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Published during the economic crisis of 1836-37, The French Revolution exploits nineteenth-century anxieties about paper money and the erosion of the gold standard to investigate a historical crisis in political, moral, and economic value. This essay investigates how Carlyle draws on the substitution of paper money and the speculation and inflation it engendered in revolutionary France as part of a larger meditation on the role and efficacy of symbols in a democratic culture. As the essay demonstrates, for Carlyle the inconvertibility of banknote into gold during the Paper Age parallels the inconvertibility of signs into time-honored systems of reference and signals the loss of privileged representations of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Mission Raquez, a French ethnographic expedition through Laos to collect material for the Marseille Colonial Exposition of 1906. This paper discusses the location of extant material and considers the ethnographic methods used on the mission in conjunction with anthropological study, mass media, and popular celebrity in turn of the century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Review of History is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

France’s so-called exceptionalism in multilateral security policy is often explained with its Gaullist political culture. However, a closer look shows that Gaullism cannot easily capture different French policies, particularly toward NATO. To unearth what can explain policy variance, this paper asks the question of whether French political parties value NATO differently and, if so, to what effect? Looking at French governments from 1991 to 2014, I argue that political parties in France carry different values, which lead them to interpret NATO’s role for France’s security policy differently. As a result, French parties in power encouraged, delayed, or halted NATO institutional transformation at specific junctures. This argument builds on the insights of the study of ideational factors in IR and the study of party politics in Comparative Politics. Through an analysis of French governments’ policy preferences toward NATO, this paper stresses that institutional transformation can be understood through the study of veto points in conjunction with national preference formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates changes in the French parliament’s role in the control of military missions, introduced by the 2008 constitutional reform, and examines their effects on practices of parliamentary control and legislative‒executive interactions. The paper analyses how the constitutional changes have developed; the attitudes of parliamentarians towards control; the knowledges they relate to legislative-executive relations; and the post-reform practice of parliamentary control of French military missions. Although legislative‒executive relations with regard to military missions have been recalibrated and formalised, they have not fundamentally challenged the executive’s lead. Reasons include a strong belief in the need for effectiveness, acceptance of the institutional order, and a foreign policy culture of executive leadership. French parliamentarians value their new powers, but mostly do not seek their further extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the entomological investigations carried out by the French naturalist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau during a series of insect epidemics that ravaged France in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how a particularly fierce invasion of caterpillars in the Angoumois region in the 1760s sparked theoretical debates about the nature of animal generation between academic naturalists, farmers, provincial officials and amateur naturalists. As part of a wider effort to reform agricultural production in France, Duhamel du Monceau sought to eliminate vernacular understandings of insect generation and to reform local pest control techniques. In his attempt to develop a body of pestcontrol knowledge grounded in the systematic observation of insect generation, however, Duhamel du Monceau relied heavily on the efforts of amateur naturalists. The paper shows how he mobilized a nation-wide network of entomological observers, and collected specimens and observational reports from farmers, improving landlords and local officials throughout France. Some informants did not only act as 'mere' observers, but formulated their own causal claims about insect generation that sometimes contradicted those of their metropolitan counterpart. Finally, it demonstrates that a 'patriotic' discourse that joined agricultural improvement and civic virtue provided a powerful impetus for the formation of collaborative relationships between academic naturalists, state officials and enlightened agricultural improvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contradictory relational dynamics of immigrant rights movement through a close examination of the French case during the 1990s. Through this movement, we find a network made up of different groups of immigrants and well-established rights organizations. As the movement intensified over the months, powerful cleavages developed between groups of undocumented immigrants (e.g. families, single men, etc.) and between certain immigrants and rights organizations. The same discursive and political structures that precipitated the cooperation of these diverse actors were also responsible for planting seeds of conflict by presenting different groups of migrants with unequal opportunitiesandplacing resource-rich associations in a powerful position in the network. The paper concludes by discussing how the theory developed here can be ‘extended’ to analyse the relational dynamics found in similar social movements in other countries (e.g. USA). