French Politics, Culture & Society

As France wrestles over the uses and societal impact of digital media and the Internet, it is instructive to recall another era of communications innovation, namely the introduction of interwar radio to the French public, and the government's reaction to controversial applications by the citizenry. Recent scholarship has underscored the importance of interwar radio broadcasting to France and its territories. Less explored, however, is the work of amateur user/developers who shaped the radio medium as an instrument of speaking, as well as listening. Determined to manage applications of radio, the French Interior Ministry formed a Police de l'Air to monitor France's airwaves, including the activities of amateur radio users (i.e., hams), whose lawful (and sometimes unlawful) use of point-to-point and broadcast communication had begun to significantly disrupt the government's effort to dictate the future forms and uses of radio. Against a backdrop of political crisis and attempts to manage print and electronic communication and dissent, the skirmishes between the Police de l'Air and amateur radio users reveal historical aspects of contemporary debates over use, access, and qualifications to speak and be heard in mediated cultural and political settings.

The presidential and legislative elections of 2007 are widely seen to have marked the end of the Far Right as a major political force in France. How could this occur only five years after Le Pen's qualification for the presidential run-off, and with his party seemingly in the ascendant? This article discusses recent fluctuations in Far Right electoral performance in France. It focuses largely on the presidential elections of 2002 and 2007, re-examining the (supposed) upswell of Far Right support in 2002 and its (supposed) subsidence in 2007. Both elections require nuanced interpretation. Both confounded poll predictions, which in 2007 failed to measure the effect of Sarkozy's hard-right campaign and, crucially, the extent to which the border between “mainstream Right” and “Far Right” had shifted since 2002. This allowed Sarkozy to drain part of Le Pen's electorate, and raises questions over the wider impact of Le Pen and the FN on the political agenda in France.

What were the significance and the impact, for Claude Lévi-Strauss, of his experience as a refugee in New York between May 1941 and December 1944? If one follows Lévi-Strauss's late reconstructions, his exile appears surprisingly as an almost enchanted experience, marked by various encounters (Roman Jakobson, André Breton, Franz Boas), the first contact with North-West Coast Amerindian art, and the discovery of New York, an almost surrealistic city “where anything seemed possible.” Without contesting such an a posteriori reading, this article shows how such a reconstruction has been made possible through a complex reorganization of a traumatizing past. It then appears that the exile, and its remembrance in later texts, played a pivotal role in the development of Lévi-Strauss's anthropological work to come: his experience as a refugee was at the root of his reinvention of symbolism as well as of his reflections on humanity as a whole.

Lévi-Strauss considered that the birth of structuralism was mainly caused by his chance encounter with Roman Jakobson: the experience of war and exile had nothing to do with it. This article contends the opposite. It analyzes, from a sociological perspective, the articles Lévi-Strauss produced in New York in the 1940s. Focusing on political and cultural anthropology through the prism of primitive societies, these texts express in sociological terms Lévi-Strauss's self-representation, his hopes and strategies. He regards war as a moment in a cycle of reciprocal exchanges between groups. He sees power as the product of an ability to serve as an intermediary between groups and group members, and anthropological knowledge as the product of the social distance to groups necessary to compare their cultural models. Levi-Strauss's theories in exile are in affinity with his social position of a broker and intermediary between distant social groups among the French émigrés and between them and the Americans. Between the lines, all these formative texts show the efforts of Lévi-Strauss's consciousness to reverse the negative signs of his condition of exile. They played a role in the birth of structuralism even as they represent Lévi-Strauss's first auto-analysis (before Tristes Tropiques).

There were probably close to ten thousand tracts, fliers, and leaflets written and distributed in French cities in May-June 1968, part of the sudden explosion of speech (“la parole”) in the public space. Both the quantity of political speech in all walks of life—not just among students—and its subject (transforming society) point to a revolutionary wish, whether openly stated in serious, often Marxist, language or implicitly expressed through satire, play, and derision. Thousands of impassioned leaflets call for the profound transformation of social relations in the workplace and ultimately for the abolition of capitalism; many others use various forms of mockery to subvert established authority, which, in that political context, amounted to the same thing. This remarkable mass of literature suggests that—contrary to revisionist views of “Mai” now widely aired in France—May '68 was revolutionary at heart.

The election of President Sarkozy has often been presented as a rupture of the French Right with Gaullism, a new blend of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. The newly elected president was barely able to hide his sympathy with this interpretation. However, since his presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly claimed a Gaullist legacy, using its symbols and drawing on its rhetoric. Sarkozy's political career, moreover, was entirely built up within the Gaullist party, and he proclaimed his affiliation with Gaullisy ideas. Therefore, in order to study and understand Nicolas Sarkozy it is essential to revisit his complex relationship with Gaullism. Likewise, Sarkozyism also has to be included in any analysis of the many contemporary forms of the Gaullist phenomenon.

Historians cannot resist violence.* Not simply because of a voyeuristic interest in the dramatically lethal, but also because many of the most vexing questions about the writing of history converge in the crucible of violent events. Historians are attracted to the subject because they hope that it might tell them something about the fundamental problems in their discipline: questions about causality, agency, narrative, and contingency; about the readability of the past and the conclusions that one can draw about complex social phenomena from fragmentary and often one-sided bits of evidence.

Jeremy D. Popkin France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order by Denise Z. Davidson

Gregory Mann Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940 by Mary Dewhurst Lewis

Elisa Camiscioli Races, racisme et antiracisme dans les années 1930 by Carole Reynaud Paligot

Ulrich Johannes Schneider From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought by Julian Bourg

Jacques de Maillard Governing and Governance in France by Alistair Cole

Abstracts

Index to Volume 27 (2009)