Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Introduction: War and Emotion in Early Modern Europe
Get PDFSince the 1980s, the history of emotions has developed rapidly. Some even speak of a real emotional turn. However, military history and the history of emotions still intersect little in early modern history studies. Since Antiquity, the emotions of soldiers have certainly been regarded as an objective parameter of war, and the role of emotions in the war context seems obvious. However the military history of modern Europe is still not very open to the concepts and methods of the history of emotions which, quite often, does not study war. Yet the history of emotions suggests fruitful avenues for renewing military history, and the study of war, omnipresent between the 16th and 18th centuries, is crucial to understand early modern societies
‘Pitiless Pity’ in Renaissance Medicine (1545-1585)
Get PDFDoctors of the Renaissance were embroiled in a debate about the limits of pity during the performance of a surgery. Paradoxically, surgical practice entailed the inflicting of pain in order to prevent suffering. Contemporaries approached this difficulty in different ways, highlighting by turns the need to resist impulsive compassion and the duty to work in full consciousness of the patient’s suffering. Evoked during numerous discussions of professionalization and anatomical study, the problem of a ‘pitiless pity’ is best addressed by Ambroise Paré, who stresses the reciprocity between doctor and patient as a way out of the impasse between ineffectual empathy and the ruthless objectivity of the medical gaze
Who Speaks for France? Vichy, Free France and the Battle over French Legitimacy: 1940-1942
Get PDFIn June 1940 the French metropolitan government signed an armistice with Hitler’s Germany, which effectively removed France from the conflict. At the same time, the little known French General Charles de Gaulle was in London establishing himself at the head of the Free French resistance movement. This set the stage for arguments over who represented the French nation and its interests. This article explores how the Vichy government and the Free French movement constructed their respective claims to legitimacy using legal, moral and historical arguments. And it considers how these claims were fought through armed clashes over French colonial territory
David Swift and Oliver Wilkinson (eds.), Veterans of the First World War: Ex-Servicemen and Ex-Servicewomen in Post-war Britain and Ireland
Get PDFIs there such thing as a ‘Decadent Translator’?: The case of Georges Hérelle (1848–1935)
Get PDFOne never reads the biography of a translator. Translators do not seem to have a biography, their lives are of no interest to the general public and no-one seems to really care for them. Except, of course, if they are creators themselves, poets in their own right, who have endeavoured, here and there, and always for a great writer, to become translators. This is why Georges Hérelle’s personality seems so unique: he is a translator with a biography – and, moreover, his biography has largely determined his first steps in translation. Not that it is necessary to linger too much on his actual life, which has already been written about at length by Professor Clive Thomson. I shall touch only briefly on Hérelle’s biography, but the links between his life and his work as a translator and essayist (for he has also written a short essay on his own work as a translator), are still worth examining. Our intuition – or rather our initial intuition – is that his case offers a wonderful opportunity to explore what exactly translating decadence is, particularly in French, and what the possible definition of a decadent translator could be. Initial intuition, for this hypothesis of a decadent translator has become progressively questionable as Hérelle’s familiarity to us has increased. He has certainly translated decadent writers with commitment and passion: but was he a decadent himself? Our newborn doubts will be addressed here in five short sections.
 
L’Art Nouveau: Babel du bibelot ou espéranto décoratif?
Get PDFLes théoriciens de l’ornement et de l’art décoratif ne cessent, dans la seconde moitié du xixe siècle, de penser les formes artistiques comme un langage dont il faudrait inventorier le vocabulaire et organiser la syntaxe. On ne compte plus en effet les grammaires de l’ornement et les grammaires de l’ameublement qui s’inscrivent dans ce paradigme linguistique. Comme l’écrit Rémi Labrusse, ‘parler de grammaire ornementale plutôt que de recueil, c’est imaginer le théoricien de l’ornement non pas comme un philologue mais comme un linguiste, moins préoccupé par le sens global d’un répertoire (assimilable à une littérature) que par les règles de fonctionnement d’une combinatoire (assimilable à une langue)’. Si le parallèle avec l’entreprise normative et taxinomique de la grammaire manifeste un souci de clarification et d’organisation rationnelle du langage des formes après des décennies dominées par la confusion de l’éclectisme, la référence à la langue implique aussi une réflexion sur l’identité nationale dans un pays – la France – où langue et identité nationale sont indissociables, et dans un moment – le tournant du siècle – marqué par les prolongements de la querelle du cosmopolitisme et l’exacerbation des rivalités entre États-nations. L’émergence de l’Art nouveau et sa diffusion rapide dans l’Europe de 1900 suscitent de nombreuses métaphores linguistiques qui dénoncent le péril d’une dégénérescence du langage décoratif français. La nouvelle langue architecturale, qui puise aussi bien dans le japonisme, les Arts and Crafts anglais que dans les innovations belges ou allemandes, apparaît à bien des égards comme un terme étranger et corrupteur, un emprunt inassimilable, tout aussi intraduisible que le nom que les Français lui inventent – ‘modern style’ – faux anglicisme qui incarne à lui seul l’irréductible différence des langues et des cultures. Le nouveau langage décoratif, en raison même de son caractère cosmopolite, apparaît dès lors comme une formation cacophonique de langues étrangères qui échouent à s’entendre et à former une langue commune cohérente.
 
