French History - Americans in France

This article seeks to provide an analysis of the personal encounters of sovereign princes one with another during the Renaissance. It does so in a different perspective from that afforded by the historiography of the subject to date, which has been concerned to emphasize the lavishness of these exceptional occasions, describe them and evaluate how much they cost. Through a detailed analysis of the accounts of the hitherto neglected meeting between Francis I and the Emperor Charles V at Aigues-Mortes in July 1538, this article concentrates on the protocol governing the inter-personal relationships of the two sovereign princes. It interprets the significance of their words and gestures towards one another. The sovereign encounter at Aigues-Mortes was a mirror of virtues in which the framework of diplomatic protocols, envisaged as means of enforcing harmonic laws to preserve equilibrium and reciprocity, became transformed into a confrontation of honour between two knights. Since they had failed to win their spurs on the field of battle, they attempted to surpass one another in virtue.

In the past decade, François Furet has exerted a profound impact on scholarship of the French Revolution. Particularly influential has been Furet's thesis, best expressed in his Penser la révolution française, that the Terror can be ascribed to properties inherent in revolutionary ideology. Furet's theories, however, remain more asserted than proved. The purpose of this paper, then, is to perform a needed empirical test of Furet's theses, using a body of evidence, namely the ‘opinions’ produced during the trial of King Louis XVI, which are particularly well suited to this purpose. Ultimately, the findings of this paper are not favourable to Furet's theses concerning revolutionary ideology and the Terror, and support an alternative model for understanding the interaction between revolutionary political culture and political action.

During the 1840s Tocqueville was praised for a disinterested patriotism alien to his aristocratic antecedents when he supported the bellicose policy of Adolphe Thiers and criticized the deference to Great Britain shown by the ministry of François Guizot. Tocqueville believed that war was a catastrophe but that the will to fight best guaranteed peace. His affirmation of a tough foreign policy that expropriated the patriotic credentials of the ‘revolutionary faction’ anticipated a modern nationalism integral to political conservatism: not the anti-parliamentary ultra-nationalism of a Paul Déroulède, but the patriotism of a conservative republican such as Raymond Poincaré. However, the resolution to fight in defence of the national interest embraced by all of the European great powers in 1914 paved the road to war; after the costly victory of 1918 the French could no longer speak Tocqueville's language.

This article argues that while Émile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart has retained its enduring status as a work of fiction, the cycle has become curiously forgotten as a work of history and, more specifically, as an historical argument. This essay asks, therefore, why Zola is not seen as an historian and sets out the gains which can come to historians through studies of the cycle. It addresses both questions of form—in terms of connections between Zola's realism and the tropes of historical narratives—and the substance of the past— through assessments of the historical value of novels such as Germinal and Le Rêve. Using such texts I argue that, when read as a totality, Zola's cycle possesses a compelling historical argument which connects his descriptions of the changes in life which arrive with modernity, the shift from monopoly to welfare capitalism in the Second Empire, and the failure of theoretical writers to comprehend the true nature of secularization in France. I go on to suggest that this narrative is bound within a very detailed and subtle discussion of teleology and modern history, that generates an historical conclusion to the cycle which adapts Hegel's ‘End of History’.

The links between freemasons and republican elites in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France are well known to historians, but despite recent discussion of a distinctively republican approach to colonialism there has been relatively little attention paid to the activities of masons in the empire. This case study of French West Africa between 1895 and 1914 analyses the ideological orientation of masons and the influence exerted by their networks in one overseas territory. The article finds that while (as in metropolitan France) such networks sometimes benefited the careers of individual masons, fraternity was often limited between masons who held high office in the colonial administration and those who joined the handful of local lodges established in West Africa. The masonic commitment to equality did not extend to encouraging African membership of these lodges, symptomatic of a more general failure by French masons to adapt their ideas to this colonial environment.

Marcel Pagnol's hit films Angèle (1934) and Regain (1937) presented an idealized image of the peasantry that was integral to both left- and right-wing discourse as a signifier of French cultural vitality and a symbolic antidote to national decadence. Each side attempted to appropriate the films as part of a larger battle in the mass-media to control the rural patrimony and win over public opinion. By analysing the ideological content and uses of Pagnol's melodramatic ethnography in relation to the socio-political mentalities of movie audiences and the filmmaker himself, this article evaluates the contribution of Angèle and Regain to the rise and fall of the Popular Front.

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