores some of the theoretical and practical issues associated with the use of memoir material and examines them through the prism of selected autobiographical writings related to Anglo-French intelligence liaison from the Great War up to the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migration of British individuals in rural and coastal areas of Europe and beyond has received an outstanding attention in media, with TV programs, movies, news articles or news magazine entirely dedicated to it and with a plethoric entertainment literature of "travel writings" and memoirs. In this paper I will present a critical analysis of such a literature, which explores how it is participating to the fetishisation of lifestyle migration, producing commercial argumentation for a lifestyle change via positive narratives and depictions of the migration processes, of the French rural places and of autochthone populations, marked with the socioeconomic structural conditions of lifestyle migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the development of the works of the Paris Peace Treaty, several representatives of the Romanian political life elaborated a series of constitutional projects, Romanian concerns of state restructuration, regarding the organisation of the Romanian Principalities, and all of these projects contained a series of basic principles of the state organisation, following a more rigorous separation of the powers and the limitation of the ruler's attributions, more specifically a modernisation of the political structures of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was Saint-Simon's relation to the fairy tale? It is difficult to imagine him immersed in a book of tales. However, the Saint-Simon household inherited from the duchesse de Berry such works as Les contes des fées by Madame d'Aulnoy, La tyrannie des fées détruites, by the comtesse d'Auneuil, Histoires sublimes et allégoriques by Madame de Murat, as well as collections of oriental tales. Although most of these works do not appear in later inventories of Saint-Simon's library, his memoirs nevertheless suggest that Saint-Simon borrowed from the literary or cultural fashion of fairies in his depictions of aristocratic society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the recent fashion for autobiographical writing among historians. It argues that this fashion goes with a rehabilitation of contemporary history, which was sometimes regarded with disdain during the time in the mid-1960s when approaches associated with the Annales school seemed most influential. Autobiographies by historians have attracted particular attention in France and all such works are sometimes labelled with the term first coined by Pierre Nora: ego-histoire. However, this article argues that the historians brought together by Nora (all French, mostly born between 1917 and 1930 and heavily influenced by the political upheavals of the period 1940 to 1962) were rather different from those historians (mostly from a younger generation) who have been drawn to autobiographical writing in the Anglo-American world. It is finally suggested that there is now something of a reaction against autobiographical writing by a younger generation of historians who argue that, even when writing about the very recent past, absence of direct personal experience can be an advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars resulted in an explosion of personal recollections on a scale never before witnessed, some published in the author's lifetime, many not. These memoirs, and the stories and anecdotes told in them, shaped the images surrounding the wars for generations to come. Given the distance that often separated the writing from the event, the memoirs almost always contained projections, evasions, myths, and outright fantasies. But that is exactly where their value lies. It allows the historian to establish the extent to which those who took part in the wars began to romanticize or indeed contest them and the man most responsible for them—Napoléon—and the degree to which they engaged in the political and cultural debates of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores issues relating to embodied criticism in France. It focuses on the literary scholar Alice Kaplan and her engagements with the legacy of French fascism, and examines her memoir "A French Lesson" and how it relates to her other scholarly work. The psychological stakes concerning Kaplan's material in relation to the loss of her father and the importance of this loss in her personal story are discussed. The article also talks about her personal struggles with the legacy of French fascism.

The article examines the image of the Tuileries Palace through references to memoirs of the Commune and to articles published in the Parisian press. It discusses the reaction of the French press from 1871 to 1883 to proposals for the restoration or demolition of the palace's remains. The article also examines the cultural denial of some critics implied by the rejection of the role of the Tuileries Palace as a major icon in France's past.