French Politics, Culture & Society

Based on the notion of legal responsibility, the article establishes a connection between the social conditions of production of literature and the ethical principles that founded the commitment of writers as intellectuals in France from the nineteenth century to the post-World War II period. While the penal responsibility of the author is imbued with a belief in the power of words, the trials were in turn often the occasion for writers like Flaubert and Baudelaire to define their own ethics of responsibility against the values of conventional morality and political conformity through which their work was liable to condemnation. Articulating these ethical principles affirmed the writer's independence from political and religious authorities and contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu. The figure of the writer as a public intellectual best embodied by Zola and Sartre emerged on the basis of this code of ethics.

The Spanish Civil War stirred an array of humanitarian relief campaigns in France that placed women in the front lines of popular mobilization. As communists, socialists, liberals, antifascists, feminists and pacifists, French women invoked the iconography and language of sexual difference to construct pro-Republican aid appeals as an expression of gendered social concern above party politics. Through exploring the female leaderships, organization, and popular participation in different relief campaigns, this article emphasizes the extent to which Spanish aid efforts were dominated by tensions within the Front Populaire.

In reviewing various commemorations that highlighted the year 2005 in France, this article points out the major evolutions of memory visible primarily in the press and media coverage of these events. If public memory remains as highly charged and polemical as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, attention is clearly turning away from the Occupation and Vichy to focus more on Europe and on France's colonial past, as we see not only in the ceremonies celebrating the "liberation" of Auschwitz, the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, and the dedication of the Mémorial de la Shoah, but also in the many articles devoted to Russian and Eastern European experiences of the war, as well as to the bloody postwar repressions of colonial uprisings in Algeria and Madagascar. Now that racial and ethnic tensions are exacerbating an increasingly fragmented public memory, the work of history is more urgent than ever.

This article argues that the way French society comprehends its territory is not only an aspect of a more general identity crisis, but also an acting component of an overall political model. France can be characterized as a "state-fatigued" society. Centralism has had an important spatial consequence: an alliance of the nation-state and provincial "notables" against the city. The major cities, especially Paris, produce for the rest of the country but continue to be denied effective local and regional political power. In this context, the peculiar tradition of aménagement du territoire can be analyzed as a discourse based on the myth of a demiurge, the state, which would be the only legitimate actor able to restore France's grandeur by reconquering the deprived parts of its territory. Correlative public polices target moral compensation for a supposed injustice: a partial reimbursement of the debt France once contracted by incorporating the provinces into the national territory. After reviewing disappointing recent changes in the geographical architecture of political power, the article makes some proposals. They are based on the dual framework that an empowerment of relevant spatial units will be necessary and that only a profound and massive debate involving ordinary citizens can overcome the current institutional gridlock.

Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2006).

Alya Aglan, Michel Margairaz, and Philippe Verheyde, eds., La Caisse de dépôts et consignations, la Seconde Guerre mondiale et le XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

Olivier Dard, Jean-Claude Daumas, and François Marcot, eds., L’Occupation, l’État français et les entreprises (Paris: Association pour le développement de l’histoire économique, 2000).

Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Pillages sur ordonnances: Aryanisation et restitution des banques en France 1940-1953 (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

Hervé Joly, ed., Faire l’histoire des entreprises sous l’Occupation: Les acteurs économiques et leurs archives (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2004).

Hervé Joly, ed., Les Comités d’organisation et l’économie dirigée du régime de Vichy: Actes du colloque international, 3-4 avril 2003 (Caen: Centre de recherche d’histoire quantitative, 2004).

Hervé Joly, ed., Les Archives des entreprises sous l’Occupation: Conservation, accessibilité et apport (Paris: IFRESI [Institut fédératif de recherche sur les économies et les sociétés industrielles], 2005).

Steven L. Kaplan and Philippe Minard, eds., La France, malade du corporatisme? XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris: Belin, 2004).

Annie Lacroix-Riz, Industriels et banquiers sous l’Occupation: La collaboration économique avec le Reich et Vichy (Paris: Armand Colin, 1999).

Michel Margairaz, ed., Banques, Banque de France et Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002).

Paul Sanders, Histoire du marché noir 1940-1946 (Paris: Perrin, 2001).

Philippe Verheyde, Les Mauvais Comptes de Vichy: L’aryanisation des entreprises juives (Paris: Perrin, 1999).

Catherine Benoît Essais de poétique des jardins by Michel Conan 131

Ralph Schoolcraft III Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France by Joan B. Wolf

Julien Bourg French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Anti-Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s in French Intellectual Politics by Michael Scott Christofferson 140

Michael S. Lewis-Beck Le Nouveau Désordre électoral: Les Leçons du 21 avril 2002 by Bruno Cautrès and Nonna Mayer

Abstracts

Index to Volume 24 (2006)