French Politics, Culture & Society

In reaction to industrial and urban development and its effects on health during the Belle Epoque, doctors endeavored to promote a program of hygienic reform. Militant vegetarians and naturopathy enthusiasts, sharing their apprehensions, translated this program into a number of concrete recommendations. Presented as an alternative solution to the detrimental effects of modern life, these reforms were supposed to guarantee a way of living that would conform to the laws of nature and therefore be conducive to health. The circulation of this health reform program was based both on a nebula of "reformist" organizations, including a key player, the Société Végétarienne de France (the French society for vegetarianism), and on norms of healthy consumption associated with the formation of specific commercial networks.

In contrast to the "official history" of the Conseil d'État that presents it as a prestigious and neutral institution, new work ought to reflect on how the grand corps of the Conseil d'État has been implicated in the major issues and crises of French political history, especially in the twentieth century. Drawing on recent historiography, this article focuses in particular on the Conseil d'État during World War II and the Algerian War. It also analyzes the variety of everyday practices of the Conseil d'État and its role in the development of administrative law. Finally, this article examines the professional careers of the members of the grand corps that have staffed this institution. It thus seeks to chart, through the study of a single institution, a path for writing the political history of the state administration that engages with the work of legal scholars as well as political scientists.

One of the most influential thinkers in twentieth-century French intellectual debates, Raymond Aron (1905-1983) spent a lifetime studying Karl Marx. Aron's adaptable interpretations of the German thinker began on the eve of the Second World War, continued in his Sorbonne lectures, and ended in his celebrated Memoirs. Far from being a mere object of derision linked to totalitarian regimes, the "semi-god" provided Aron with an unrivaled stage to promote his own evolving views on an array of critical epistemological and political issues linked to heterogeneous values, historical determinism, class warfare, and the role of Communist parties. Aron cleverly segmented his views on Marx so as to address different audiences and seduce the largest possible number of young people on the side of liberal democracy.

Over the course of his career, urban sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe evolved from a sociological interpreter of human needs into an advocate of the democratization of city planning. The major factors shaping this trajectory were his contacts with liberal Catholic associations, his education under ethnologist Marcel Mauss, his teaching experience at the École des cadres d'Uriage, and his own studies of working-class communities. Chombart de Lauwe took French urban sociology in novel directions and effected an important and underappreciated liberalization of city planning. Analysis of Chombart de Lauwe also challenges recent trends in the historiography of the Catholic Left.

Martha Zuber Introduction

Frank Dobbin Integrating Paradigms

Amy Verdun Strategy, Ideas, and Political Leadership

Thomas Philippon Economics and Playing the Market

Nicolas Jabko A Response to My Critics

On the front cover of Claude Ribbe’s Le Crime de Napoléon is a photograph of Hitler surrounded by a bevy of generals looking down at the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides during his visit there after the fall of France in 1940. The message is clear: the author is thus directly associating Napoleon with Hitler and, as we shall see as Ribbe develops his argument, with the Holocaust. Napoleon, Ribbe claims, is guilty of a “triple crime” against humanity: the reintroduction of slavery in 1802; the deportation and killing of large numbers of Africans (or people of African origin); and the massacre of blacks that took on a “genocidal nature” and that prefigured the policy of racial extermination carried out by the Nazis during the Second World War (12 13). “Le crime est si impardonnable”, writes Ribbe, “qu’il a provoqué plus de deux siècles de mensonges. Car les faits sont bien connus des historiens, mais volontairement passés sous silence” (13).

Jeremy Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004).

Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Jean-Pierre Le Goff, Mai 68: L’Héritage impossible (Paris: La Découverte, 1998).

Jennifer Heuer From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France by Rebecca Rogers

Owen White Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century by Gregory Mann

Muriel Darmon Le Lien social by Pierre Bouvier Alec G. Hargreaves

Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaïsse

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