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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]