French Politics, Culture & Society

The history of sub-prefects under the Vichy regime remains to be written. What were the realities of their activities during this period? What history did they recount after the Liberation? What memory did they keep of those dark times? These are the questions that this article will answer by focusing on Pierre Henry Rix, a sub-prefect still renowned in Corsica for his leading role in the rescue of Jews. While shedding light on the skills required to climb the ladder of the prefectural career before, during and after the World War II, the article seeks to better understand how a Vichy sub-prefect, involved in the Gaullist Resistance and little concerned by the fate of the Jews, belatedly refashioned himself as a rescuer of Jews.

In 1900, there were around one thousand folklorists writing about folk traditions in France. While some were “pioneers” endeavoring to establish a discipline scientifically, most of them just indulged their curiosity on a part-time basis. All of them, however, contributed to an increasing interest in knowledge about “the people.” This invites us to question what folklorisme says about the nature of folkloristic discourse. Although it never met a “science of tradition,” folklorisme always mobilized an interpretation of the world in which tradition was considered an authority. Straddling the registers of a modernity it supported and a tradition it was forced to work with, the Republic did not, however, bank on folklorisme. There is something of a paradox here that needs to be clarified.

When turn-of-the-century conservationists in the United States and Europe began to lambast and promote legislative action against the use of exotic bird feathers in women's fashion, French naturalists stood apart from their Anglo-American colleagues in offering an ecological program that emphasized the needs of the French feather trade. This article explores the particular French cultural investment in fashion not only by feather tradesmen but also by conservationists from the 1890s through the 1920s. This attachment to the importance of women's luxury fashion as a French national patrimony meant that French response to proposed feather bans by the United States and Great Britain included a more sympathetic address to the bourgeois woman consumer and patriotic praise for the skill and taste of the workingwomen of the Parisian feather trade.

The workplace is a critical site in the social construction of gender that transforms cultural norms about gender into structurally ascribed and hierarchical power relationships. This article examines representations of hospital work in recent French and Belgian fiction films exploring the connections between idealized gender identities and the existence of profoundly unequal and stressful working conditions. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from performativity and the psychodynamics of work, the article examines the complex interplay between gender identity and occupation within three recent films. We will see that alongside structural hierarchy, gender divisions in a hospital setting are legitimized by a logic of urgent medical necessity. Following Judith Butler, the article aims to analyze and deconstruct naturalized gender representations, so that we can challenge the material inequalities to which they give rise.

Carolyn Eichner, Feminism's Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).

Stephen L. Harp, The Riviera Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).

Burleigh Hendrickson, Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022).