French Politics, Culture & Society

For left-wing revolutionary groups in 1970s France, to have a publication was to exist. In the face of a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, however, militant editors often struggled for survival as they attempted to build a base of reliable readers. In this context, economic viability and ideological influence were intertwined. This article examines the production and consumption of French leftist media in the 1970s to understand how revolutionary publications co-opted capitalist sales techniques in service of radical social and political goals. In couching the practices of capitalist media in the language of socialism, editors and readers built strong revolutionary communities while also, unintentionally, softening popular perceptions of certain market behaviors that breathed new life into French capitalism.

Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces were dominated by men recruited from across the French Empire. However, women from every imperial territory also played an important role. This article focuses on women from New Caledonia, in the French Pacific, who joined the Free French women's auxiliary forces in Autumn 1940. It draws upon military archives, contemporary newspaper coverage, and Raymonde Jore's autobiography to investigate how these women skillfully navigated their identities and the stories of their service, depending on the sociopolitical environment. It also demonstrates how the intersections of gender and race influenced official attitudes toward these female combatants, as male metropolitan French officers and their administration were forced to grapple with changing visions of womanhood and empire in periods of war and decolonization.

Although Renaud Camus has established himself as the theorist of the “great replacement,” the writer, who was influenced in his early days by the genre of the New Novel and wrote gay chronicles that were considered sulphurous, did not seem a priori predisposed to becoming a world-famous figure of the far-right intellectual. The aim of this article is to understand the logic behind this evolution. It shows that, while his politicization may reflect the reconversion strategy of a writer faced with a declining literary trajectory, it is also the fruit of prior dispositions that were already revealed in his early writings. While Camus tried to legitimize his political stances in the name of a “literary conception of the world,” he appeared increasingly marginalized as a writer, although this did not prevent some of his ideas from becoming successful. Beyond Camus’ personal trajectory, this case highlights the transformations affecting intellectuals’ political involvement today.