55,821 research outputs found
“Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799
No full textThis study analyzes a hitherto unexamined group, the French diplomatic corps during the Revolution (1789 to 1799), and focuses on the question of loyalty and conscience. For some diplomats choice was an illusion as their status often determined their fate. Some supported the king and continued to do so in spite of the high cost, often creatively sabotaging the Revolution. Others put nation, as they defined it, above king. Because the definition of loyalty constantly shifted the corps, like the army and the bureaucracy, was periodically purged. Those who had worked for or been sympathetic to the old regime or those who had allied with a certain political faction came under scrutiny. The turmoil in the diplomatic corps not only had international repercussions but also reflects larger societal trends, such as the attack on the aristocracy and the displacement of one elite by another. The French diplomatic corps was thus emblematic of many issues surrounding the revolutionary struggle of this decade.Publisher PD
Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War
No full textThis study investigates French images of women during the First World War, the feminine postures and roles captured by photographers, how female images were used in the wartime media and by the state, and how captions and other textual modes strengthened an overarching message of total consent. By analysing the three most prominent genres of female imagery during the period – women in distress, feminine devotion, and women toiling for the war effort – this book seeks to demonstrate how photography assisted in the gender work of the war. Photographers and publishers showed how traditional feminine traits could contribute to a male-designed and directed war effort, while also concealing instances of female dissent, which included feminist, socialist, popular and pacifist objections to the war. Yet, although the archives contain few wartime images created by French women themselves, this work also introduces a small group of period photographs, lithographs, articles and literary works that disrupted the visual narrative of subordination.Publisher PD
The Legacy of Iconoclasm: religious war and the relic landscape of Tours, Blois and Vendôme, 1550-1750
No full textThis study explores the process of physically rebuilding, renewing and reinventing the relic landscape in the regions around Tours, Blois and Vendôme following the widespread iconoclastic damage of the French religious wars. The author takes a long-term perspective exploring developments over two hundred years, from the mid-sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth centuries. The book explores what the physical renewal of the landscape can tell us about evolving beliefs and practices concerning relics during the Catholic Reformation and what reconstruction activities reveal about the meaning and experience of relic veneration. It pays particular attention to how the relic landscape evolved through relic translations and how communities that oversaw relic shrines remembered the iconoclastic acts of the religious wars through liturgical and ritual commemorations, memorials, artistic renderings, oral traditions and written accounts.Publisher PD
The new enfant du siècle: Joseph de Maistre as a writer
No full textThe essays contained within this volume were first presented at Reappraisals/Reconsidérations, the Fifth International Colloquium on Joseph de Maistre, held at Jesus College, Cambridge on 4 and 5 December 2008.Series editor-in-chief: Guy Rowlands, University of St AndrewsJoseph de Maistre's reputation as a writer is legendary. His style, unique and alive, moulded the French language anew. It sabotaged his attempts at anonymous publication and earned him, through the centuries, the praises of enemies and admirers. Yet the relationship between Maistre's thought and writing remains ill-known. This collection is the first to examine how Maistre's ideas – including his denunciation of the written word – intersected with his writing practices and personas. The essays disclose an author formed by duty and affectionate relationships, by the conventions of public combat, by an intense sense of history, and by the imperatives of Revolution.Introduction: assessing Maistre's style and rhetoric / Richard A. Lebrun -- Joseph de Maistre as pamphleteer / Richard A. Lebrun -- Joseph de Maistre, letter writer / Pierre Glaudes ; translated by Kevin Michael Erwin and Richard A. Lebrun -- Joseph de Maistre: the paradox of the writer / Benjamin Thurston -- Epilogue: the forced inhabitant of history / Carolina ArmenterosPublisher PD
Caste, class and profession in old regime France: the French army and the Ségur reform of 1781
No full textFirst published in French in 1974, David D. Bien’s essay on the nature of nobility in old regime France pivoted around the 1781 “Ségur regulation” that required four generations of nobility for most officers entering the army. Once seen as a classic manifestation of the so-called “aristocratic reaction” against commoners, the loi Ségur, in Bien’s deft analysis, instead emerges as a telling sign of tensions within an increasingly divided nobility. While exploding crude myths about class conflict and its causative role in the Revolution, Bien mounts a strong case for viewing eighteenth-century social tensions as the product of professional identity as much as social class. This study is presented here for the first time in English with a short preface by Rafe Blaufarb, and a wide-ranging introduction by Jay M. Smith that places Bien’s work in the wider context of historical thinking over the past half-century on the origins of the French Revolution.Publisher PD
The reform of zeal: François de Sales and militant French Catholicism
