French Politics, Culture & Society

As the foremost organ of the French satirical and illustrated press, the weekly Le Rire captivated a broad reading public in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the crossroads of commercial entertainment and mass media, Le Rire sought to champion caricature and comic illustration as art forms worthy of serious merit and to make humor a powerful tool for political, cultural, and social commentary. This article aims to assess the periodical's impact in its time, and furthermore, contends that Le Rire was a determinative force in reshaping public mores toward comedy and satire, carrying the legacy of nineteenth-century developments in the history of French caricature into novel modes of expression and consumption at the turn of the twentieth.

By analyzing the public mural paintings sponsored by the French state to help artists survive the economic crisis around the time of the Popular Front, this article intends to contribute to the study of the relationship between mass politics and mass culture in the 1930s. After addressing French and foreign views on mural art as well as state agendas behind mural commissions, the study examines the social and political significance of state-financed mural projects. Frequently large-scale and realized in a figurative style, murals portrayed collectivities in instants of conviviality and extolled the solidaristic ties binding them. State-financed mural paintings, I contend, monumentalized “the collective” so to create unity and collective spirit. Thereby, they created a visual politics that helped bridge the gap between art and the people and became agents of mass politics at a time of political instability.

Through a reflection on the ambiguous facets of Holocaust oblivion that has lasted for generations, the article examines how the official politics of memory in France instrumentalized historical oblivion as an ideological tool. To this end, the essay analyzes Fabrice Humbert's 2009 novel, L'Origine de la violence, to examine the essential role of literature in pinpointing the dynamics of memory and forgetting while exploring the ambiguity of oblivion, pardon and reparation. The unveiled family secret is explored as an allegory of the cryptic national history that reflects the amnesia imposed after the Vichy regime (1940-1944) by the “resistancialisme” promulgated in the post-war period in France; amnesia decreed years later by President Georges Pompidou when he pardoned the French war criminal Paul Touvier in 1972. This politics of forgetting comforted a generation of citizens implicated in collaboration during WWII, resulting in conflicts with the younger generations, as portrayed in Humbert's text.

Paysages et paysans: la vie rurale en France au XIXe siècle, 1820–1905 was the anodyne title of a loan exhibition inaugurated in March of 1978 at Beijing's National Gallery of China. As the first exhibition of Western painting in China after the instauration of the Communist regime in 1949, the show was a cultural- diplomatic landmark; its planning and reception can refresh our understanding of both Franco–Chinese cultural relations in the waning years of Maoism and the diplomatically recuperative uses of French nineteenth-century painting. This article uncovers the rationales of French actors and institutions as revealed in archival documents and then scrutinizes the unexpected reception of an art exhibition that remains an important episode in cross-cultural relations and aesthetic reclamation.

If Renza Bensmaïa is right to see in the essay “the Other that gives birth to all the others” ; if it is indeed the case that, since Montaigne, it has fed on doubt and fuelled debate ; if it is therefore coeval with modernity ; then there is a contradiction between Éric Zemmour's essayistic stance and his — reactionary, extremist, xenophobic — political program. Instead of trying to resolve this contradiction by negating either of its terms, I follow the internal logic of the essay as practised by Zemmour to arrive at the paradox of an essayist who is also an extremist. Evolving from the essay to the pamphlet, and oscillating between the two, Zemmour is this paradoxical essayist who “tries” to escape the essay by means of the essay.

Drawing on ethnographic research among bullfighting professionals and audiences in Spain and France, this report assesses the current health of bullfighting in Arles as a means to grapple with broader questions surrounding the cultural and political standing of this increasingly controversial activity on both sides of the Pyrenees.

Alex Csiszar, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Emmanuelle Reungoat, Enquête sur les opposants à l'Europe. À droite et à gauche, leur impact d'hier à aujourd'hui, Lormont, France: Le Bord de l'eau, 2019.