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621. Screening France

Author:
Brigitte Humbert
Publication Date:
06-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
American films about France or French people seek to maintain a certain level of Frenchness, usually through superficial traits and stereotypes, while also naturalizing them for perceived American expectations, including a taste for romance, a clear demarcation between good and evil, a certain type of action, and happy closure.
Political Geography:
America and France

622. Catholic Culture in Interwar France

Author:
Philip Nord
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
French Catholicism experienced a renaissance in the interwar decades, which expressed itself in a variety of forms: associational activism, cultural production, and political organizing. The new Catholic activism left a mark on the life of the late Third Republic; it played a well-known part at Vichy; and it made a major, if not always acknowledged, contribution to the renovation of French public life in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Political Geography:
America and France

623. Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17th October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory

Author:
Joshua Cole
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In October 1961, an as yet undetermined number of Algerian protesters were killed by the police in Paris while demonstrating for Algerian independence. In the last two decades, these killings have become the focal point of a public controversy in France, as questions about the memory of the Algerian war converged with debates about immigration and citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s and with the willingness of the French state to confront the crimes committed during the last phase of decolonization between 1945 and 1962. Most commentaries have emphasized the connections of this debate with an earlier bout of French soul-searching over the question of the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany during World War II. This connection seemed all the more relevant when the man who was the prefect of police in Paris in 1961, Maurice Papon, was accused and eventually convicted of assisting in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux in 1942-1944. This article argues that the public attention to the connections between Maurice Papon and the Holocaust have obscured the extent to which the debate in France about October 1961 has been driven by developments in Algerian politics in the last four decades. The extent to which historical accounts of the events of October 1961 are shaped by very contemporary political concerns presents particular challenges to the historian, who must find a way of retelling the story without merely reproducing the ideological conflict that produced the violence in the first place.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Paris, France, Germany, and Algeria

624. Réformer les retraites en France

Author:
Bruno Palier
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Le système français de retraite présente de façon typique, voire caricaturale, les caractéristiques des systèmes continentaux de protection sociale, qualifiés de conservateurs et de corporatistes par Gosta Esping-Andersen 2. Ce système d'as-surance vieillesse, financé en répartition, vise au maintien du revenu des salariés et garantit des prestations relativement généreuses aux travailleurs mais se soucie peu des plus pauvres ou de ceux (surtout celles) aux carrières discon-tinues et aux faibles revenus. Ce système, obligatoire, n'est pas géré directement par l'État mais par les partenaires sociaux, représentants de ceux qui cotisent et bénéficient du système. Dans la mesure où chaque catégorie professionnelle atenu a conserver son propre régime de retraite, le système est très fragmenté.
Political Geography:
France

625. Humanisme et Terroir: The Culture of Genetically Modified Crops in France

Author:
Kerry Whiteside
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The cultivation of genetically modified crops has re-energized a tendency within French culture to apply broad, humanistic values to social and technological trends perceived to endanger them. Humanists invoke qualitative standards of refined taste, social equity, humane work conditions, aesthetic satisfaction, and critical political engagement in their judgments. The spread of transgenic plants challenges humanistic culture to the extent that biotechnological innovations are perceived to be driven by narrower considerations of scientific curiosity, agronomic advantage, and corporate profitability. The French state has had to balance a desire to put those techno-economic interests in the service of its international standing and an imperative to respond to skeptical citizens intent on having more say in decisions affecting the quality of their lives. Consequently, the state has experimented with new participatory practices designed to register concerns that might be shortchanged in the culture of political and scientific elites.
Political Geography:
France

626. Le Système Politique français après les élections de 2002 en France: The Culture of Genetically Modified Crops in France

Author:
Gérard Grunberg
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The first round of the French presidential election of 2002 seemed to confirm and worsen the representation crisis, the loss of influence of the main political parties, and the weakening of the right/left division. The strength of the French political system seemed threatened. Yet, the political reality that came out of the 2002 elections is quite different. The end of the "cohabitation" regime restored the power of the president and a unified leadership. The two main parties - the RPR, transformed and expanded into the UMP - and the Socialist Party, were strengthened in their own camps and collected together more than 90 percent of the seats. The UMP holds the majority in the National Assembly. The high participation of voters in the second round of the presidential election showed the isolation and powerlessness of the National Front. All in all, the political system took the assault fairly well. The Fifth Republic remains and functions. Much to the contrary, the defeat of the left and its growing divisions are serious reasons for the Socialist Party to worry. Its credibility is weakened, and the dominating power on the political spectrum is the UMP.
Political Geography:
France

627. Contradictions in the Carribbean: Martinique and the 2002 French National Elections

Author:
William F.S. Miles
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Results of the French legislative elections in 2002 reflect great ideological diversity among the electorate of the overseas department of Martinique. They also belie the apparent political uniformity as expressed in the preceding presidential elections. (In Martinique, incumbent President Jacques Chirac had just received his highest score of any voting district in the Republic.) One staunch pro-statehood incumbent lost to a Socialist; the pro-Chirac mayor won by the greatest margin of any district; an incumbent backed by Aimé Césaire was defeated by an ex-Communist; and the pro-independence incumbent deputy narrowly defended his seat from a pro-statehood challenger. The elections were also marked by a record number of candidates, low voter turnout, clientelistic politics, and the power of mayoralty. These results put Martinique out of step with the French nation as a whole. Wishing to remain within France, but struggling to remain something other than France: Martinique's contradictory political culture endures in the Caribbean. The editor wishes to include here, with apologies to the author, the acknowledgements, which were inadvertently omitted as the proofs went to press. They read: "Fieldwork for this research was made possible by a sabbatical leave from Northeastern University. From September 2001 through June 2002 the author was visiting researcher with the Centre de Recherches sur les Pouvoirs Locaux dans la Caraïbe (CRPLC) at the Schoelcher (Martinique) campus of the Université des Antilles-Guyane. Special thanks go to CRPLC director Justin Daniel. Prof. William Miles".
Political Geography:
France and Caribbean

628. Review Essay - Is the King Dead? Performing Sovereignty in the Modern Era

Author:
Sheryl Kroen
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
It is common practice among early modern French historians to interpret society, culture, and politics through an analysis of the metaphors, narratives, and rituals that mediated the relationship between sovereigns (kings and queens) and the nation. La Mort du Roi: Un essai d'ethnographie politique comparée transposes this practice to the modern period, in particular by focusing on the discourses and rituals surrounding dying and dead heads of state in France and elsewhere. It was the death of François Mitterrand in 1996 that provided the inspiration for this transposition, worked out in a year-long seminar organized by Jacques Julliard in 1996 and 1997 at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Topic:
Sovereignty
Political Geography:
France

629. Indeterminate and Inhuman: Georgette Leblanc in L'Inhumaine (1924)

Author:
Maureen Shanahan
Publication Date:
05-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for European Studies at Cornell University
Abstract:
This essay argues that L'Inhumaine, directed by Marcel L'Herbier, succeeded as a display of avant-gardism but failed as a heterosexual romance due to misquotation of heterosexual paradigms and its citation of gay, lesbian, and queer signs of the era. Georgette Leblanc, who was the film's lead actress and a principal financial contributor, signified as too “authoritative” both to collaborators and critics, yet her role in shaping the narrative has not been acknowledged. Leblanc scripted the principal character, the singer Claire Lescaut, as an “inhuman woman” who refuses marriage, fails to mourn her suicided male suitor, and is reviled by other women, suggesting post-war women who persisted in their careers and failed to mourn male losses from the Great War. In one scene, when a theater audience breaks into partisan factions rioting over Lescaut's “inhumanity,” two garçonnes or mannish women appear to take Lescaut's side against others in the audience, a scene staged in part by Leblanc's lover Margaret Anderson, co-editor of the Little Review. The presence of the garçonne couple suggests Leblanc and Anderson's desire to connote a lesbian meaning to the “inhuman woman” and to address a lesbian spectator. In addition, Leblanc's age, on-screen persona, and her partnership with a younger male actor disturbed the contemporary ideological ordre familial in post-war France. Instead, both Leblanc and Jaque Catelain, the male lead, resembled other public queer figures, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Jean Börlin, the lead dancer for the Ballets Suédois. In its emphasis on theatrical performance, audience relations, masking and deflected emotions, L'Inhumaine produces a slippage between the visible and invisible and permits multiple spectatorial positions.
Topic:
Gender Issues and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Europe and France

630. Russia faces Europe

Author:
Dov Lynch
Publication Date:
05-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Union Institute for Security Studies
Abstract:
The crisis on Iraq has challenged key features of international relations. The United States and Britain intervened in Iraq without the specific support of the United Nations, avoiding a second resolution in February 2003 precisely because they feared coercive action would be vetoed. The UN has taken a serious blow and the parameters of international law on self-defence and the use of force are being redefined by US and British actions. The crisis has also left the transatlantic relationship in tatters, with the appearance of serious divisions in Europe and inside the European Union. France, Germany and Russia coordinated their positions against coercive actions within the UN Security Council, adopting a number of joint declarations in 2003 on how to strengthen the inspection regime. With all this, the very notion of the West as it existed in the Cold War seems under question.
Topic:
Security and International Cooperation
Political Geography:
Russia, America, Europe, France, Kosovo, Germany, United Nations, and Syria