New Books In French Studies

There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply of Zidane trotting away from the Italian defender, turning back, and driving his head into Materazzi’s chest. Perhaps a cheer of approval, or scorn for the blatant foul. Then the red card came out, and with it the realization that Zidane’s brilliant career had come to an end. And as the camera followed him leaving the pitch, and he passed the World Cup trophy waiting on its pedestal, we understood that Zidane’s act of anger had likely cost his team the victory. Laurent Dubois, scholar of modern French history and devoted supporter of Les Bleus, recognized that the head-butt and the reactions it generated in France were questions needing serious investigation. Finding the answers, he understood, requi

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what it was. Depictions of the revolutionary period often put the guillotine at center stage: atop a platform with a raucous audience at its feet and some noble man or woman about to put on–with the executioner’s aid–the finale to their ordeal. The guillotine is also often taken as a token of France’s human rights enlightenment. It made execution swift and supposedly painless. Such characterizations miss an essential point: The guillotine was meant to make execution disappear. France’s republican founders sought efficiency and discretion in carrying out what they saw as a ne

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In her riveting intellectual biography, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year, Nancy Duvall Hargrove, the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Mississippi State University, revisits that single year in the poet’s life to mine it for later influences. While this period is often interpreted to be typical of the early 20th century post-graduate foreign study experience, Hargrove invites us view it as extra-ordinary. Linking Eliot’s work to the Ballets Russes, the music of Stravinsky and the intellectual tension ofLaNouvelle Revue Francaise, she demonstrates the rare coming together of

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and substance abuse leading to an early death. In light of this tendency, Carolyn Burke‘s No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Knopf, 2011) serves as a much needed corrective, breathing life back into the chanteuse’s legacy. During her short life Piaf consistently demonstrated an extraordinary boldness- in her relationships, yes, but also in her singing, her spirituality, her artistic collaborations and her commitment to France during World War II. And the music! That voice! “Non Je Ne Regrette Rien” seems to pulse beneath the text of Burke’s book and, reading it, one c

We’ve dealt with the question of how racial categories and conceptions evolve on New Books in History before, most notably in our interview with Nell Irving Painter. She told us about the history of “Whiteness.” Today we’ll return to the history of racial ideas and listen to Andrew Curranexplain the history of “Blackness.” Doubtless Europeans have noted that different humans from different parts of the globe lookdifferent for millennia. But it was only relatively recently, as Curran explains in The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), that they took a serious interest inexplaining these differences in a manner we would call “scientific.” There are two major reasons for this tardiness. First, metaphysical and biblical schemes provided the primary context for the interpretation of the human until the mid eighteenth century. Second, the most important scientific communities in Europe-those of France and Engl

In the late 19th century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim warned the world about spreading “normlessness” (anomie). He claimed that modern society, and particularly life in concentrated urban-industrial areas like Paris, left people without the sense of belonging that characterized “traditional” life. Durkheim was not alone in thinking that there was something fundamentally sick-making about modernity. Marx called the modern malady “alienation” (Entfremdung), Weber called it “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and Freud called it “discontent” (Unbehagen). The more general term used in fin de siecle Europe was “neurasthenia,” a condition of nervous exhaustion caused by the frenetic pace of modern life. The theory that modernity was pathological was put to the test on several occasions in the early twentieth century. One of the earliest was the Paris flood of 1910. It’s the subject of Jeffrey H. Jackson‘s wonderfully told tale Pa

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t), the “Trial of the Century” involved a washed-up football star, a slowly moving white Bronco, an ill-fitting glove, and charges of racism. I watched every bit of it and remember exactly where I was when the verdict was announced. But if you are French (which is a nice thing to be), then there is only one “Trial of the Century” and it involved an honorable though stuffy army captain, a torn up note of no significance, a bungling military establishment, and charges of anti-Semitism. The erstwhile American football player (and actor, don’t forget he was an actor) was guilty, pretty much everyone knew it, but no one really wanted to take the issue on. The aloof French officer was innocent, pretty much everyone knew it too, but in this instance a kind of culture war broke out. France circa 1900 was at a fork in the historical road: on the left, the liberalism of the Revolution; on the right, the conservatism of the post-Napoleonic

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on liberte, egalite, fraternite. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoye