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Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras 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 article examines how games set in the past reflect contemporary social and political events without overtly communicating messages. Using a simplified version of Astrid Ensslin's methodological toolkit, the author studies four critically acclaimed retrospective mystery games produced in France within the 1986–91 period. The research results allow one to externalize a trend marked by ambiguous meanings called la mode rétro, namely a nostalgic re-creation of the past and a simultaneous coming-to-terms with France's history. The author contextualizes the games examined here in terms of their references to a problematic past – the nation's wartime stance towards Nazi Germany, and colonialism – and contemporaneous events such as the emergence of the National Front in France. The titles examined here demonstrate how discursively ambiguous computer games are as cultural texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The colonial period in Algeria was a time of suffering and struggle for Algerians who fought to win back their freedom and defend their values against French attempts to subjugate them. It was also a struggle to end foreign control over the country's wealth and resources. National independence sought a sovereign state with free decision-making, away from French influence in particular, in a context of ideological polarization and mutual hostility between ex-colonial forces and independent states. The root of such hostility lies in what both parties lost, and resulted in a distinctive pattern of French--Algerian bilateral relations tainted by nostalgia from the French side and the struggle for parity from the Algerian side. The three decades following Algeria's independence witnessed, to a certain extent, a national sentiment opposed to colonial France, and it is the sentiment that Algerian politicians attempted to use to manage relations between the two countries and obtain some benefits by invoking the past in speeches at a local level, and to overcome that past in building relations with France. As a security crisis and economic decline hit Algeria, it became apparent that the French regime was to exert effective influence on the country and control its foreign policy to meet French aspirations and ambitions in both Africa and the Arab world. This conclusion suggested to several observers the fall of the Algerian elite, responsible for decision-making, under French influence. Moreover, this elite group, while dealing with several regional issues, was not able to assert complete independence in its decision-making regarding foreign affairs, whether due to its past and formation or to the network of new relations built between the Algerian and French systems. This reality, which is deeply rooted in the Algerian foreign policy system, raises the question of the ability of the Algerian elite to pull away from its colonial inheritance and the grip of the French regime. One might therefore wonder how historical events and Algerian solid ties with the French administration shape French--Algerian relations and their political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Nostalgia has become a new master narrative both in public discourse and academic research, serving as an explanation for trends in fields as different as popular culture, fashion, technology, and politics. This essay criticizes the wide‐ranging use of the term. It argues that nostalgia often does not adequately describe the diverse uses of the past to which it is applied. It does this by historicizing the nostalgia discourse with particular emphasis on the 1970s, when dictionaries first noted a semantic shift from homesickness to a sentimental yearning for the past, and intellectuals discussed a widespread, pathological “nostalgia wave.” After the introduction, the second section looks at the changing meanings of nostalgia, the third examines how the “nostalgia wave” was seen to manifest itself and who was thought to be afflicted by it, and the fourth discusses contemporary explanations. Building on this, the final section critically examines the nostalgia discourse before evaluating its continuing influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines fictional representations of the emigration of the French Revolution. It focuses on the novels Eugénie et Mathilde, Les Petits émigrés, and Le Retour d'un émigré, which were published in France between 1797 and 1815 as émigrés were seeking to return to the nation they had fled. It argues that these novels should be interpreted as making claims about the ability of émigrés to reintegrate within the nation. The sentimental novels responded to two key anxieties about the émigrés' return by demonstrating that émigrés had not been transformed into foreigners during their time abroad and that they were not seeking to reconstitute Old Regime France. These novelists redefined the émigré as an isolated and pitiable wanderer, and redefined France as a nation bound by common suffering and sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about communist nostalgia in the identity of the left political party of France, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). Topics discussed include the collapse of the Vichy government in 1944, PCF's passivity on the issue of the signing of the German-Soviet Pact, and the French resistance movement of 1941 after the Nazi invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

This article compares the ways in which French and British newspaper discourse has approached nostalgia—as an emotion, social experience and cultural value—in coverage of the 1980s popular music tours RFM Party 80 and Here and Now (2001–2011). Similarities in French and British approaches include an emphasis on joy, the festive, an imagined return to youth, unquestioning nostalgia, social cohesion as well as stereotypical views of 1980s popular music and fashion as kitsch. The study also reveals clear differences between national contexts. British coverage avoids taking life too seriously, but also challenges unquestioning nostalgia, and develops more complex forms. French coverage emphasises the value of emotion, social and intergenerational cohesion as well as national pride. The nostalgia tour is also associated in French coverage with the defence of popular culture, the resistance to perceived Parisian domination and the development of charity and musical creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Belle Époque (Trueba, 1992) and La lengua de las mariposas (Cuerda, 1999) offer a nostalgic representation of a specific Spanish past, the Second Republic. This period is rendered as an ahistorical, quasi-bucolic and freer time when sexual and/or cognitive desire circulated with fewer restrictions. In addition, in these two films, nostalgia is not only a set of topics or an emotional tone, but also (and above all) a narrative structure based on a semi-disjointed episodicity. The success of this episodic approach to the idealized scenario of the Second Republic cannot be properly understood without paying attention (and in contrast) to the type of films that a young generation of directors popularized in the 1990s. These film-makers emphasized tight causal plots and a thematic interest in pan-European, late-capitalist tribulations, such as commodification, lack of authenticity, delusion and social marginalization. In this context, Belle Époque and La lengua de las mariposas re-imagine a different, looser and less constrained experience of time and temporal succession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nostalgia in its classic form-a longing for home-has commonly welled up among Parisians living far from their city. That kind of nostalgia famously afflicted soldiers called to battle, notably during the drawn-out 'Great War.' It also struck civilian Parisians unable to return to their hometown during the Occupation. A more common and widespread form of Parisian nostalgia is the bittersweet remembrance of a time in the past, especially following a bout of charm-destroying changes or urbanist operations, such as those of the Second Empire and the Fifth Republic. Cultural memory has imbued one particular era with the greatest nostalgia: the so-called Belle Époque. More generally, Parisian nostalgia has focused on a memory of the disappearing petit peuple and a handful of picturesque sites, such as pre-1914 Montmartre and, in the late twentieth century, the old central Halles, Belleville, and the Rue de Lappe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the uses and representations of nostalgia among trade organizations such as the compagnons du Tour de France, an active French organization of craftsmen and artisans. According to the article, the Tour de France is an initiation period during which apprentices learn their trade in various areas of France except their own region. Two aspects of the Tour de France are considered including the one which provokes the sentiment of loosing one's regional origins and the nostalgia felt after the end of the Tour.

The article examines Hip Hop songs and a choreography created by immigrant rappers and a choreographer in France which focus on the themes of identity, nostalgia, and relationships between children immigrants and their parents. The author analyzes the choreography titled "Douar" created by Algerian dancer and choreographer Kader Attou, and the songs including "Mali forever," by rapper Mokobé from the group 113, and "Manish Mena" by the group Ministères des Affaires Populaires (MAP). INSET: Extrait de Mali forever.

The article presents an ethnographic description of the hamlet of Viévola near Tende, France, which the author observed from 2006 to 2009. The links between nostalgic thoughts, particularly in choreographies and music, and the location to which they are dedicated are considered. It demonstrates how the hamlet is rebuilt during an annual festival as a space different from reality which symbolizes a past era. The concepts of structural nostalgia, heterotopia, and space and location are also discussed.

