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This article outlines the contexts and consequences of an unrecognized late-nineteenth-century French translation of Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. Produced by Édouard Drumont as part of his antisemitic bestseller, La France juive, the translation is incorporated into a longer history of ritual murder stories. Praising the tale as a form of historical evidence for antisemitism, Drumont concretizes a link between the medieval antisemitism of Chaucer's tale and its later modern forms, creating an ethical necessity for the tale's readers and critics to acknowledge the tale's role within a longer history of antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of the organ as a political tool in nineteenth-century France. Under the Napoleonic Concordat (1802-1905), which established Catholicismas the official religion of the nation while placing the Catholic church under the authority of the state, the organ epitomized the political situation of a country marked by the inextricable entanglement of politics and religion. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including national and local archives, instrument makers' papers, and scientific and ecclesiastical reports on organ building, I analyze how governments and the clergy jointly orchestrated the construction of a metropolitan and colonial network of organs, before turning to the social motivations for such programs--the church and state's eagerness to establish and maintain their authority over society in the wake of successive revolutions and political upheavals. I consider how these programs resulted in the imposition of new scientific, technological, and musical standards that generated controversies over the relationship between religion and modernity. In so doing, this article highlights the benefits of social history for a better understanding of the organ and its reciprocal heuristic value within broader histories of sound, culture, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the "affective geographies" of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grenoble's presentation of 300 pairs of embroidered leather gloves to Empress Eugénie in 1860 exemplifies the traditional use of gloves as soft power. But the huge increase in glove-manufacturing and glove-wearing in nineteenth-century France gave gloves greater influence than ever before. As a powerful tool of social discrimination, they could reveal much about the wearer's class, character, habits and morals. Novelists and playwrights soon recognized gloves' potent symbolism: many literary examples portray gloves as agents of seduction, corruption, deceit or humiliation. For some writers, gloves had the power to disturb. For others, they were emblematic of France itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate the long run relationship between education, industrialisation and growth. I evaluate the impact of primary schooling on the economic development of France between the 1830s and 1914. To do so, I rely on very precise data on education at the level of municipalities. I instrument educational achievements, namely enrolment rates and schooling years, by the proximity of municipalities to printing presses established before 1500. This method returns a positive impact of an early high educational achievement on growth during the nineteenth century. This indicates a positive effect of the acquisition of basic education and elementary skills on the development of French municipalities. Therefore, the accumulation of human capital within primary schools contributed positively to growth during the nineteenth century and up to World War I, the core period of modernisation and industrialisation in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the book "Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France" by Jessie Hewitt. The book explores the role of gender in the French psychiatric system during the 19th century. It examines how male doctors reinforced gender norms and hierarchies within asylums, and how the concept of family played a pivotal role in the treatment of mental illness. The book also highlights the experiences of women in the psychiatric system and their contributions to the field. Overall, the book offers a thought-provoking analysis of the intersection of gender and psychiatry in 19th-century France. [Extracted from the article]

Scholars of the nineteenth-century race sciences have tended to identify the period from c. 1820– c. 1850 as a phase of transition from philologically to physically focused study. In France, the physiologist William Frédéric Edwards (1776–1842) is normally placed near the center of this transformation. A reconsideration of Edwards' oeuvre in the context of his larger biography shows that it is impossible to see a clear-cut philological to physical "paradigm shift." Although he has been remembered almost solely for his principle of the permanency of physical "types," Edwards was also committed to what he recognized as the new science of " linguistique " and proposed a new branch of comparative philology based on pronunciation. Bearing Edwards' attention to linguistics in mind, this article reconstructs his racial theories in their intellectual contexts and suggests that at a time of emergent disciplinary specialization, Edwards tried to hold discrete fields together and mold them into a new "natural history of man." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impact of industrial activities on primary instruction in early nineteenth-century France. To do so, I use a newly constituted database on the location and characteristics of primary schools at the level of municipalities. This database is extracted from the Guizot survey conducted in 1833, before the implementation of the first national law making the opening of a school mandatory in any municipality more than 500 inhabitants. By using mineral deposits as an instrument, I first show that the presence of industrial activities in a given municipality was positively influencing the presence of primary schools. An increase in the supply of schools by municipalities explains this association. Additional resources transferred to them by manufactures favoured this increase through an income effect. However, I find no significant link between industry and the accumulation of human capital. On the contrary, I provide indications that industrial activities were associated with lower enrolment rates. If they had a positive impact on the demand for schooling, it was only for a very restricted part of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 1830s, embalming became fashionable in France. Unlike traditional embalming reserved to the elites since the Middle Ages, the new, private form of embalming concerned ordinary people who could not bear seeing their passed beloved ones decompose and decay to dust. This rise went hand in hand with the multiplication of timeless plots allocation within cemeteries created by the