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The article retraces how the notion of cultural singularity in sexuality was constructed and weaponized in the most popular French illustrated periodical of the First World War. It argues that La Vie Parisienne's sublimation of romantic love, sex, and Frenchness worked as a cultural tactic that, while helping the readership cope with a devastating historical disruption, undermined at the same time claims for social change. The close analysis of works by illustrator Chéri Hérouard uncovers how nationalism and anxieties of sexual dispossession contributed to integrate a fraught notion of women's sexual consent to a broader claim of cultural superiority. This article provides a critical approach to popular and visual representations of heterosexual and non-conjugal norms of desire, seduction, and sexuality in wartime France. It also offers a historical example of how the racialization and nationalisation of gender relations, discussed as 'Gallic singularity' in recent scholarship, trivialises masculine aggression and produces the ambivalence long associated with the notion of women's sexual consent in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penelope, Nausicaa, Ariadne, Sappho, Aspasia, Olympias, so many names of well-known female figures who have long served as the backdrop for the history of the Greeks without really questioning their own history. What about today? To answer I propose to follow my experience, that of a teacher-researcher at the university in France since the 1970s. This contribution built from a personal journey does not claim to be a synthesis of teaching and research on the history of women and gender in ancient history, but only one perspective among others. It describes the passage from a history of women to a history of gender, then to a mixed history which develops today in history of the ancient worlds, Greek and Roman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over the past twenty years, the cultural and social history of the Great War has undergone a profound revitalization and given rise to new areas of research, such as the history of the body and of violence, the relationships between the front lines and the home front, the 'cultures of war,' and religious feeling. At the heart of this approach is an interest in intimacy, or the private life of soldiers and their relationships with their loved ones, an area that has been explored thanks to a new focus on personal archives: letters, diaries, photographs. Taking wartime France as its example, this article analyzes the contributions of this new history of World War I and assesses its methodological issues. The Great War can thus be seen in its full measure, not only as the first conflict conducted on a global scale, but also as a true anthropological turning point, one that caused tremendous upheaval for those who lived through it: new kinds of violence on the battlefields, new mourning rituals, unfamiliar difficulties in reconnecting with private life in the aftermath of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]