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As in other industrialized countries, cartelization was widespread in France after the 1870s. Cartels, and the public policy toward them, were frequently addressed in the public debate. This article deals with the stance taken by French economists on this subject until the Great Depression. Although they were divided into several groups that were in sharp disagreement on most scientific and policy issues, French economists were almost united in their lack of support for anticartel policy. The liberal economists' opposition stemmed from their general hostility to government intervention. Unlike in the English-speaking world, where many economists otherwise critical of government gradually became supportive of antitrust after mounting evidence had revealed the scope of certain kinds of exclusionary behavior, the French liberal economists remained constant in their opposition. The more reform-minded university professors, as well as the sociologists- economists of the Durkheimian school, were unenthusiastic about policies meant to safeguard competition because they viewed "excessive" market competition as destabilizing and wasteful. Finally, the most prominent experts in industrial economics, who were employed by large companies or professional organizations, also advocated a hands-off approach, in accordance with their employers' preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1885 Louis Pasteur successfully treated two boys from different parts of rural France, Joseph Meister and Jean-Baptiste Jupille, with his experimental rabies vaccine. Arguing that the boys played an important role in shaping images of Pasteur and his vaccine in French culture, this article reconstructs their long relationships with the scientist and then traces their evolving cultural representations during the Third Republic up to 1940. Meister, a young child from Alsace who sought salvation in Paris, was particularly assimilable to nationalist narratives that Pasteur himself encouraged. Jupille, in fighting with a rabid dog to save young children from attack, could provide an exemplar of the selfless yet virile male adolescent whom late nineteenth-century authorities sought to produce. Both boys' stories produced associations that reflected favorably on Pasteur and the Pastorians, yet each also held an independent appeal at particular moments in modern French history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ferguson's Accounting for Taste reveals a gap in our understanding: How did French culinary discourse move beyond the bourgeois sphere in which it emerged in the nineteenth century? Picking up on her comparison of the Proustian synthesis of regional and national culinary culture in the Recherche to the project of national identity creation in the Third Republic's best-selling textbook, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, this essay argues that the culinary model Ferguson describes was in fact widely disseminated through mass primary education under the Third Republic. Examining an overlooked corpus of primary school readers and textbooks, I show that food and cooking provided object lessons imparting practical and scientific knowledge to enlighten the masses, and textbooks canonized regional specialties as part of a new national geographic consciousness. At the same time, I underscore the limits of this consensual image of a national culinary culture, which collided with the class habits and horizons of the urban and rural masses attending l'école républicaine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During its first decades the Third Republic's relationship with the Catholic Church soured. While the Republic notoriously recast itself as a secular regime through removing clerics from the classroom, laicization also drove the development of public welfare. By examining the case of ouvroirs, charitable ateliers run by female religious orders to train and employ young women, this article explores the consequences of new ideas about welfare for working-class girlhood. In the context of rising anticlericalism, the Republic mobilized labor law and sent labor inspectors to scrutinize the nuns' treatment of their charges. The Republic's efforts to regulate these spaces represent a transformation in its treatment of girlhood, a recognition that girls' care could not be left to the private sphere. Instead, not only was it the Republic's responsibility to protect these girls, but this protection had a larger, societal imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of elite male opinion in France toward women's suffrage on the eve of World War I. It is based on three poorly known sources from the years 1910-13--two published opinion surveys and the entries in an essay contest sponsored by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques--revealing the attitudes of a sample of male social and political elites. Their opinions can be divided into three broad categories: those in favor, those firmly opposed, and those who expressed qualified support. Social conservatism with regard to change in general appeared to be an important element in male resistance. Those opposed or offering only qualified support adopted two major strands of reasoning: the reassertion of hierarchical sexual difference supported by nature, accompanied by the fear of sex warfare; and dissatisfaction with the existing form of "universal" manhood suffrage, leading to a call for electoral reform that would take precedence over any change in women's political status. But a surprising number also appeared uncertain, even ambivalent or ignorant, about the goals of the suffrage movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article underlines the significance of emotions in shaping political culture by analyzing a largely forgotten spectacle, the "Christmas Tree of the Alsatians and Lorrainers." Held annually in Paris from 1872 until 1918, the event aided children whose families had fled Alsace and Lorraine to retain French citizenship following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. It also provided an afternoon's entertainment for a paying audience. The Christmas tree was strongly associated with Alsace, and the event was a spectacle of patriotism, widely reported in the popular press. Through music, verse, and performance, those present mourned "the Lost Provinces" and celebrated the patrie, mobilizing for the Republic the emotions roused by the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. This event highlights the significance of popular cultural practices in developing the "sympathetic emotional regime" that underpinned the successful implantation of the Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reexamines the legacy of Wagnerism in France through the lens of cultural and intellectual history. Taking the Revue wagnérienne (1885-88) as its central subject of analysis, it demonstrates that contributors to the Revue developed from Richard Wagner's work several strategies for transcending the Franco-German nationalist conflicts so trenchant in the 1880s. Falling beyond the confines of any one academic discipline or aesthetic category, the Wagnerism presented on the pages of the Revue wagnérienne borrowed from scientific thought, aesthetics, religion, and politics in equal measure. This comingling of approaches expressed by the authors suggests that Wagnerism in the 1880s created an intellectual space for seemingly contradictory perspectives to coexist. Grappling with Wagner's works and ideas, then, provided French intellectuals with an opportunity to imagine alternatives to many of the political, cultural, and ideological polarizations of the early Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French socialist movement developed out of an eclectic mixture of ideas and militant groupings in the late nineteenth century. As party unity developed, many theoretical positions were sidelined. The strand of thinking exemplified by the working-class journalist Eugene Fournière, an advanced form of economic federalism that drew on the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, found it difficult to identify itself clearly in twentieth-century socialism; yet this strand has remained a source of fruitful discussion. This article attempts to unpack the relationship between the intellectual history of these forms of socialism and the issues of political identity faced by militants who were attempting to forge a clear identity. Using Fournière as a case study, this article suggests that afresh examination of the political culture of the socialist movement will give a stronger basis for understanding how dissidence and libertarianism have been vital elements in French socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National and international critics of Paris's 1900 Universal Exposition claimed that it was a disaster on various levels. That year, in addition to two walkway collapses that killed thirteen people, Paris experienced numerous construction and transportation accidents; electrical failures and fires; a deadly heal wave followed by a water shortage, near sewer failure, and "great stink"; and typhoid and smallpox outbreaks that killed more than a thousand people. Taking the spatial turn in exposition studies, this article interprets these claims as part of a conservative disaster discourse that targeted the exposition to undermine the Third Republic and its progressive conception of urban modernity. Thus, rather than examining an actual disaster, I show how the Republic's critics used fears of impending disaster to cast modem Paris as a "risk society" characterized by "normal accidents," which in turn questioned the Republic's project, widely hyped at the exposition, of controlling nature and achieving social progress through science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Emile Zola's "J'accuse," the Dreyfus affair has often been conceptualized as a struggle between truth and raison d'état. In this interpretation, the antidreyfusards voluntarily cede any claim to the concept of truth in favor of arguments based in the exigencies of national security. This article suggests, however, that antidreyfusard rhetoric and imagery also employed a concept of truth: a subjective truth that depended on personal credibility as established through opposition to imagined enemies of France. The caricaturist Caran d'Ache represented this relational truth in scenes of antidreyfusard women identifying and rejecting dreyfusard or Jewish men. These scenes allowed the artist to emphasize the personal and conditional nature of this sort of truth by showing ambiguous sexualized or aggressive women acquiring credibility through their hostile interactions with dreyfusard or Jewish adversaries, thereby permitting the representation of a truth based on human interaction and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to a familiar assimilation model whereby peasants were "transformed into Frenchmen," this study of Limousin migrant masons illustrates how occupational specialization, rural-based social networking, and circular migration strategies encouraged residential concentration in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. After addressing circular migration and the characteristics of the building trades that promoted social networking, this study draws on census and electoral records to map the boundaries of Limousin solidarity in Paris during the Third Republic (1871-1914). Rather than constituting a "colony," Limousin migrant masons established "microcommunities" based on familial and village-based social ties. The article concludes with an analysis detailing the functions of residential concentration by considering how collective living arrangements in hôtels garnis (boardinghouses) enabled the procurement of work, maintained the cohesion of the work team, and promoted links connecting Paris to the Departments of the Haute-Vienne and the Creuse in central France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the reasons that pronatalists in the Third Republic aligned the resolution of the depopulation crisis with the fate of settler colonialism. Convinced that the French population grew more quickly when far away from the metropole, pronatalists presented colonial emigration and settlement as means by which to strengthen the French race. The demographic importance that pronatalists attached to imperialism also led them to study colonial initiatives in population growth, most notably those of Governor- General Joseph-Simon Gallieni in Madagascar. Gallieni's belief that a large indigenous labor force was essential to preparing the colony for more extensive French settlement led him to introduce a series of reforms intended to increase the colony's Merina population. Though Gallieni's reforms reflected racial and gender assumptions specific to Madagascar, pronatalists in France considered them applicable to their own efforts to address the gendered causes of French racial decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the juridical concepts and notions of political unity and legality in the late Third Republic in France. Definition of the political doctrine, jurisprudence of crisis, that emphasized the importance of decision, order, and national unity over constitutional norms and parliamentary practice; Significance of the constitution in the legitimacy of the administrative state; Law and jurisprudence in the Great War; Political authority of coalition governments; Reaction to the Nazi revolution; End of political unity.