decree of 1804, on which families could build tombs destined to shelter their dead. Embalming hence belonged to the 'funeral transition' between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century as described by R. Bertrand: the concern for the dead was not characterised by the concern for their soul but rather for the material remains. The cult of the dead focused on the grave in the nineteenth century: embalming was perhaps a necessary step within this materialisation: during a limited period of time, the certainty of having a fully preserved body under the grave was necessary in order to function as a place of memory and as a cornerstone of the cult of the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the development and design of the modern French feeding bottle, created during the nineteenth century, an era in which modern consumerism coincided with the medicalisation of childhood. Three main reasons elucidate this transition: growing concern for children, the failure to abolish wet-nursing, and the rise of the commodity society. Based on hundreds of feeding bottles, advertisements, pharmaceutical catalogues and manuals composed by physicians and midwives, this article analyses the complex relationship between the object, the users, the manufacturers and the socio-medical environment. By examining the feeding bottle from historical, material and visual perspectives, while unfolding the scientific, technological and economic factors that contributes to its design, this article highlights the vast changes that took place in the medical attitude towards childhood, hygiene and bodily functions, as a direct result of consumer demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Parisian literature and art magazine La Plume (1889–1914) has been traditionally considered a ‘petite revue’. This article shows its transformation from a specialized magazine made by writers for writers into a key actor of late-nineteenth-century culture, particularly under the entrepreneurial leadership of Léon Deschamps (1863–99), its first editor. At its beginnings, La Plume made the most of a productive formula that used subscriptions to sustain publication, like other literary reviews of the time. But it also integrated isolated practices into a larger system, able to produce synergetic effects that would prove profitable. As the magazine turned its back to the literary underground, it became a limited company, introduced some of its collaborators into the dailies’ editorship, and promoted art and artists, exhibitions and social events, it addressed a broader, more fashionable bourgeois readership, particularly women. This step marks an interesting turn in periodical history and throws up unforeseen issues, examined on the basis of unpublished documents from the magazine’s archives. The study sheds light on the importance of financial factors in the creation of literature and art periodicals, and links changes in form and content with concrete commercial strategies. La Plume represents an interesting case study of business transformation. Not only did it succeed, it also guaranteed a sustainable and expandable economic model rooted in communication strategies.

Unified growth theory suggests the fertility decline was crucial for achieving long-term growth, yet the causes behind that decline are still not entirely clear from an empirical point of view. In particular for France, the first country to experience this demographic transition in the European context, the reasons why some areas of the country had lower fertility than others are poorly understood. Using département level data for the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper exploits the French regional variation to study the correlates of fertility, estimating various fixed-effects models. The findings confirm the importance of some of the forces suggested by standard fertility choice models. Education in general, female education in particular, for example, seems to be crucial. Results also highlight the relevance of non-economic factors (such as secularisation), for which I provide new measurements. The presence of spatial dependence also suggests that diffusion of fertility played a particular role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With twenty-one single-authored plays staged at Paris' premier theatres during the 1830s and 1840s, Virgine Ancelot produced more theatrical works than any other French woman dramatist of the period. Despite her success, Ancelot's comedies and vaudevilles have received little critical attention. Contrary to the light façade common throughout much of her theatrical work, Ancelot's plays underscore the inequality and injustices experienced by women of her time. Her use of humour to simultaneously conceal and accentuate her attacks within the most public of literary genres indicates that a reconsideration of Ancelot's theatre is overdue. This study illuminates the simultaneous evolution of Ancelot's humour and her desire to pinpoint inequities surrounding the feminine condition through an examination of some of her most successful theatrical works: Le Château de ma nièce (1837 - Théâtre français), L'Hôtel de Rambouillet (1842 - Théâtre du Vaudeville) and Follette (1844 - Théâtre du Vaudeville). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernity has typically been considered a process consisting of 'modernizing' initiatives concerned with nation-building, industrial economic development, and new social and political practices associated with democratization. This article engages ongoing debates regarding the import and meaning of modernity for historians and argues in favor of an historically situated understanding of the modern based upon an examination of social power and identity in post-revolutionary France. In particular, it assesses the transformation of social and political relationships in the nineteenth century as France embraced mass democracy and overseas imperial expansion in North Africa, arguing that modernity became a convenient means of preserving elite primacy and identity in an age increasingly oriented toward egalitarianism, democratic participation, and the acquisition of global empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Édouard Baldus, a prominent figure in the history of French photography, is known almost exclusively for his silver-based photographs of the 1850s and early 1860s. Yet Baldus was also at the forefront of developments in photomechanical reproduction, publishing seven albums of photogravure prints between 1866 and 1884. Palais du Louvre et des Tuileries. Motifs de décorations, published in various editions between 1869 and 1875, was the first to reproduce his own photographs rather than engravings by earlier artists. It depicts architectural elements of the Louvre and Tuileries palaces, images that derive largely from Baldus’s commission between 1855 and 1857 to document the construction of the New Louvre. Drawing from analyses of Palais’s prints and their corresponding