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I argue that explicit national models of religious governance inevitably conceal tensions and ambiguities, and are not suitable bases for socio-political analysis of religious governance. I take the French notion of 'laïcité' as an example, pointing out the diversity of definitions and uses of the term. A stronger foundation for analysis is the long-term tradition of the state controlling and supporting recognised religions, a tradition that dates from the early modern Gallican Church and continues through Napoleon's Concordat, the state's assumption of responsibility for maintaining church buildings and paying religious school teachers' salaries in the twentieth century, and the recent creation of a national Islamic body, the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM). I draw on this idea to examine the preceding papers in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Paedagogica Historica is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through its historical account of the Confédération Paysanne (CP)'s origins and early years (France), this paper explores the ways in which ‘peasant’ discourses are shaped by non-peasant understandings of what ‘being a peasant’ should mean. As we shall see, far from reflecting an innate and immutable ‘peasant’ way of being or seeing, references to ‘peasantness’ and ‘peasant farming’ act as discursive tools to both unite a heterogeneous activist base (composed of marginal and marginalized farmers) and advance organizational interests. This requires the CP – and its predecessors – to respond to a series of external constraints. In the course of this paper, we shall also show how academics play an important mediating role in the process of constructing or adapting the CP's ‘peasant’ discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper describes the strategies of the French fashion business to authenticate its designs and brands under the challenge of mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing by US manufacturers. It focuses on the 1950s as a pivotal moment in fashion history, as the older model of elite fashion ‘trickling down’ to the lower strata of garment production made way for a multiplicity of trendsetters and a democratisation of fashion. Starting from a situation in which New York-based manufacturers produced low-price copies of Parisian designs, the paper analyses the various strategies of French fashion producers to get control over the exploitation of their designs. As attempts to secure international copyright for fashion designs failed, Parisian designers brought out tie-in products and boutique lines and managed to shift the authenticity of their work from the design to the brand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1887 to 1946, the administrative apparatus known as the indigénat provided French administrators in New Caledonia with a set of exceptional measures to streamline the governing and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (‘natives’). This paper examines the place of the indigénat, the role of colonial administrators in defining one or more communities of race and the variable status of the category of indigène in New Caledonia in the period to 1946. Particular consideration is given to the influence (or absence thereof) of the science of race on administrative thinking about native policy in New Caledonia, the distinctions drawn between different categories of indigène, the extent to which cultural and political divisions between the Grande terre (mainland) and the Loyalty Islands were imagined or constructed in racial terms and the situation of métis (‘half-castes’). The paper argues that an incipient definition of the indigène as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian, mixed or Oceanian race must be understood in the context of the development of the indentured labour and immigration regimes (the importation of workers from Asia and other parts of Oceania) as well as the ways in which the indigénat was differently applied and experienced between New Caledonia's mainland and its dependencies (notably the Loyalty Islands), as well as by métis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In France, the inter-war years were a time when the sports movement was truly in need of structure and the media wanted to play a part in the process. At that time, sports practice was fairly limited and making it an integral part of French daily life was an essential goal. With this in mind, the French media took part in the popularisation of sports practice where the rationale seemed more concerned with its emergence rather than its development. Regional case studies can be helpful in pinpointing how social perspectives were viewed by the media, provided that they focus on the territories that reflected the national frame of mind. This allows for plausible generalisation. The Rhône-Alps region, more precisely the Grenoble valley, was typical in this respect. An in-depth study of a regional weekly sports newspaper, ‘Les Alpes Sportives’ (8 November 1919 – 5 May 1928), demonstrates how editorial leverage was used to convince readers to turn to sport and recognise its cultural worth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper follows the lives of Mateu Orfila and François Magendie in early nineteenth-century Paris, focusing on their common interest in poisons. The first part deals with the striking similarities of their early careers: their medical training, their popular private lectures, and their first publications. The next section explores their experimental work on poisons by analyzing their views on physical and vital forces in living organisms and their ideas about the significance of animal experiments in medicine. The last