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With the rise of industrialization and urbanization in the early nineteenth century, concerns about identity and information became increasingly pressing. At the same time, nineteenth-century society placed a high value on reputation and appearance. Secrecy was thus both deemed necessary to bourgeois notions of privacy and viewed as potentially dangerous to public order. While this dynamic has been explored for the elite primarily in terms of family life, the impact of honor and shame on economic practices of non-elites has been little considered. This article offers the first in-depth analysis of two competing types of papers in nineteenth-century France—those, like Le Tocsin and La Gazette des renseignements, which championed creditors and those, like Pauvre Jacques and La Gazette de Sainte-Pélagie, which defended the interests of debtors. Despite representing often directly opposing interests, both kinds of papers prominently employed tactics of public humiliation through the circulation of the names and personal details of specific creditors and debtors whose actions were deemed dishonorable. By examining the importance of reputation and honor in the lives of small shopkeepers and artisans at the beginning of the industrial revolution, this article shows how reputation grew rather than diminished in importance with a perceived increase in the anonymity of the market and how the commercial press could be used to describe and denounce economic and legal forces perceived as oppressive to small tradesmen and merchants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective Many occupations and industries use wood as a raw material and wood dust is a well-known carcinogen. This study presents trends in occupational exposure to wood dust for all workers (employees and self-employed workers) in France between 1982 and 2017 and focuses on the exposed workers in 2017. Methods Exposures to this carcinogen were assessed using the Matgéné job-exposure matrix. Trends in the prevalence and proportion of exposure over the study period were estimated by linking the matrix with population data from the 1982, 1990, 1999, 2007, and 2017 censuses and are described for selected industry groups. Results The number of exposed workers to wood dust has decreased significantly over the last 40 years, from 466,900 potentially exposed workers in 1982 to 305,000 workers in 2017. The proportion of exposed workers has also decreased over time, although not uniformly across industries. Increases in the proportion of exposed workers are observed in certain industries, such as "Sawmilling and logging" (from 61.2% to 73.6% over the period for men) and "Finishing of sale premises" (from 3.3% to 6.2% for women). Conclusion This article is the first to describe occupational exposure to wood dust in France for all workers and to follow its evolution over the last 40 years. Occupations and industries still at risk in 2017 are also described with the aim of helping to improve prevention policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Studies confirm the positive effect of sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxation on public health. However, only a few countries in Europe adopt SSB taxes. From a public policy perspective, we investigate the conditions under which countries do or do not follow this evidence. Methods Crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of 26 European Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries with and without an SSB tax. We test which configurations of conditions (problem pressure, governmental composition, strategic planning, health care system, public health policies, inclusion of expert advice in policymaking) emerge as relevant in determining adoption and non-adoption between the years 1981 and 2021. Pathways that lead to the presence and absence of SSB taxes are identified separately. Results At least one of the following configurations of conditions is present in countries that introduced taxation: (i) high financial problem pressure, low regulatory impact assessment activity; (ii) high public health problem pressure, a contribution-financed health care system, no holistic strategy for combatting non-communicable diseases (NCDs); (iii) a tax-financed health care system, a holistic NCD strategy, high strategic and executive planning capacity. In countries that did not adopt SSB taxes, we find (i) high regulatory impact assessment activity, high levels of sugar export; (ii) no holistic NCD strategy, high spending on preventive care; (iii and iv) a lack of strategic planning capacity and either a high share of spending on preventive care or inclusion of expert advice. Discussion Evidence inclusion requires clear policy priorities in terms of strategy and resources to promote public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France’s de-industrialization in the mid-1970s was catastrophic for the proletarian communities of the Parisian banlieue. By the 1980s, the effects of prolonged unemployment were apparent, with high rates of voter abstention and growing support for the Front national. In the summer of 1989, writer François Maspero and photographer Anaïk Frantz spend a month wandering through former Communist bastions — the banlieue rouge — to take stock of this political shift. While the chronicle of their journey, Les Passagers du Roissy-Express (1990), has attracted much scholarly interest, its reflections on the legacy and decline of municipal Communism have gone largely undiscussed. As I show, however, Les Passagers presents the social problems of the banlieue primarily in terms of a collapse of political horizons. Having long been involved in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist activism, Maspero intimately experiences the implosion of the radical left during the Mitterrand years. Les Passagers documents his attempt to work through it. Written against the backdrop of the brutal suppression of pro-democracy protests in China and the first signs of the coming dissolution of the Soviet Union, Les Passagers demonstrates a rare sensitivity to the complex, shifting relationships between state and municipal Communism, and between local party politics and an ethical culture of solidarity. This article examines the contribution that Les Passagers makes to a more nuanced understanding of the history of the French left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To revitalize a language is to increase its number of active users[2] and to strengthen its presence in a given society, which has been the goal of many regional language communities in Europe, especially in France within the Breton, Basque and Catalan communities, among others. Much of the previous research conducted on the RMLs of France concentrated on regional I or i minority languages, yet government and policy conversations tend to use blanket terms to refer to all languages other than French. The concepts of vitality and resilience have long been pertinent in research dealing with the regional and minority languages (RMLs) of Europe, and further evidence of this has surfaced in relation to the current pandemic. [Extracted from the article]

