Conceived as both a vehicle to national prestige and as a civilizing mission, the second French colonial empire (1830–1962) challenged soldiers, scholars and administrators to understand societies ...radically different from their own. The resultant networks of anthropological inquiry, however, did not have this effect. Rather, they opened pathways to political and intellectual independence framed in the language of social science, and in the process upended the colonial political system and reshaped the nature of human inquiry in France. While still unequal, French colonial rule in Africa revealed the durability and strength of non-European modes of thought. In this ground-breaking new study, historian Douglas W. Leonard examines the political and intellectual repercussions of French efforts to understand and to dominate colonial Africa through the use of anthropology. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, these French thinkers sowed the seeds of colonial destruction.
Beyond the Great War Ingram, Norman; Bouchard, Carl
2021, 2022, 2021-12-17
eBook
Following the end of the First World War, a new world order emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was an order riddled with contradictions and problems that were only finally resolved ...after the Second World War.
Beyond the Great War brings together a group of both well-established and younger historians who share a rejection of the dominant view of the peace process that ended the First World War. The book expands beyond the traditional focus on diplomatic and high political history to question the assumption that the Paris Peace Treaties were the progenitors of a new world order. Extending the ongoing debate about the success of the Treaty of Versailles and surrounding events, this collection approaches the heritage of the Great War through a variety of lenses: gender, race, the high politics of diplomacy, the peace movement, provision for veterans, international science, socialism, and the way the war ended. Collectively, contributors argue that the treaties were at best a mitigated success, and that the brave new world of 1919 cannot be separated from the Great War that preceded it.
A wide-ranging study which examines the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice. Affords a new optic for ...understanding French New Wave cinema and innovative readings of New Wave films. Offers an inclusive view of the New Wave through discussion of lesser-known directors alongside renowned New Wave filmmakers .
An encounter between a warring knight and the world of learning could seem a paradox. It is nonetheless related with the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, an essential intellectual movement for western ...history. Knights not only fought in battles, but also moved in sophisticated courts. Knights were interested in Latin classics and reading, and writing poetry. Supportive of “jongleurs” and minstrels, they enjoyed literary conversations with clerics who would attempt to reform their behaviour, which was often brutal. These lettered warriors, while improving their culture, learned to repress their own violence and were initiated to courtesy: selective language, measured gestures, elegance in dress, and manners at the table. Their association with women, who were often learned, became more gallant. A revolution of thought occurred among lay elites who, in contact with clergy, began to use their weapons for common welfare. This new conduct was a tangible sign of Medievalist society's leap forward towards modernity. This monograph contains a great deal of detailed information about the attitudes towards learning and written culture among members of the nobility in different parts of Europe in the Middle Ages.
When fiction and reality meet: Probably no contemporary novel has shaped reality as powerfully Houellebeck's Submission. No previous analysis of Submission is as deep and encompassing as this volume ...written by experts on politics and literature.
Before he became the father of cinematic special effects, George Méliès (1861-1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, ...Méliès Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès' career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with the larger cultural and historical contexts in which Méliès operated, shaped his cinematic oeuvre. Solomon examines Méliès' unpublished drawings and published caricatures, the role of laughter in his magic theater productions, and the constituent elements of what Méliès called "the new profession of the cinéaste." The book also reveals Méliès' connections to the Incohérents, a group of ephemeral artists from the 1880s, demonstrating the group's relevance for Méliès, early cinema, and modernity. By positioning Méliès in relation to the material culture of his time, Solomon demonstrates that Méliès' work was expressive of a distinctly modern, and modernist, sensibility that appeared in France during the 1880s in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution.
In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onward, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive ...Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative absence in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight—the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately toward a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women—mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children. Immigrants often embraced these policies because they, too, stood to gain from pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefits, and French nationality. By striking this bargain, they were also guaranteed safety and stability on a tumultuous continent. Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.
