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12. Soixante ans après: pour un état des lieux de mémoire
- Author:
- Nathan Bracher
- Publication Date:
- 03-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- In reviewing various commemorations that highlighted the year 2005 in France, this article points out the major evolutions of memory visible primarily in the press and media coverage of these events. If public memory remains as highly charged and polemical as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, attention is clearly turning away from the Occupation and Vichy to focus more on Europe and on France's colonial past, as we see not only in the ceremonies celebrating the “liberation” of Auschwitz, the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, and the dedication of the Mémorial de la Shoah, but also in the many articles devoted to Russian and Eastern European experiences of the war, as well as to the bloody postwar repressions of colonial uprisings in Algeria and Madagascar. Now that racial and ethnic tensions are exacerbating an increasingly fragmented public memory, the work of history is more urgent than ever.
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Algeria, and Madagascar
13. France, une géographie à inventer: un nouveau contrat politique entre la société et son espace
- Author:
- Jacques Lévy
- Publication Date:
- 03-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- This article argues that the way French society comprehends its territory is not only an aspect of a more general identity crisis, but also an acting component of an overall political model. France can be characterized as a “state-fatigued” society. Centralism has had an important spatial consequence: an alliance of the nation-state and provincial “notables” against the city. The major cities, especially Paris, produce for the rest of the country but continue to be denied effective local and regional political power. In this context, the peculiar tradition of aménagement du territoire can be analyzed as a discourse based on the myth of a demiurge, the state, which would be the only legitimate actor able to restore France's grandeur by reconquering the deprived parts of its territory. Correlative public polices target moral compensation for a supposed injustice: a partial reimbursement of the debt France once contracted by incorporating the provinces into the national territory. After reviewing disappointing recent changes in the geographical architecture of political power, the article makes some proposals. They are based on the dual framework that an empowerment of relevant spatial units will be necessary and that only a profound and massive debate involving ordinary citizens can overcome the current institutional gridlock.
- Political Geography:
- France
14. Existe-t-il une religion civile républicaine?
- Author:
- Jean Baubérot
- Publication Date:
- 08-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- La notion de « religion civile » provient, on le sait, de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, et elle a été, ces dernières décennies, reprise et réinterprétée par des sociologues et des historiens. En France, il est assez courant d'opposer la « laïcité républicaine » (française) à la religion civile américaine. Cet article propose, au contraire, l'hypothèse que la question de la « religion civile » se situe au coeur de la spécificité de la laïcité française dans sa dimension historique comme dans son actualité. La Cour constitutionnelle italienne considère, depuis 1989, le principe de laïcité comme fondamental ; plusieurs pays (Portugal, Russie) ont inscrit la laïcité dans leur Constitution ; le Québec a explicitement laïcisé ses écoles en 2000, etc. Et, pourtant, la laïcité continue d'apparaître souvent comme une « exception française » Or cette exceptionnalité n'est nullement conforme à la pensée des pères fondateurs de la laïcité française : Ferdinand Buisson, le maître d'oeuvre (au côté de Jules Ferry et de ses successeurs) de la laïcisation de l'école, et Aristide Briand, l'auteur principal de la loi de séparation des Églises et de l'État de 1905, envisageaient la laïcité de façon universaliste et non substantialiste : il existe pour eux des pays plus ou moins laïques, et la France n'est pas le pays le plus laïque du globe.
- Topic:
- Civil Society, Government, and Religion
- Political Geography:
- United States, Europe, and France
15. Religions, genre, et politiques laïques en France, XIXe-XXe siècles
- Author:
- Florence Rochefort
- Publication Date:
- 08-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- In the French polemics over the Islamic headscarf, the relationship between secularism and sexual equality has sometimes been made out to be an artificial one. The articulation between politics, religion, secularism, and women's rights is examined here over the longue durée. Since the beginning of the secularization process during the French Revolution, a minority has championed an egalitarian conception of secularization. Rivalries between or convergences of political and religious authorities have driven an ambivalent and not very equal secularization, creating secular pacts that rely on gender pacts to the detriment of equality. This dynamic reversed itself beginning in the 1960s with the battle for legal contraception and abortion, which shook one of the very bases of French Catholicism to its foundation. The headscarf affairs revealed the egalitarian effects of secularism and favored the elaboration of thought about secularism in conjunction with sexual equality, which, whatever the various interpretations of that thought may be, could prove to be a non-negligible benefit.