After the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, a wave of political refugees and intellectuals immigrated to France. Among the intelligentsia, writers continued to write despite the practical and emotional difficulties of exile. Three decades later, some authors, such as Goli Taraghi, gradually developed a French-Persian hybrid literature, which closely interweaves the history and culture of both countries. Their stories put in perspective a deep understanding of time and space, past and present in terms of nostalgia and melancholy of the early years. In La maison de Shemiran, Goli Taraghi reveals a painful, intimate and sometimes humorous period of her life in exile and her childhood memories. Her story is the a posteriori result of this experience, which however deeply penetrates the psychological mechanism that operates the inner self as a mutative agent of identitary metamorphosis. By studying this work, we will take a look at the intrinsic relationship between nostalgia caused by the situation of exile and its impact on the perception of time and space. We are dealing here with an individual experience, which nevertheless reflects a painful and transitional phase, also known by other artists in exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of nostalgia as a clinical category has many highly specific national stories. This paper traces an aspect of this history, examining aspects of nostalgia's changing meanings in nineteenth-century France. Nostalgia was a disease triggered by displacement, which became medically and politically important after the French Revolution, when military surgeons encountered epidemics of nostalgia in the armed forces. Understood as a form of pathological homesickness, the category straddled environmental medicine and emerging ideas about insanity. The diagnosis became particularly important to Idéologue writers as a case study in regulating and redirecting the emotions, demonstrating the efficacy of their new “moral” treatments and an ability to generate patriotic attachment to the new nation state. Over the course of the century, nostalgia disintegrated as a medical condition reflecting a decline in environmental explanations for disease within medicine, and increasingly plastic meanings attached to nostalgic desire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the significance of popular-music-related nostalgia broadcast on French television, particularly since the launch of the successful Âge tendre et têtes de bois series of concert tours in 2006 and holiday cruises in 2008. Building on existing academic accounts, particularly in psychological science and consumer and marketing research, my study demonstrates how television coverage of popular music emphasises joy, rather than the ‘bittersweetness’ often associated with nostalgia, views the past more positively than the present (‘simple nostalgia’), represents a fantasy return to youth, and promotes social and cross-generational cohesion. On occasion, however, such coverage is tempered with expressions of ambivalence or reticence. While popular-music-related nostalgia is defined by television coverage as an ‘emotion’ or ‘experience’, it is also viewed as a commercial force and in terms of its own problematic status within the wider musical and cultural field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Le présent article vise à explorer le motif esthétique et thématique de la nostalgie dans la culture française en analysant sa présence concrète dans l’œuvre et le personnage de Georges Brassens. Pour ce faire, nous offrirons premièrement une présentation diachronique du concept de nostalgie et nous étudierons ensuite la nostalgie comme leitmotiv dans les textes de Brassens en analysant ses enjeux sur le plan de l’expression et de la réception. L’analyse nous permettra d’identifier le personnage Brassens comme mythe d’une francité foncièrement passéiste, assimilée à une identité universaliste républicaine, située dans un passé fictionnel, opposée au multiculturalisme problématique de la réalité contemporaine. Les conclusions s’interrogeront sur le rôle de la nostalgie dans la construction de l’identité nationale française. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the figuration of the Parisian urban space in the work of Georges Simenon. Object of analysis is the detective novel Maigret et l'homme tout seul, emblematic not only for the literary workings of this figuration within one particular novel, but also for the coherent symbolic representation of Paris on the scale of Simenon's fictional world as a whole. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (strongly influenced by Aragon's Paysan de Paris), and more specifically its definition of the urban flâneur as one of the most salient figures to lead to a meaningful interpretation of the nineteenth century, proves to be a useful approach. An analysis of the figuration of Paris on the level of the novel's fictional world is followed by a detailed interpretation on close-reading level. Particular emphasis is laid on the literary concept of index, as proposed by Roland Barthes, in strong connection with Simenon's pointillist writing style. Affective notions, such as atmosphere and nostalgia, connoted by the idea of Parisian flânerie, and often associated with the work and life of Simenon, thus receive a more defined interpretation. The concept of the flâneur, as well as some striking details of this particular novel, not only lead to the detective novel's nineteenth-century literary roots (Cooper-Dumas-Poe), but also reveal significant references to Parisian society under Louis-Philippe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses music in North American French colonies, focusing on the accounts of the French writers and travelers Vicomte François-René de Chateaubriand and Alexis de Tocqueville. It is said that both writers saw music as a remnant of French empire in the areas that formerly constituted New France. Topics include elements of nostalgia, Chateaubriand's ambition to be an explorer and find the Northwest Passage, and the teaching of French dance to Iroquois Indians by a man named Violet. Also noted are Tocqueville's book "Democracy in America," the purported nobility of Native Americans, and the French Second Empire.

This article explores an aspect of France's relations with North Africa that has hitherto received relatively little attention from cultural commentators working in the broad area of postcolonial Francophone studies, certainly in the United Kingdom, namely, the photographic representation of Alexandria in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period the city was finally emerging from the near oblivion in which it was plunged following the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the subsequent expulsion by the Egyptian government of the cosmopolitan community which had been responsible for its erstwhile success and prosperity since the 1850s. The article takes the photobook Alexandrie revisitée (Hassoun 1998) published as part of the celebrations surrounding L'Année France-Égypte launched by Presidents Jacques Chirac and Hosni Mubarak, as a representative case study of the depiction of the city at the end of the twentieth century. Using theories of nostalgia, the uncanny, and photography, this study demonstrates how the aesthetic form and content of Alexandrie revisitée functions as a historical, cultural, political and memorialist document, as well as a product of the 'special relationship' between France and Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reflection on the history of a deep state of melancholy referred to as nostalgia and experienced by French colonists or soldiers in Algeria between 1830 and 1880. Based on military and colonial archives, medical sources and private or official letters, the article discusses the social and emotional context in which young soldiers could let themselves die from nostalgic grief during this period. The means used at the time to help soldiers and emigrants cope with nostalgia are examined.

