New Books In French Studies

A new idea of the future emerged in eighteenth-century France. With the development of modern biological, economic, and social engineering, the future transformed from being predetermined and beyond significant human intervention into something that could be dramatically affected through actions in the present. In The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One (University of Toronto Press, 2021), William Max Nelson argues that specific mechanisms for constructing the future first arose through the development of practices and instruments aimed at countering degeneration. In their attempts to regenerate a healthy natural state, Enlightenment philosophes created the means to exceed previously recognized limits and build a future that was not merely a recuperation of the past, but fundamentally different from it. A theoretically inflected work combining intellectual history and the history of science, this book will appeal to anyone interested in European history and the history o

This one's personal. Tyler Sonnichsen's Capitals of Punk: DC, Paris, and Circulation in the Urban Underground (Palgrave, 2019) was an amazing book for me to read and speak with its author about. While I am always fascinated by the different approaches to and thematic areas covered by the books I explore for the podcast, this one took me back to my years as a Montreal teenager, cutting my own hair, sewing my own dresses/skirts, and running around town after the loudest, fastest (sometimes angriest) music I could find. And it brings the stories of some of my favourite sounds from that era (and since) together with my love of and fascination for France and French culture. That's never happened before for me on the podcast.  Capitals of Punk looks at the movement -between France and the United States, Paris and DC- of music, people, a broader (sub)cultural phenomenon that included writing, art, ideas, an ethos for creating and living. Drawing on interviews and the extensive archives kept by musicians, promoters,

Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers.  In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804-1954 (NYU Press, 2020) — her analysis of Haitian writing that followed independence — Stieber composes a new literary history of Haiti, that challenges our interpretations of both freedom struggles and the postcolonial. By examining internal dissent during the revolution, Stieber reveals that the very concept of freedom was itself hotly contested in the public sphere, and it was this inherent tension that became the central battleground for the guerre de plume — the paper war — that vied to shape public sentiment and the very idea of Haiti. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergradu

Todays’ guest is Mack P. Holt, Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University in Virginia, talking about his recent book, The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630, out 2018 with Cambridge University Press. In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XII

Today New Books in History features Karl Schlögel, Professor Emeritus at the Europa Universitat Viadrina, Frankfort to talk about his new book, The Scent of Empires: Chanel no. 5 and Red Moscow, out this year, 2021 with Polity Press. Can a drop of perfume tell the story of the twentieth century? Can a smell bear the traces of history? What can we learn about the history of the twentieth century by examining the fate of perfumes? In this remarkable book, Karl Schlögel unravels the interconnected histories of two of the world’s most celebrated perfumes. In tsarist Russia, two French perfumers – Michel Beaux and Auguste Michel – developed related fragrances honouring Catherine the Great for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. During the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Beaux fled Russia and took the formula for his perfume with him to France, where he sought to adapt it to his new French circumstances. He presented Coco Chanel with a series of ten fragrance samples in his laboratory and, after smellin

Joshua Cole's Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Cornell University Press, 2019) appeals to a few of the different readers in my head: the one who admires a critical history interrogating archival evidence, narrative, and categories of identity; the one who enjoys a localized story that illuminates a much broader context and set of themes; and the one who is completely fascinated by a mystery. Examining a brief, but powerful, episode of political violence in Constantine in August 1934 that resulted in the deaths of 25 Jews and 3 Muslims, the book reveals fissures within colonial society in Algeria that French authorities had a vested interest in provoking and nurturing. The particular conflict that pitted Muslims against Jews with such intensity over the course of a few days during the interwar period gave the French state an opportunity to fuel tensions between these communities in order to resist political reforms extending key rights of citizenship to Muslims in

Emmanuel Macron “has shown a genuine ability to strategize politically, determinedly and clear-sightedly [in] occupying the space of the bourgeois bloc. This is a space that France’s political crisis has left open for many years but that no one before him had been able to identify and represent effectively”. So say Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini in The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France's Political Crisis (Verso Books, 2021). For three decades, the French centre-left has tried and failed to hang on to a working-class base with socialist platforms while, at the same time, appealing to the same demographic as its leadership: metropolitan, liberal and with an unbreakable core commitment to European intregration. In 2017, Macron abandoned this effort and went straight for the “bourgeois” core of 20-25% of the electorate with the aim of building out into the traditional right in time for the April 2022 election. Bruno Amable is a professor of economics at the University of Geneva and was previ

Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019).  One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants.  He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key pro

Islam, réforme et colonisation: une histoire de l'ibadisme en Algérie (1882-1962) by Augustin Jomier is an important study of colonial North Africa, Islamic reform, and Ibadi Islam. Jomier, a professor at France’s Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, has reframed the history of colonial Algeria by examining it “from the south.” His focus is the Mzab, a region based around seven oasis towns in the northern Sahara 600 km away from the capital city. The Mzabis on whom Jomier concentrates are a linguistic and religious minority in Algeria, speaking a Berber language and practicing Ibadi Islam both of which distinguish them from the Arabic-speaking, Sunni majority. By grounding his study not only in colonial archives but also sources from the Mzab—where he conducted extensive fieldwork—Jomier intervenes in historiographical debates pertaining to the Mzab and far beyond. The book is not only a landmark study of reform outside of the Sunni perspective, it also elucidates the limits of