- Topic:
- Islam
- Political Geography:
- France
16. On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion
- Author:
- Helena Rosenblatt
- Publication Date:
- 12-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- That French Protestants gave strong support to laïcité is by now well established. Whether this support was due to ideological dispositions within Protestantism or to Protestantism's practical relationship to history can be debated; what cannot be debated is the disproportionate role Protestants played within the Third Republic and among the early proponents of laïcité. In recent work, Patrick Cabanel has even made a compelling case for the Protestant sources of laïcité, placing particular emphasis on the Protestant entourage of Jules Ferry (1832-1893) and stressing the inspiration provided by the pro-Protestant intellectual, Edgar Quinet (1803-1875).
- Topic:
- Religion
- Political Geography:
- Europe and France
17. Religion et politique en France dans le contexte de la construction européenne
- Author:
- Jean-Paul Willaime
- Publication Date:
- 12-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- Strongly marked by the weight of the past, the French approach to State-Religion- Society relations has distinct qualities, and especially a strong confrontational and emotional dimension. This essay address the evolution of these relations and their tensions by focusing on three subjects that make manifest the relationship between politics and religion in important ways, namely, schools, sects, and Islam. The arena of the school is especially significant in three respects: the link between public and private schools; the question of what should be taught about religion, and the display of religious expression by students. The essay considers these matters within the context of wider transformations in religion (secularization) and politics (disenchantment and changes in the state's role in society). It concludes by situating recent developments in the context of globalization and especially Europeanization.
- Topic:
- Development, Globalization, and Islam
- Political Geography:
- Europe and France
18. Les élections françaises de 2007
- Author:
- Gérard Grunberg
- Publication Date:
- 12-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- The 2007 presidential elections have been the most important in France since 1981 because they provoked ruptures in the way the state and the French political system function. These ruptures, which this essay explores, include: the structural advantage the Right now has over the Left in national elections; the extension of the president's power and role in the regime; the transformation of the French political parties system into bipartism; and, finally, evolution inside the two major French parties due not only to the personality, ideas and choices of their respective candidates but also to the growing role of the president in the regime and its effects.
- Political Geography:
- France
19. La singularité française: la campagne présidentielle de Ségolène Royal
- Author:
- Frédérique Matonti
- Publication Date:
- 12-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- For the first time, a woman has come close to becoming the president of France. This essay examines the conditions that account for why Segolène Royal was chosen as Socialist candidate for the presidency. These conditions were above all political and were linked to key features of the Socialist Party. But her nomination also needs to be understood in the context of the parity law. To an important extent this law reinforced the gendered order, and Ségolène Royal's candidacy emerged readily in the wake of the law. The essay goes on to analyze the candidate's campaign. Before and during the primary campaign, the general framework was conducive to her ascendancy. But, after the primaries, critics were sharp: Royal was portrayed as ever less competent. Although there is a sociological basis for the voting of 2007, misogyny also played a part in Ségolène Royal's defeat.
- Topic:
- Law
- Political Geography:
- France
20. Once Again, From a Distance: Martinique and the French Presidential Election of 2007
- Author:
- William Miles
- Publication Date:
- 12-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- In May 2007, Martinique did not follow the rest of France in endorsing Nicolas Sarkozy in his bid to become president. Along with the other overseas French states Guadeloupe and Réunion (but not Guyane), Martinique supported rather the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. Martinique thereby distanced itself from the rest of the République—as it had done in 1995—by backing a left-wing presidential candidate rather than the ultimately victorious right-wing one. 2007 represents the converse of 1981, when Martinique voted for the rightist candidate but France as a whole elected a leftist (François Mitterrand). Over time, being at electoral odds with the nation as a whole has become less troubling for Martinicans: independence, which most islanders oppose, is no longer seen at stake in presidential outcomes. On the other hand, Martinicans have become progressively resigned to their peripheral status within French presidential politics.
- Political Geography:
- France