part describes their contrasting research on the absorption of poisons and the divergences in their approaches, methods, aims, standards of proof, and intended audiences. The analysis highlights the connections between nineteenth-century courtrooms and experimental laboratories, and shows how forensic practice not only prompted animal experimentation but also provided a substantial body of information and new research methods for dealing with major theoretical issues like the absorption of poisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some countries rely more heavily on equities markets, while others depend more on commercial banking? Analyses of the origins of contemporary capitalist institutions usually look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this paper demonstrates that financial institutions -- regarded as central to the way capitalist systems are organised -- changed radically in the mid-twentieth century in many countries. This paper argues that government partisanship in formative moments of institutional (re)creation can better account for their modern manifestation than prominent alternative explanations. A new measure of partisanship that is sensitive to these institutional transformations is presented. Case studies on Germany and France offer evidence consistent with this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a critical reflection on the use of quantitative sources for the historian of education. It identifies and discusses key promises and challenges related to the construction and interpretation of historical statistics in education, drawing on a number of British and some French historiographical examples. Ultimately, the article encourages, where possible and appropriate, a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to identify trends and patterns in education and facilitate their contextualisation in terms of processes and meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1919 Greater Paris competition was the first attempt at metropolitan planning in France. Paris was then the fourth largest city in the world. As in other metropolises, congestion and hazardous urban growth were its main problems. The need of planning was evident. However, the long-term city–suburb conflict, the legal constraints, and the political divergences hindered the realization of a comprehensive plan. In this context, an international competition was launched. The prize-winner was the French architect Léon Jaussely. Although Greater Paris competition did not result in a comprehensive plan straightaway, it constitutes a turning point in Paris’s planning history. Through research on unpublished sources preserved in different Parisian archives, this paper aims firstly to reconstruct the process of the competition. The thorough reports of the jury offer an entirely new approach to the study of this kind of competition, since they allow us to comprehend the preoccupations of the administrations in charge. Secondly, it intends to examine the projects, connecting their solutions with international models and debates. It focuses on those concerning the comprehensive plan and particularly on Jaussely’s awarded project. Finally, the long-term influence of the competition will be discussed and regarded within the international context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Society & Leisure / Loisir & Société is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to analyse certain techniques of subjectivation in modern child-rearing and the way in which medical discourse leads to the construction of children through those techniques. As a case study, several manuals on childcare used during the first third of the twentieth century in Spain and France have been selected. A historical-genealogical perspective is adopted, according to which childhood is not a natural or ahistorical category, but depends on cultural practices. In Western countries, these practices have been strongly influenced by expert discourses. The techniques proposed in the manuals are identified and the theoretical justification for them analysed according to the socio-cultural and historical context. It is shown in what sense the practices recommended by doctors for mothers constituted a kind of early informal education contributing to the creation of future well-educated citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to give the Frisian jurist Ulrik Huber (1636–94) his place in the European history of the notion of fundamental laws and to enhance our understanding of the history of the rule of law, particularly of the role of fundamental laws therein. In order to do so Huber's notion of fundamental laws will be read against the background of a European sketch of this notion. Huber's ideas on fundamental laws are taken here for a door through which some age-old ideas entered a new stage – and with these age-old ideas a core conception of rule of law thinking had knocked on that door. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the history of the isolation and industrial production of aluminium in France, from the work of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville in the 1850s to the latter part of the twentieth century, focusing on the relationships between academic research and industrial exploitation. In particular, it identifies a culture and organisation of research and development, 'learning-by-doing,' that emerged in the French aluminium industry following the establishment of the first electrolytic production facilities in the late 1880s by Paul Héroult, who, along with the American Charles Hall, patented the electrolytic method of producing the metal. This French method of R&D was a product both of a scientific culture that saw a continuity between scientific research and industrial application, and of a state policy that, unlike in Germany or the United States, was late to recognise the importance of fostering, on a large scale, the relations between academic chemistry and industry. It was only after World War II that the French state came fully to recognise the importance of underpinning industry with scientific research. And it was only from the 1960s, in the face of intensifying global competition, the risks of pollution, and the cost of energy, that the major aluminium firm Pechiney et Cie was able to replace a culture of 'learning-by-doing' by one that integrated fundamental science with the production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the revival of Pliny's Naturalis historia within the scientific culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a French effort to produce an edition with annotations by scientists and scholars. Between the Renaissance and the early eighteenth century, the Naturalis historia had declined in scientific importance. Increasingly, it was relegated to the humanities, as we demonstrate with a review of editions. For a variety of reasons, however, scientific interest in the Naturalis historia grew in the second half of the eighteenth century. Epitomizing this interest was a plan for a scientifically annotated, Latin-French edition of the Naturalis historia. Initially coordinated by the French governmental minister Malesherbes in the 1750s, the edition was imperfectly realized by Poinsinet a few decades later. It was intended to rival two of the period's other distinguished multi-volume books of knowledge, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and Buffon's Histoire naturelle, to which we compare it. Besides narrating the scientific revival of the Historia naturalis during this period, we examine its causes and the factors contributing to its end in the first half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern & Contemporary France is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, sport and tourism developed simultaneously under British inspiration. The models of the Alpine Club and the Touring Club set examples which were emulated in France, thus benefiting the development of physical activities and the planning of places of interest. While private commercial initiatives were only slowly emerging, the French Alpine Club and Canoe Club, effectively assisted by the Touring Club de France, promoted tourist expansion. This paper shows how the cooperation orchestrated between the sports and tourist societies played a driving role in the development of the tourist economy in France. To support this project, this case study uses the comparative analysis of two tourist areas: the banks of the River Marne, taken over by Parisian water sport enthusiasts, and the Dauphiné Alps, favoured by English mountaineers as early as the 1860s. Comparing two different geographical areas and two different activities allows us to highlight the common process which accounts for the joint development of sports and tourist activities. Our analyses, which are based on a precise chronology and a detailed cartography, underline the progressive structuring of sports sites and development of tourist infrastructures needed to accommodate sportsmen and -women. This work is founded on an analysis of the archives and publications of the above-mentioned organizations. The tourist development of these areas is identified through cadastral maps and tourist guides. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The period 1880–1930 saw women composers achieve unprecedented prominence as composers of large-scale works. This success coincided with the first wave of feminist movements in England, France and Germany. This article views the junctions where these two groups of women met through the vehicle of the feminist press, documenting the tensions and misunderstandings that occurred between emerging women composers attempting to be taken seriously as creative entities and feminists seeking to improve the political, social and professional lot of women. The pervasive aesthetic of male musical genius remained unquestioned by many feminists in spite of examples of female creative brilliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism and sport are two phenomena that rapidly expanded at the end of the nineteenth century. The latter is often viewed as a service in a system structured by the former, in the way tennis courts or golf courses are established near hotel facilities. Yet, the development of outdoor sports reveals that a tourist territory can be defined by its sports function. Through the example of mountaineering in the French Pelvoux massif, we are going to show that a physical activity may have a major role in determining tourist territories and the local economic growth. This research paper investigates, chronologically and geographically, the expansion of mountaineering in the Pelvoux massif and its spin-off effects on touristic amenities, especially in the development of hotel services, town-and-country planning and communications. This demonstration is based on archives from several alpine societies – the French Alpine Club, the Society of Dauphiné Tourists and the Touring Club de France – as well as on monographs published by mountaineers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper retraces the origins of the unbundling of infrastructure, which is a monopoly, from services, which are subject to competition. Using the case of the railroad industry in France, I examine how both natural monopoly theorists and legislation dealt with this subject in the nineteenth century. I argue that the origins of vertical unbundling date to this period with legislation pertaining to inland waterways and railroads. This was particularly the case for the railroad industry due to pricing and competition rationales. I analyze