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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]

This article explores the epistemological and cultural evolution of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France, focusing on the crucial period (1850-1914) when the concept lost its medical meaning and embraced new cultural scenarios created by the rise of a modern nationalism and the perception of national territory. The analysis examines two major scientific discourses on nostalgia, medical and geographical, recognizing that these representational systems broadly exceed the limits of scientific logic and function as heterogeneous genres that include political, philosophical, and literary concerns of the period. By tracing the genealogy of the concept of nostalgia, the article establishes a relationship between the medical thesis and the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache, who is considered the founder of the discipline of modern geography in France. The article delves into the cultures of sensibility and explores the politics of feelings--areas of research that are quite relevant for our own nostalgic era. [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]

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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]

Le présent article se propose d'étudier, le "principe" du régime, au sens montesquivien du terme, établi dans les territoires d'outre-mer de la Troisième République en s'intéressant aux passions et aux agissements des colons et des "indigènes" afin de mieux comprendre comment une minorité blanche parvient, en plus des prérogatives exorbitantes confiées au détenteur du pouvoir, à s'imposer jour après jour en donnant d'ellemême une image de toute-puissance. Pour analyser les ressorts de cette situation, il faut chercher à atteindre la quotidienneté et l'intimité des rapports de domination imposés par les Français grâce l'instauration de nombreuses règles écrites et non-écrites qui régissent la vie des autochtones. Langue particulière, violences symboliques et discriminations raciales multiples; telles sont les principaux éléments qui contribuent à la pérennité de l'ordre colonial. [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.