In commemoration of the 45th year of their exile, 500 pieds-noirs and their families gathered in Toulouse, France in May 2007. During their meeting, the Amicale de Saida viewed the film Saida... On revient! sur les pas de notre enfance, which chronicles the return voyage of members of the community and their encounters with the places of their past. The amateur film provides a return to Algeria for the pieds-noirs who could not physically make the journey. While many buildings in the images were in ruins, the pieds-noirs did not view the present and experienced a return to somewhere other than what was filmed. Saida... On revient! is one of numerous journeys to Algeria that have occurred in the past 50 years. Notable Algerian-born authors Albert Camus, Marie Cardinal, Leila Sebbar, Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous have all participated in written and real returns to Algeria, and they all reflect on the ruins of Algeria that haunt them in their exile. By analysing the representation of real ruins in documented returns to Algeria, this article demonstrates how ruins of lost locations hold potential to ruin the stability of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrial exhibitions in Paris during the July Monarchy drew large crowds and broad coverage in the press. Reviews of these exhibitions frequently appeared in newspapers that covered the annual art Salons, and often in the same part of the publication - in the feuilleton space. Thus an aesthetic of the commodity emerges in the reviews of the industrial exhibitions, as readers were taught to view the objects produced by industry with the same eye that assessed the value of new works of art. This essay concerns the contours of this aesthetic and how reviewers produced interest in these objects on display. Coverage of these exhibitions reveals the dominance of progress as an organizing paradigm for the historical consciousness in the early nineteenth century. Yet, at the same time, counterbalancing such a valuation of progress, objects are often represented as connected to or evocative of a lost pre-Revolutionary past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the analysis of the use of nostalgia in songs, books and films in France. The intellectual David Lowenthal defines nostalgia as a recognition of a malaise in the present, which is compensated for by the creation of an imaginary world. The author cites the musical album "Entre-Deux" by Patrick Bruel and the film "Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain," by the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet as examples of the nostalgic media production of the 1990s and early 2000s. "Entre-Deux" is mentioned for its attempt to invoke nostalgia for the music of the 1930s and "Amélie" is mentioned as a film that invokes memory of the past while preserving a recognition of the present.

A vibrant centre of cultural and artistic production, interwar Paris attracted many photographers from central Europe. Bringing with them inherited traditions and visual lexicons from their countries of origin, this heterogeneous group of photographers, which included Ilse Bing, André Kertész and Germaine Krull, put their acquired skills and habits to use in new contexts, drawing inspiration from each other, from their engagement with the vibrant culture of France, and most of all from a widespread fascination with Paris as photographic topos. Responding to nostalgia for images of a 'popular Paris' in the illustrated press, these photographers accomplished an alchemical transformation of Paris into a city in which past and present were poignantly reconciled. At the same time, many of their photographs, shot through with themes of exile and homelessness, reveal the fragility of the myth of a 'popular Paris', particularly after the advent of economic and social crises in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a cinema of place, the new wave is most famous for its loving representations of Paris, but many new wave film-makers, such as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Demy depicted provincial France. During the 1950s, France experienced rapid modernization and urbanization, but by the end of the decade, France was beginning to revisit the provincial towns and countryside that had been transformed or left behind. In its narratives and form, the new wave registered this dual migration and fond glance back at the provinces as a tension between mobility and dwelling in place, between nostalgia and modernity. A detailed analysis of Jacques Demy's first feature-length film, Lola (1961) illustrates this double movement. Demy himself returned to his hometown of Nantes to film this story of return of departure, which he repeats in revised form in other port cities in his subsequent films, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1966). In its dynamic of restless peregrination, Lola revises traditional regionalism by rejecting fixed origins and identities despite its undeniable attachment to place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis in medicine of Denis Guerbois (1775–1838), presented in Paris in 1803, was the first dissertation in french (and not in latin) that investigated the state of nostalgia and its detrimental effects on young conscripts called up to defend their nation in 1793. The symptoms included moral asthenia, physical depression, and nosocomial fever. It was absolutely necessary to give the patient the hope of seeing his family and friends, and to allow him to go home on leave. After that, he was again good for service. Several observations (semiology, treatment, study of the pathogenesis) illustrate this pathology, which army doctors were fully familiar with. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines the meaning of nostalgia and some of the reasons why the France of the 1930s was prone to nostalgic longings. It then considers why the colonial film lends itself to the expression of these nostalgic feelings whilst also pointing to some of the paradoxes attached to such an endeavour. Finally, the article offers a study of Les Hommes nouveaux which focuses exclusively on the ‘biopic’ element of the film and on the kind of past that is reconstructed through the figure of Marshal Lyautey, as well as on the exclusions necessary for the preservation of ideological harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers de Sociologie Economique et Culturelle is the property of Institut de sociologie economique et culturelle (ISEC) 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.)