the writings of Dupuit and Walras, and show that they both agreed that infrastructure and services had to be unbundled for the inland waterways. In contrast, they expressed different justifications to defend the monopoly for the railroad industry. Following a chronological progression, the first section explores the origins of unbundling in legislation. The second section analyzes how theorists approached the way railroads had to be managed. Throughout, I highlight the interplay between their work and legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ‘poor’ result achieved by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2007 presidential elections, many commentators saw the demise of the Front National. However, when asked by a journalist whether it was the end of her father's political career, Marine Le Pen smilingly replied: ‘I don't think so. In any case, this is the victory of his ideas!’ In this question and answer lies the whole story of the Front National and its impact on mainstream politics in the past two decades. First, Le Pen's defeat was exaggerated, the same way his victory had been in 2002. What Mondon argues in this paper is that the 2002 presidential elections did act as an ‘earthquake’ within French politics. However, this ‘earthquake’ did not trigger a tsunami of support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, but rather a tidal wave of misinformation and misunderstanding as to the real significance of the election results. By concentrating on the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections, Mondon highlights how this reaction led to the consecration of right-wing populist politics, best exemplified in the landslide election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. He also provides an insight into the slippery slope Sarkozy's government took after its election, leading to an extremely rightward-leaning 2012 presidential campaign and new heights for the Front National. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the beginning of the 1730s René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur published two long memoirs on a new type of thermometer equipped with a specially calibrated scale — known ever since as the Réaumur scale. It became one of the most common ‘standardized’ thermometers in Europe until the late nineteenth century. What made this thermometer so successful? What was it specifically? I will first argue that the real Réaumur thermometer as an instrument was a fiction, a ghost — an idealized instrument. On paper, it was theoretically flawless. In reality, the standardized Réaumur thermometer was most likely never achieved. This article shows that its success was essentially due to a recontextualisation from theoretical natural philosophy — Réaumur's principle of uniformity — to: 1) the context of artisanal knowledge and practices and 2) the context of making and reporting in the Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences actual measurements done in the field (in Paris at the Observatory, in Provincial France, in the Colonies, and in the rest of Europe). Réaumur's thermometer was essentially a theoretical method to which was associated a particular scale. It was the instrument's reification for market consumption and fieldwork that gave this specific type of thermometer materiality and authority. Although most Réaumur thermometers ever made were strikingly different from one another, over time the thermomètre de Réaumur designation became a brand, a seal of approval born from customary artisanal practices and cultural habitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of security sector reform (SSR) was first formulated by UK development actors. Since 2008, France has officially adopted an SSR strategy and promoted the concept at the European level during the country's 2008 EU Presidency. However, what appears on paper to resemble full support from French institutions is in fact more complex. If the anglophone roots of the policy initiative do not seemingly explain its lack of institutionalization in the French context, it would appear that the difficulty faced by the French administration in finding a whole-of-government agreement on what the content of SSR should be, does. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The early development of football in France provided recognition of Paris and its suburbs as a hegemonic space, from both a sporting and organisational point of view. While Parisian leaders were behind the autonomisation and internationalisation of French football, teams and players from the Paris region were among the most sought-after, with the most media coverage, in the country. From the 1910s onwards, however, the transformation of the institutional scene, the emergence of very competitive provincial teams, and the commercialisation of the game relegated Parisian football to the sporting periphery. Highlighting the causes behind both the sporting hegemony and the subsequently declining status of the capital of a strongly centralised state, this paper investigates how sporting excellence was re-distributed following the institutional and subsequent economic autonomisation of football. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizenship involves both legal status and lived experience. The Condominium of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) was based on an agreement between France and Britain, which explicitly denied citizenship to the indigenous majority of the archipelago. Indigenous ni-Vanuatu were officially stateless under the terms by which France and Britain jointly governed the New Hebrides from 1906 to 1980. Although forms of citizenship as lived experience were evident in church, custom and profession, its legal absence sharply curtailed the ability of ni-Vanuatu to fully participate as citizens in a full range of civil, social and political rights that citizenship embodies. While limitations on indigenous legal, political and social rights were not unusual in colonial territories up until World War II, the total denial of any form of civil status was. After World War II, the issue of indigenous statelessness in the New Hebrides became more acute, as it contravened the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, constitutional guarantees to citizenship under the Fourth and Fifth French Republics and the principles of the British Nationality Act of 1948. This paper explores statelessness and citizenship in the New Hebrides and argues that the cumulative experiences of statelessness and the limitations that the absence of legal citizenship placed on political and social rights in the New Hebrides were, like land and custom (kastom), vital issues in the decolonisation of Vanuatu. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Devlin and Hoyle report, Committing to culture: arts funding in France and Britain, argues that the cultural policies of these two European neighbours have been steadily converging since the mid-1990s but that their social and economic contexts are now quite different (e.g. youth unemployment, GDP, disposable income). The paper addresses this convergence-within-divergence by comparing how policy discourses have conceptualised popular culture in the two countries. It investigates the hypothesis that, in both, an engagement with popular culture has in fact been an important driver of change, albeit at different times and with different taxonomies. And it asks what light this comparison might shed on cultural policy thinking in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of reconstruction, sport was a component of education and considered useful to complete the individual's training. Because sport brings people together, it was the ideal instrument to ensure the unity of a country racked by tensions and oppositions. Could not sport help restore the French Union, made vulnerable by the expression of Malagasy nationalism? The first part of this article describes the implementation and organisation of the new sports administration along the values it intended to promote. The second part covers the strategies developed by the colonial administration to regain control over sports structures, in line with the generalisation of the principle of free association in 1946. Thirdly, the paper analyses the revival of a sport policy officially focused on mass sports, but which in fact excluded the most popular activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Modern & Contemporary France is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses the various ways that patents and standards framed a challenger's opportunities. It recounts the history of the Bull punched card system, both in Norway in the 1920s and France in the 1930s, as it developed and became a challenger to IBM's monopoly. Bull faced the first mover's patents and standards differently. Standards paved the way for the challenger's actions, while patents hampered certain facilities for their duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the evolution of shipping and trade between the United States and France from the end of the American War of Independence to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1783–1815). It argues that commercial relations followed their own, internal dynamic and had scarce connections to statist commercial policies. These relations were, however, deeply responsive to the international context and to warfare in particular. American shipping to France experienced an extraordinary boom after the outbreak of war between France and Great Britain in 1793. The paper explores the nature of this trade and demonstrates that its full understanding requires a global approach to trade flows in the Atlantic World rather than the bilateral approaches which dominate contemporary as well as most historical analyses. A broader analysis must integrate merchant strategies and networks into the Atlantic history. The last part of the paper analyses the specific case of Bordeaux, the major French port for US shipping during the French Wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that European cooperation in the management of African crises is not inherently more legitimate than previous unilateral forms of intervention. Nonetheless, the French colonial tradition of military intervention and continued efforts to maintain French hegemony are not necessarily incompatible with a European capacity to manage African crises. The cases of the French interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and in Chad/Darfur will support this argument. These cases show that the new interventionism cannot escape the fact that these postcolonial African states are a product of the French colonial Republic. Functionally, France's historic links to such places have both constructed their current political crises and created the expectation that France (above everyone else) should take the lead role in intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French experience of the First World War has aroused significant interest within and outside academic circles since the 1990s. A heated controversy over the role and significance of the 1914-1918 'war culture' has, in the last ten years, pitted two schools of interpretation, emphasizing 'consent' on the one hand and 'coercion' on the other. This paper first presents the main lines of the argument between two groups of historians anxious to contribute to a European history of the First World War. It then suggests avenues of further investigation that urgently require an international and collaborative effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The child and childhood were vital