France's civil nuclear power industry emerged from the earlier military nuclear programme as a programme owned and controlled by the state. This was in line with the nation's longstanding style of economic and industrial governance. Such an approach had the advantage that the capacity of nuclear power grew rapidly, with generous funding and close coordination by the state. During the 1980s and 1990s, the nuclear power industry succeeding in resisting broader moves to reduce the role of the state in French industry. Links between the government, the regulator and the industry remained close, aided by longstanding informal networks between key individuals. The first decade of the 2000s saw the start of significant reform of the nuclear regulatory infrastructure. However, by this time the disadvantages of long-term state control of the nuclear industry were becoming increasingly apparent. These included deficiencies in policy making, industry regulation and corporate management which have brought France's nuclear industry to a crisis. This analysis applies institutional theory to show how the nation's longstanding approach to economic and industrial governance has shaped the development of its nuclear industry and thus provides a salutary example for other countries pursuing a similar path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biographies of Walter B. Cannon (1871-1945) usually present two sides of his life: one, where he was an outstanding man of science in the United States during the so-called "Golden Age of Medicine," and the other, where he was a leading humanitarian activist engaged in myriad causes, notably in the defense of Spanish democracy during the Civil War (1936-1939). However, these biographies fail to take into account that the apparent link between these two sides of his life was his religious conviction. This study summarizes the aims and accomplishments of the American Medical Bureau to Aid the Spanish Democracy (AMBASD) of which Cannon was chair between 1937 and 1939. Then, it examines Cannon's inspirational role on the international relief work with Spanish Republican refugees in France, through the case of the Varsovie Hospital of Toulouse that between 1945 and 1949 was jointly managed by the Unitarian Service Committee (USC) and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), and renamed Varsovie Hospital/Walter B. Cannon Memorial in recognition of the Spanish Republicans' debt for his extraordinary contribution during the Spanish Civil War and beyond. Finally, the article investigates the Unitarian roots of Cannon's humanitarian ethos by exploring the historical relations of this religious movement with science and with many major actors at Harvard University as well as the links of Cannon's relatives to Unitarianism. The analysis reveals Unitarianism's influence on Cannon's views about science, democracy, and liberty, as well as on his remarkable involvement in the medical solidarity movement with the Second Spanish Republic and other similar commitments. In sum, it shows how important is to branch out in our studies of medical and scientific practice to include practitioners' broader social and religious communities in order to understand their motivations, achievements, and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This was not the case, as only a small number of such clusters were identified and only associated with cases of bilateral cryptorchidism, which is far less common than unilateral cryptorchidism. Location, location, location - where you are born may determine your reproductive (and more general) health. If this is important in the etiology of cryptorchidism then the identified hotspot clusters of cryptorchidism would likely be restricted to rural farming areas and/or areas of intensive agriculture, as has been reported in other studies (Garcia-Rodriguez et al.,1996; Lane et al., 2017). Identification in rats of a programming window for reproductive tract masculinization, disruption of which leads to hypospadias and cryptorchidism. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French relations through the prism of musical standardization. Bringing together perspectives from musicology, history of science, and political history, it demonstrates the holistic value of musical practices for the study of processes of political integration. In 1859, Napoléon III's government determined a national pitch to which musicians should tune their instruments. The following year, Britain's Society of Arts attempted to emulate this standard. Amid tense Anglo-French relations, British audiences interpreted the French pitch as a measure of the country's autocracy, and these political anxieties materialized through a redefinition of the standard. The challenges of introducing a musical pitch within a liberal political framework encountered in 1859 were subsequently echoed in debates over the reform of weights and measures following the 1860 free trade treaty between Britain and France. Both the economic and artistic integration of these countries involved the problem of how to regulate society within a laissez-faire state. Musical standardization has received little historiographical attention, but the regulation of this art offers insights into mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-French political culture. Entangled within complex network of industrial, institutional, and social structures, musical pitch demonstrates how problems of economic and social integration were inseparable from international and socio-political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osteometric data from > 450 modern wild rabbits, mostly from Portugal, Spain and France, show an inverse correlation between their size and the temperature of the environment, in accordance with Bergmann's rule. Similar measurements made on some 1660 rabbit bones from 14 Portuguese late Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sites indicate that rabbits became considerably smaller at the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary. Thus, rabbit size varies or varied with temperature both today and in the past. A direct temperature–size relationship was assumed, and the regression of modern rabbit bone size on temperature was then used to calibrate the temperature equivalent for the change of size of rabbit bones in the past. The result indicates a Last Glacial Maximum to present-day difference, Δ t °, of 7 or 8 °C. An alternative interpretation that does not assume a direct temperature–size relationship would indicate that the environment in Portugal 15 000–30 000 years ago was similar to that in northern France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the