French Politics, Culture & Society

L'enquête exploratoire proposée s'appuie sur une approche anthropo-historique de la croche, un style de lutte de l’île de La Réunion. L'analyse discursive, principalement fondée sur des sources documentaires, des entretiens et quelques observations, étudie la trajectoire contemporaine de cette activité physique au regard de globalisation sportive. Ainsi, du fait d'une recréation avant tout exogène plutôt qu'endogène, la croche reste une activité en sursis patrimonial. Aujourd'hui, seule subsiste la réussite d'une normalisation sportive.

The communitarian experiences of the first socialists condense a singular relationship to science. This article analyzes the place of practical knowledge—the knowledge of ordinary and daily experiences—in the socialist attempts to live together. During the nineteenth century academic sciences became more strongly structured while practical knowledge was considered less important or delegitimized. Four themes concerning the place of knowledge in community experiences are reviewed: everyday knowledge, hygiene, education and machines. In these four broad areas, early socialists made a subtle division between the use of academic science and the mobilization of practical knowledge. In everyday experiences, legitimate knowledge was required, but it did not. Practical knowledge thus did not disappear from the socio-epistemic horizon of the emancipatory current at the dawn of the nineteenth.

Robert Linhart was a leader of the French Maoists and an analyst of Lenin's theory and practice during the 1968 years. He is best known for his account of working in a French automobile factory in 1968–1969, L’Établi, published in 1978. This essay analyzes what he brought to this experience and what he took from it. Mathias Gokalp adapted L’Établi for a new audience in a film released in 2023. Linhart's story belongs to a particular political and economic world past but continues to challenge those who engage with it today.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was best known for his pathbreaking forays in literary criticism: dense meditations on the abyss of literary meaning, culminating in his radical insight concerning the ontological impossibility of writing or écriture. Accordingly, Blanchot was justly canonized by luminaries of French Theory such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as an indispensable precursor of their influential prognostications concerning la mort de l'auteur and le degré zéro l’écriture. At the same time, circa 1980, rumors began to circulate concerning what Michel Surya has denominated l'autre Blanchot: the right-wing political journalist of the 1930s, who enthusiastically embraced the neo-Maurrassian adage, Plutôt Hitler que Blum. Could it be that one of the reasons that, later in life, Blanchot was attracted to such hermetic theories of textuality and signification—écriture blanche—was to escape the trammels of his ignominious political past?

John Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

Caroline Séquin, Desiring Whiteness: A Racial History of Prostitution in France and Colonial Senegal (1848–1950). (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024).

Willa Z. Silverman, Henri Vever: Champion de l'Art Nouveau (Malakoff: Armand Colin, 2018).