aspects of the ideology of the French Revolution, and the education of the young in the new ways of thinking was perceived as an urgent ideological enterprise in the 1790s. Little attention has been paid, however, to the strategies employed by writers of books for the young to mould a young and impressionable readership. The decade saw an attempt to revise from the grass roots level children's experience of books and their ways of reading, both for leisure and for educational purposes. This paper considers how this aim evolved in a crucial period in the history of French children's literature with particular reference to the narrative of exemplary lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The destruction during the Second World War made the city a crisis of looming proportions throughout Europe. In the case of France, over three-quartersof the country was struck by the war. Cities and towns were in ruins. Over 2 million buildings, a quarter of the housing stock, was destroyed or damaged (Croize, 1991, pp. 253-257). A million families were left homeless. Millions of others lived in temporary shelters and run-down apartments without access to basic services. This tragic situation made the housing crisis-that is finding a place of live-one of the most serious and explosive post-war domestic issues in France, as it was all over Europe. One way the crisis was addressed was for men and women to build their own homes, or to simply occupy vacant buildings. This paper looks at the role of the organised self-help housing movement within the massive effort of reconstruction and building after the Second World War, from 1945-1954. The movement comprised three phases: the squatter movement; the mouvement Castors or Beavers movement, which became a limited effort at auto-construction; and lastly, the housing campaign launched by the Abbe Pierre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the shift from comic illustration to photography made in the 1850s and 1860s by several caricaturists in Paris, France. Effects of the structure of employment and professional training during the Second Empire; Careers of nineteenth-century French photographers Nadar and Etienne Carjat; Ways in which caricature and photography were seen as attacks on the fine arts.

When the scheme of morphological subdivision propounded is applied to Western Europe, the Central Massif of France appears as a physiographic province with a unity of major relief type and structural evolution. The geographical regions within this province have two other important features in common: they have a similar history and the majority are characterized by a "mountainous centrality" with regard to the rest of France. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the emergence of the general patterns of road and rail communications in these regions.

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports published within the issue on topics including the underlying structures of the famine in Nordic history, the grain trade from the Baltic provinces to Finland and Sweden during the 1690s, and a long-term view on trade and agriculture in Northern France from 5400 BC to 3900 BC.

This article explores the interconnections between the media in France and the emergence of a Franco-British alliance on the eve of the Second World War, emphasizing how newspaper, radio and newsreel coverage helped mould British perceptions of France during the late 1930s. It will argue that British assessments of France, and thus France's potential value as a wartime ally, were influenced greatly by the dominant representations furnished by the media. In 1936, such representations portrayed a polarized France unworthy of British support; by 1939, they depicted a strong and united country of inestimable value to Britain. This transformation was not simply fortuitous; by the late 1930s, French politicians, conscious of the deleterious effect that media representations of a divided France was having on their country's prestige, endeavoured to transform the media from a symptom of decadence and malaise into a weapon of unity and strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Nadar shifted his attention from caricature to photography in the 1850s, he produced several fascinating hybrid images. Among these are experiments in photomontage and uncommon portraits that combine graphic, photographic, and autographic elements. The author shows how Nadar cultivated a number of recognisable signatures, which he reiterated and adapted for different image-types, products, and advertisements. Nadar’s investment in self-portraiture, his penchant for publicity, and his ability to work across platforms and to balance artistic ambition and commercial enterprise are explored in depth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For over a century, historians and literary critics appear to have been at odds regarding the poetry of the First World War. This schism owes itself to processes of canonization which restrict (in Britain) or completely ignore (in France) the full extent and diversity of wartime poetic practices. Investigating a new corpus of French poets of the First World War, and considering poetry as a social and cultural category and as a wartime practice whose functions go beyond literary value, this article argues that war poets can be read as ethnographers of wartime culture. In proposing this analogy, it aims to present the ethnographic conventions as a common ground where History and Poetics can establish a dialogue. For scholars aiming to investigate how cultural production shapes experiences of armed conflict, this ensures poets are seen as the producers of interpretive knowledge of war and poems as more than either transparent documents or hermetic lyrical creations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]