photographs, this article examines Baldus’s photogravure process and his strategies as an editor and publisher of his own work. It furthermore demonstrates that he chose to illustrate Palais with photogravures rather than photographs for specific aesthetic and conceptual reasons in addition to concerns about economy and the stability of silver-based prints. Lastly, this article argues for the significance of Baldus’s photogravure production to his entire oeuvre and to the development of photomechanical processes in the mid-nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the contributions of Cora Millet-Robinet to the education of women in their motherly role. Millet-Robinet, a well-noted published scientist of her period, broke many barriers when she became active in the silkworm industry and later became a champion of the education of genteel country women as well as farmers’ wives. This essay focuses on the ways Milllet-Robinet applied the scientific rigour she learned in the laboratory to her childcare manual, the Conseils aux jeunes femmes sur leur condition et leurs devoirs pendant l’allaitement (1841). She wanted mothers to be organised, efficient and self-reliant so that they could free themselves from domestic tasks and be able to have time for another kind of work. The cultural importance of Millet-Robinet’s work is begging for our attention, as she helped shape women’s role at home and in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In November 1861, Dr. J. Marion Sims, an American gynecologist, named and described the syndrome of vaginismus, which linked symptoms of vaginal hypersensitivity to muscular spasm. The only rational treatment for this disorder, said Sims, was surgery. His work was taken up immediately in France, but the story of its interpretation and application is a rather complicated one. Félix Roubaud, a leading specialist on matters of impotence and sterility, revised earlier writings in order to make a clear place for Sims's theories. But in the succeeding decades, Sims was subject to more and more criticism in French medical circles. Some argued that French specialists had already identified all the key elements of vaginismus, and that Sims was no more than a successful publicist. Others—and these were finally the most influential—argued against surgical treatment. More and more French writers on sexual medicine argued that vaginismus was a “moral” disorder that could not properly be treated by physical methods. And within French medical circles the Sims operation for vaginismus came to represent an “American” approach that was too rational, and too straightforwardly physical. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the "crisis of masculinity" in late nineteenth-century France, both artistic and medical images of anatomy were marshaled in service of social health. This paper examines the images in the seventh volume of the "Nouvelle iconographie" of the Salpêtrière hospital with a particular focus on a chapter by Paul Richer that deals solely with the healthy male body: "Des Différents Modes de Station Chez l'Homme Sain." The chapter serves as a case study that illustrates contemporary anxieties about masculinity entrenched in the imaging of the male body. While the Nouvelle iconographie was almost always dedicated entirely to the pathologized body, this unusual chapter serves as the ground by which the sick bodies in the rest of the volume might be judged. However, Richer's classically ideal igures are curiously incomplete. The patients of the hospital depicted in the rest of the volume are in varying states of undress, genitals always visible, but none of the illustrations in Richer's chapter, including two meticulously detailed engravings, include penises. This analysis considers both classical and popular precedents for the illustrations, as well the way they articulate the intersections of the disciplines of art and medicine, in order to argue that contemporary anxieties regarding masculinity, class, and sexuality account for this intriguing depiction of "l'homme sain." Keywords: Nouvelle Iconographie, Paul Richer, Anatomy, Art, Medicine, Masculinity, Health, Nineteenth-century France [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a particular and significant relationship between literature, art, objects, and decorative art in the context of a developing finde-siècle interest in the aestheticized house. Focusing on the Goncourts's 'maison d'art' created at Auteuil from 1868 to house their art collection and library, the article considers key ways in which a modest bourgeois domestic house became a stage and canvas for transforming it into a proto-Symbolist work of art. Addressing recent scholarship on the house collection in Edmond de Goncourt's 1881 La Maison d'un artiste, and on its interior aestheticization, the present discussion amplifies these approaches, analysing the interrelationship between the house as a material creation and its textual and photographic evocations. The article thus extends existing knowledge of the project's material and literary scope in two significant ways. First, it emphasizes Goncourt's Auteuil 'décors' as more multi-faceted and evolving creations than hitherto acknowledged, encompassing multiple material and fictional conceptions of 'décoration'. Second, it argues an enhanced role for Goncourt's concept of 'décoration' as a medium for a new literary and decorating artistry in ways that suggest Goncourt's creation as pivotal for younger contemporaries and for developing Symbolist literary, visual, and material cultures of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay shows how and why the masculine dressing gown became ubiquitous in literary documents and in visual imagery between 1830 and 1870. This article of clothing associated with the Orient was the garment of choice for France's most celebrated writers, such as Balzac and Flaubert. It also appeared in an extraordinary number of fashion plates, caricatures, short stories, and novels. I analyse the proliferation of this accessory in nineteenth-century French cultural production in its relation both to a rising material culture and a developing aesthetics of modernity. I also show that instant recognition by a growing consuming public of male artists clothed in the talismanic robe de chambre attested to its new performative power. Ultimately, I argue that the elaborate semiotic system produced by the robe de chambre, as well as its shifting value between 1830 and 1870, epitomizes the changing social status of artists in nineteenth-century France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the French author and lecturer Max O'Rell. It explores O'Rell's propagation of the stereotyped images of French woman, views on the characteristic differences between an English woman and French woman, and participation in the debate over manners and morals in Great Britain, France and the U.S. Also included are the discussions on sensuality of French marriages and the prostitution in France.

