Search

The secularization literature increasingly recognizes the role of historical state‐building processes and the manifest agency of sociopolitical actors in shaping public secularity. Based on archival data from the French Third Republic, this article offers three contributions to the historicizing agenda. First, to better capture the contingent and agency‐driven nature of secularization, it reoperationalizes the concepts of separation and regulation as contentious strategies of state‐building used toward religious authority. Second, it identifies and exemplifies four interrelated yet uneven spheres in which secularization is prompted through governmental action: politico‐institutional, socio‐pedagogical, symbolic‐ideological, and property‐distributional. Third, it suggests going beyond viewing secularizing agents as disconnected elites operating independently of grassroots movements. The French case shows that the Republicans' engagement with the pressures of various class forces had a significant impact on their secularizing policies. The analysis advances the study of the mechanisms whereby state‐building engenders and mediates secularization as a nonlinear and heterogeneous process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines some of the debates over maternal instinct in France under the Third Republic. It focuses on the work of three naturalists (Fabre, Perrier, and Giard) and shows how these scientists shaped, reinforced, or challenged feminine identities as well as a number of sexual social conventions making constant reference to the natural as their authority. This paper highlights these scientists' views on womanhood and maternity and their stances on contemporary feminist discourses as well as seeking to establish the extent to which these views and stances influenced their scientific discourses and practices. It also aims to demonstrate the interpenetration of science and policy, not only in terms of the transfer of political concepts into the scientific domain (and back again), but also as a joint construction process, which produced a new political and natural order in nineteenth century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the French feminist movements campaigning to obtain the right to vote between the 1870s and the 1930s are well known, the struggles for women's access to higher education and professional work have not yet been studied in depth. Although the French Third Republic (1871-1940) claimed to adhere to the principles of equality, meritocracy and the 'free competition of talents', which translated concretely into the creation of a system of scholarships, competitions and professional degrees which provided access to many of the professional careers, these doors remained largely closed to the first women attempting to enter them. The controversies that this situation provoked are the subject of this article, which draws from professional, parliamentary, press and activist sources. More broadly, through examining this particular series of controversies, the article aims to give an account of the mechanisms and arguments that are generally used to make such discriminations publicly acceptable within institutional spaces that are formally governed by the principle of equal access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the suicide of a teenager illuminated a longstanding ideological divide in fin-de-siècle France. Five days after his arrival at the Maison Paternelle, an internationally renowned, privately-operated establishment for bourgeois boys, Gaston Contard committed suicide. The suicide was quickly sensationalized in the press and resulted in a wide-ranging investigation by public prosecutors who charged the institution's director with illegal imprisonment. Although acquitted, this was a pyrrhic victory as the event marked a critical turning point in the relationship between private power, state control and paternal authority as it pertained to the incarceration and socialization of troubled youths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]