Analyzes the diplomatic career of Ernest Constans, French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1898-1909. Background in politics; Comparison of the ambassadorial performance of Constans with French foreign minister Theophile Delcasse; Observations about his diplomatic career.

Focuses on the political crises that endangered the Third Republic in France before the Second World War. Impact of Boulangism on politics; Emergence of ecclesiastical hierarchy and monarchist deputies; Massive injection of capital.

Examines anti-Protestant writings during France's early Third Republic era. French reexamination of their national identity in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune; Alien elements invading the French body politic; Prominent position that individual Protestants held during the formative years of the Third Republic.

Stresses that military monuments were the only obvious examples of the modern cult of death and the statue-mania of France's Third Republic. Number of monuments studied in the Department of the Aisne; Information on the religious form to some of the monuments.

Examines the existence of a third side to the barricades in France's civil war of 1871. Analogies that are implicit in François Furet's presentation of the Edgar Quinet/Alphonse Peyrat debate; Groups which comprise the Party of Conciliation.

The article focuses on the history of France during the period 1880-1907. During this period, a cluster of advanced republicans formed the extreme Left in the Chamber of Deputies. The most advanced among them became known as Radical-Socialists. Lift-wing Radicals generally voted for legislative projects designed to improve the living standards of workers, and they all strongly championed labor's right to organize and to strike. Because they were convinced that workers are a bulwark of any country, they strongly disapproved the use of the army in localities affected by strikes. The presence of troops, supposedly to protect non-strikers, was not compatible with the right to strike.