French Politics, Culture & Society

George Ross, one of this journal's founding editors along with Stanley Hoffmann, died in April 2025. Trained as a sociologist, Ross worked across disciplines to become a leading scholar of French politics and a major figure in the field of European Union studies during his nearly forty years as the Morris Hillquit Chair in Labor and Social Thought at Brandeis University. He brought his interdisciplinary expertise and his extensive interest and enthusiasm for all things French to help create French Politics and Society, which became French Politics, Culture & Society in 1999, a major vehicle for scholarship on France. Here we pay tribute to his considerable achievements as a founding editor and as a scholar who shaped the fields of French trade union studies, political economy, and European Union studies.

At least since the advent of the new institutionalism in the 1980s, many scholars working in the field of comparative politics have put an emphasis on the role of structures in politics, whether the organizational landscape of the political economy, the complexion of electoral rules, the structure of the state or the character of international regimes.¹ George Ross, by contrast, was a scholar of agency. And the agents in which he was most interested were those seeking to transform society from the political left, especially in France.

In the last three decades of his long and successful career, George Ross was best known for his work on the European Union, its internal workings and particularly the Commission.¹ It is perhaps less well known that an earlier study of the Parti communiste français (PCF) was a precursor—indeed foundational—to his 1995 book on the Delors Commission. The View from Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis provided George Ross with the opportunity to experiment with and hone tools for participant-observation at a moment of critical juncture of a small collective within a system of large institutions.² In contrast to his work on unions as strategic actors, this research challenged him to develop an analytic approach that located the agency of individuals and small collectives within their institutional and structural constraints.³ Identified individuals with personal histories, goals, skills, and strategies were at the heart of The View from Inside, which we published together in 1984. Finally, the book on the PCF prepared George Ross, as did his work on French unions and the French Left generally, to understand that even the most intelligent, progressive, and admirable people could fail to achieve their goals and might have to face the decline of their cherished strategies and even institutions.

Je me souviens du regard à la fois rieur, éclairé, profond et toujours attentif de George. Et je me souviens encore d'un “autre regard” celui—intellectuel—qu'il portait sur la société française pour mieux la questionner. George était de ces collègues et amis venus d'ailleurs qui permettent à “l'indigène d'ici” de mieux comprendre son pays et les acteurs ou les forces qui agissent en son sein.

The melding of cheerful humanity and pragmatic leadership made George Ross a successful leader and wonderful supervisor. In an email from March 2001 George shared that he had learned at a meeting with representatives from the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service, our main funding agency) that they would continue to fund the Brandeis Center for German and European Studies (CGES). He ended his message, characteristically, with a wink: “Does good news always come on dreary days?”

George Ross contributed crucially to our understanding of the transformation of the French Left and, in particular, of the French Socialist Party (Parti socialiste; PS) in the 1970s and 1980s. His numerous studies of the Union de la Gauche, the intellectuals and the new middle classes, the trade unions, and the Mitterrand administration were—and remain—intellectually strategic for a thorough understanding of this unique period of the French left. Moreover, that particular “French moment” had a considerable impact on the European Left as a whole and on the course of European integration.

It is not easy to write about the work of a departed friend. It is also not easy to write about a book that was already reviewed in these pages by none other than Stanley Hoffmann. In the Spring 1995 issue of French Politics and Society, the famed Harvard professor wrote about Jacques Delors and European Integration, George Ross's account of his participant observation in the European Commission, that it was the “most acute and intelligent ‘inside’ story ever published about the functioning of the European Commission,” as well as a “splendid account of one of [Europe's] major turning points.”¹ Thirty years later, the verdict still holds. George Ross's book has become a classic in European studies that is often the starting point for anyone trying to understand how EU institutions work, how to study them as an ethnographer, and what made the tenure of President Jacques Delors (1985–1995) uniquely successful in the history of European integration.

George Ross transformed the academic study of the French Left, encompassing both the political and industrial wings of the working class. His influence came first and foremost from his scholarship, about which I have more to say below. But it also came from George's remarkable dedication to developing a cohort of younger scholars with similar academic commitments. This was certainly true for me, and my development as a scholar, first of French labor and later of the broader comparative trajectory of Western labor movements, but it extended well beyond to George's influence as a mentor to a whole generation of scholars of France.

George wielded a pen. When we hosted scholars, policy makers, and other dignitaries at the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at Brandeis University, George would use his pen to take indecipherable notes in which most of his words ended up underlined, circled, or struck through, full of arrows that connected thoughts and ideas and questions in seemingly (but probably anything but) random ways. When not actively writing, he would chew on his pen such that those of us working at the Center worried that he might swallow it. To us, this encapsulates much of who George was: thoughtful, curious, engaged, questioning, serious, wise—and goofy. We loved this combination, first as his students and mentees and then as his friends (with every email first asking how our dogs were doing, of course). George took us seriously, he took our ideas seriously, and he seriously giggled about a whole lot along the way.

La Fronde (1897–1905) a longtemps été considéré comme une exception dans l'histoire du journalisme féminin. Fondé par Marguerite Durand et conçu par des plumes féminines, le quotidien a paradoxalement été comparé à des publications masculines afin d'exprimer sa particularité et sa légitimité dans le champ journalistique. Alors qu'il se targue d’être “l'organe officiel du mouvement féministe”, La Fronde est moins étudié du point de vue d'autres périodiques de femmes. Et pourtant, des organes minorés comme La Femme de l'avenir (1897–1901), La Femme socialiste (1901–1902) et L'Abeille (1901), ont élaboré un discours sur l'entreprise frondeuse et sa véritable place dans l'univers de la presse féministe. Cette perspective alternative peut nous renseigner davantage sur les mécanismes qui consacrent certaines œuvres féminines et en invisibilisent d'autres.

This article examines sources related to ethnographic exhibitions at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in late nineteenth-century Paris through the lens of recent scholarship on Whiteness in France. It unearths implicit and explicit articulations of Whiteness associated with the exhibits that emerge within the context of the city's broader culture of spectatorship and entertainment. Whiteness is theorized in terms of a visual practice or gaze and is associated with the process by which commentators of the time contrasted the Parisian “self” with non-Europeans featured in exhibits. Racialized, embodied notions of Whiteness are also expressed in gendered and class-based terms. These emergent forms of Whiteness and spectatorship changed the ways that Parisians perceived themselves as well as their city's place vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Keith Michael Baker, Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Franck Frégosi, Gouverner l'islam en France. Paris: Seuil, 2025.

Sara Rahnama, The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Gonzalo J. Sánchez, Contested Vision. Captivity, Creativity, and Paris Prisons, 1793–1894 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025).

Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025).