start of the French Revolution, the National Assembly faced two major economic and social challenges: the staggering debt and a society entrenched in corporate hierarchies. This article examines how, as the deputies overhauled the currency system to shore up state finances, money created unexpected popular inroads to both arenas of reform. In order to quickly emit new paper money called assignats, the deputies first printed bills in denominations too large for retail trade. In response, Parisian merchants formed novel coalitions to protect alternative forms of small change. They joined forces across traditional occupational divisions to evaluate currency and call for practical tokens. In doing so, the retailers influenced the trajectory of national monetary reform from 1790 to 1793. Unable to subdivide large assignats, everyday citizens turned to nascent financial societies for usable tokens. The resulting monetary networks delineated new groups of individuals who required common bill denominations, relied on overlapping systems of credit, and shared confidence in local issuers of promissory notes. Thus, rather than petitioning the state as distinct trade corporations, butter merchants, fish wholesalers, carpenters, and others formed innovative alliances as currency communities. Therefore, this article argues that even before the deputies abolished the guilds in 1791, Parisians reached across the boundaries of corporate society. Merchants continued these diverse associations after 1791 in order to avoid charges of illegal syndicalism. While demanding pocket change, the popular classes reimagined social identities and reordered the corporate world from within between 1789 and 1793. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take advantage of the expansion of the French High‐speed Rail to study the impact of decreases in communication costs in the form of lower travel times between headquarters and affiliated plants of corporate groups. We show that such shocks foster the functional specialisation of remote affiliates on their production activities. Support activities shrink because of the transfer of high‐skilled managers to headquarters. These organisational rationalisations have a significant but small impact on overall profit. Our results hold across all industries but are strongest in services where the information to be transmitted across sites is arguably softer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I interrogate the complex relationship between nature and culture by examining how tropical nature and raw materials were conceptualized and displayed in the nineteenth century. I do so by discussing a display of tropical wood mounted by the Empire of Brazil for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. The reception of this display in Europe is analysed through Karl Max's ideas on the gendering of nature and commodity exchange, through the concept of tropicality, and through Claude Lévi-Strauss's binaries of the raw and the cooked, which help reveal how natural materials were commodified into things themselves. Broadly, I am interested in putting 'nature in our official past' and bringing key concerns from environmental history studies to the fore, to bear on studies in design history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship between creditor protection, law reform and credit expansion using longitudinal data for four OECD countries between 1970 and 2005. By decomposing the different elements of creditor protection, we show that civil law countries (France and Germany) have developed a high level of protection for creditors in the form of controls over the management of debtor firms, while common law countries (UK and USA) have arrived at a high degree of protection in relation to secured creditors' contractual rights over firms' assets. Using panel causality tests and dynamic panel data modelling, we show that laws strengthening creditors' control over debtor firms in these four countries had a long-term positive effect on the expansion of private credit, while reforms increasing secured creditors' rights had a negative effect. We explore the implications of our findings for legal origin theory and the varieties of capitalism approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using local administrative data from 1826 to 1936, we document the evolution of crime rates in nineteenth century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed about 40% of French vineyards. We use the geographical variation in the timing of this shock to identify its impact on property and violent crime rates, as well as minor offences. Our estimates suggest that the phylloxera crisis caused a substantial increase in property crime rates and a significant decrease in violent crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humble ballot paper is a defining technology of elections throughout the world. This article interrogates its contested past by demonstrating - over a long period and in the context of three contrasting countries - how and why it emerged in the early modern period and how it was then used, abused and regulated in the context of the expanded, and eventually mass, electoral arenas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ironically, by the time that the ballot paper was firmly established, its monopoly was already being challenged by mechanical and then electronic media, which may eventually condemn it to extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the motivation, scope, findings and reception of the survey of London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham which the French journalist Léon Faucher published in Etudes sur l'Angleterre (1843-5). Sources include Faucher's letters, the original and revised text, the English translator's notes, and reviews in the British, French and German press. Faucher's fieldwork led him to question liberal orthodoxy and propose remedies to alleviate working-class distress. Exceptionally in eighteen-forties Britain, the continental socio-economic treatise was widely discussed and acclaimed. Elucidating Faucher's thought and setting it in context illuminates the contrast between him and other writers, particularly Friedrich Engels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategies, actions, and meaning of the credit activities of single women in rural credit markets in eighteenth-century France. For the purpose of this article, gender and, more importantly, marital status, are considered as critical categories of historical analysis, and this approach has yielded key data in the examination of loans records from 1733 to 1790. This article concludes that not only did single women gradually become major agents in the circulation of capital within their communities but that they also gained greater social freedom and empowerment thanks to their role as creditors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]