The article examines Charles Étienne Pierre Motte's map "Le Plan figuratif des barricades," which provides a social and historical overview of a society in turmoil during the reign of King Charles X in 1830 in Paris, France. It explores the use of text, colour, shapes and symbols in the map and its presentation of a divided city. The map also details the specifics of the French revolution and the social and economic divide between the pro-monarchy bourgeoisie and the working class.

In France, the Revolution of 1848 reshaped politics as it drew heretofore excluded groups into politics. In Montpellier, these changes provoked contests over the place of new citizens in the body politic and urban space. In August 1848 tensions reached their zenith as royalist residents of a lower-class neighbourhood clashed with the forces of order. Moreover, they defended their neighbourhood from intrusions on the part of their political opponents. Not only did these struggles concern the issue of command over space, but they also showed that the purportedly uncouth men intended to take part in the formulation of politics too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns two collections of photographs made in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s. The first archive was assembled by the Paris police in the course of enforcing laws against the production and distribution of obscénités. These photographs were pasted into an official arrest register and served as legal evidence. The second collection, a set of stereographs made by Auguste Belloc for clandestine commercial distribution, was seized in a police raid but never inserted into the register. The author analyzes the evolving style of the photographs in these collections, correlating the changes with patterns of prosecution documented in public records. The study reveals the intricate relationship between photography and modern notions of gender, identity and the imaging of sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bibliophiles of nineteenth century France were passionate about their books both as texts and as objects. Books were seen as "speaking" to each other, and to their owner as well. Furthermore, the books were written about as "friends" and companions, dear to the heart of their collector. The relationship between book and collector often involved "remaking" the book: rebinding it, commissioning illustrations, stamping it with a personal ex-libris. The resulting almost hybrid nature of the books, was exemplified by the private library, or cabinet de travail, in which they were kept, which contained all kinds of objects, rather than simply books. The principle of organization of the varying collections was often self-consciously personal rather than striving for any objective systemization of knowledge. Indeed the arrangement of the space mirrored the sociability of the space, such that interrelationships amongst the artworks and books were considered important. Photographs document the heteroclite nature of the private library with its mélange of books, furnishings, sculpture, paintings and objets d'art. The portraits that the photographer known as Dornac collected and published as Les Contemporains Chez Eux show the notable figures of Paris in their private cabinets de travail surrounded by artworks, books and often photographs. The idiosyncrasies of the organizational principles of these private libraries were related, this paper will show, to the keen sense of identification with their libraries that these collectors felt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines changes in the treatment of venereal disease in mid-nineteenth-century France in light of theoretical developments in the understanding of these diseases. It focuses on three theories of venereal disease: the orthodox theory of the “unity” of gonorrhea and syphilis; the physiological theory of François Broussais, which essentially denied the actual existence of such a disease; and Philippe Ricord's new doctrine of venereal disease, a theory that is often credited with having established the distinction between syphilis and gonorrhea. The argument is that theoretical considerations played a major role in the evaluation of the relative merits of these theories and that any understanding of the appeal of Ricord's new doctrine must consider not only its pathological claims but its therapeutic implications as well. This was not, however, simply an instance of theory applied. These two aspects of Ricord's new doctrine, its pathology and its therapeutics, were inextricably bound up with one another, so that judgment of the one necessarily entailed judgment of the other. The argument is that therapeutic practice should not be seen simply as a downwind consequence of changes in the theoretical understanding of disease, but rather as an integral part of the process of change. These were the kinds of developments that led doctors to believe that French medicine was making very real progress at mid-century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]