No full textThe Reform of Zeal explores the origins, nature, and impact of François de Sales’s vision of Catholic douceur (gentleness) in the era of the French Wars of Religion. Since Natalie Zemon Davis’s pioneering work on the ‘rites of violence’, scholarship has focused on the militant Catholic cultures of early modern France. Taking a fresh approach to de Sales’s work as a missionary, spiritual director, and founder of the Order of Visitation, this volume documents the evolution of de Sales’s spirituality and his championing of religious cultures of nonviolence within French Catholicism. The Reform of Zeal argues that Salesian douceur not only constituted one of the most effective critiques of French Catholic militancy in the period, but also a unique source of religious renewal in the seventeenth century, independent of Leaguer and early dévot fervour.Publisher PD
Postcolonialism, Identity, and the French Language in St. Lucia
No full textExamines attitudes toward cultural identification with the French language, recently increased in education, relative to English and Kwéyòl, among St Lucians, through a postcolonial conceptual framework. Author contextualizes this within St Lucia's history, as first French and later British colony, and relates it to the multiplicity, characteristic of St Lucia (and Caribbean) Creole identity, and a connected fluidity in language use. Through a rural and Castries sample, he further studies the evaluations of St Lucians of French, English, and Kwéyòl, in relation to their sense of cultural and social relevance and affinity of and with these languages. He shows how English is seen by most as high-status and important for St Lucians, especially for upward and outward mobility, while especially for St Lucia's national identity Kwéyòl is also valued by most, despite its recent partial waning. French, recently stimulated as main second or third language, is seen as quite important, and should according to a majority of the sample (especially in Castries) be learned more by St Lucians, and is seen as more relevant than Spanish. Author points out how this is related to a strong cultural affinity St Lucians sense with nearby Martinique, practical connections (traveling, migrating) to Martinique, or French/Martinican tourists in St Lucia, as well as to French's similarity to Kwéyòl, thus possibly helping to bolster Kwéyòl's status
Revisiting Geneva: Robert Kingdon and the coming of the French Wars of Religion
No full textThe late Robert Kingdon’s Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555-1563 (1956) was not merely an engaging and challenging piece of scholarship, it came to dominate the study of Genevan Protestantism and the city’s relationship with other Reformed communities, particularly those in France. Based on the rich archival records in Geneva, Kingdon’s work would inspire many subsequent scholars to investigate the questions he first raised in the 1950s. This volume is testament to the breadth of material he first covered, and demonstrates the variety of fields in which he came to have influence, including printing history, the role of the nobility in the Reformation, the functioning of the Consistory and the lives of pastors. Born out of a conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his original book, this volume now stands as a memorial to a life of exemplary scholarship.Foreword / Sara K. Barker -- Robert M. Kingdon (1927-2010): a scholarly life well lived / Andrew Pettegree -- Geneva in the centre? The challenge of local church orders / Philip Conner -- The elites and the politicisation of the French Reformation: the work of Robert M. Kingdon and the origins of the Hugenot party / Hugues Daussy -- Genevan print and the coming of the Wars of Religion / Andrew Pettegree -- Settling quarrels and nurturing repentance: the Consistory in Calvin's Geneva / Jeffrey R. Watt -- Developments in the history of Geneva since the 1960s / William G. NaphyPublisher PD
Perceptions of France : French books in the early libraries of South Australia, 1848-1884
No full textThis work is partially supported by funding from the British AcademyIn 1848, the South Australian Library and Mechanics’ Institute came into existence. It was the first stable library in South Australia. In 1856 its books passed to the library of the South Australian Institute, whose holdings continued to grow until 1883, when many of the books were transferred to the fledgling Public Library, forerunner of today’s State Library. Between 1848 and 1883 the two early libraries built up a collection of nearly 20,000 works of which a little over 500 were by French authors, and almost half of those books were in French. This paper follows the growth of the collection of French books and examines the nature of the books that were acquired. In doing so it highlights the place which French culture continued to occupy within the intellectual life of early South Australia and illustrates the gradual change of taste as an elite culture was displaced by the demands of a more popular readership.Peer reviewe
The French Communist Party and Britain in the Second World War
No full textTransnational studies of the French Communist Party (PCF) have understandably emphasized relations with the Soviet and Italian Parties. However, study of the PCF's relations with its minnow-like counterpart in Britain sheds light on its tortuous trajectory during the Second World War. The French and British communist press of the period, as well as recently released archival documents, show radical shifts in line and fortune, ultimately determined by decisions taken in Moscow. The defeat of Nazism sees the apogee of communist influence on both sides of the Channel, but signs of isolation and inexorable decline soon emerge.Peer reviewe
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