Understanding how people cope with large-scale traumatic events has become more urgent as we continue to cope with the effects of the pandemic. In Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2021), Jillian Rogers examines France in the aftermath of World War I, which left its residents mourning a lost generation and many soldiers suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.  Through analysis of French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, as well as music and archival materials, Rogers argues that music was a significant method that French people used to manage and perform trauma. Employing innovative analytical techniques, Rogers shows that stylistic developments in post-war French music may have been responses to trauma suffered by the composers. As a consolatory practice, French performers used music to remember loved ones but also to sooth themselves through the repetitive bodily movements required to play neoclassical music.

Steven Press is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. His marvelous first book, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Harvard University Press, 2017), is an incredibly well-documented monograph that follows a paper trail of questionable treaties to discover the rogues or confidence men whose actions touched off the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s. Dr. Press shows in captivating detail how private European businessmen and firms produced hundreds of deeds purporting to buy political rights from indigenous African leaders whose understanding of these agreements was usually deemed irrelevant. A system of privately governed empires, some spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles, promptly sprang up in the heart of Africa. These experiments in governance quickly attracted notice in European capitals. The book portrays how the whole dubious enterprise came to a head at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when international diplomacy embraced rogue empires as l

In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jason Berry delivers a history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Beyond its ancient streets, jazz, and Carnival lies a richer, more textured New Orleans than anyone imagined. Berry spotlights the tension between a culture of spectacle, rooted in African burial dances, and a city of laws anchored in white supremacy. Discussing how culture and law grind against each other, the narrative is a parade of New Orleanians faced with these tensions. Learn more about the forthcoming documentary City of a Million Dreams here. Jason Berry is an independent writer, documentary film producer, and journalist living in New Orleans. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Albert Camus, one of the most famous French philosophers and novelists, has a diverse fan base. British alternative rockers The Cure sang about The Stranger in their first big hit, “Killing an Arab”, released in 1980. George W. Bush announced that the novel was his summer reading in 2006 (considering the book’s central plot point and what he had unleashed in Iraq, this raised a few eyebrows). In 2009 there was a call to move his remains to the Pantheon. Camus’ concept of the “absurd” continues to resonant with those alienated by late capitalism and The Myth of Sisyphus is regularly invoked by faculty members dealing with university bureaucracies.  But few critics properly place Camus and his work in the context of French colonialism. Born in Algeria to an impoverished pied-noir family, he was quite the outsider (dare we say “étranger”?) to the privileged world of French letters. Once a member of the Communist Party, he became a staunch critic of Stalinism and groupthink. When Camus dared to break ranks with t

The preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of w

In The Haitians: A Decolonial History (UNC Press, 2020), leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians (UNC Press, 2020) also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo--the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompa

Project Europe made waves when it was published in German in 2018 (CH Beck) and was soon translated into English as Project Europe: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020). A clue to its crossover appeal can be found in its original subtitle: "A Critical History." Avoiding the traps of euro-'Whig' or eurosceptical histories, Patel rethinks the development of the European Communities and the European Union from first principles. He concludes that they were just one model among many postwar associations but proved the most evolutionarily fit; that they benefited from peace more than they contributed to it; and that "disintegration and dysfunctionality" were embedded in their design. Having taught at Maastricht University and at the European University Institute in Florence, Kiran Klaus Patel is now professor of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. *Patel's book recommendation is The Capital by Robert Menasse (MacLehose Press, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley

On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2020). This conversation is a perfect supplemental teaching tool to assign a class reading Reproductive Citizens as is the impressive digital appendices that Dr. Barton created to accompany her work. Building on the massive amount of primary and secondary source material that Dr. Barton examined during research, she built a digital repository and archive for students and researchers to use. Included in these appendices are statistics on foreigners in France and descriptions of sources as well as methodologies. A testament to Dr. Barton’s commitment to diversity and accessibility in education, she provides this resource free to all in the hopes that students and researchers studying women, gender, sexuality, and/or migration can benefit from them. To learn more, please visit this website. About Reproductive Citizens: 

Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways. In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual hi

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought: A Longing for the Abyss (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle Eas

The 1790s were a decade of turmoil and strife across the West. With the French Revolution, a new era of wars began that invoked the language of equal rights. In The Bloody Flag: Mutiny in the Age of Atlantic Revolution (University of California Press, 2020), Niklas Frykman recounts how these two factors combined to shape the mutinies that took place throughout the era. As he explains, recruiting crews for the navies of the era was typically a coercive process, one that took sailors away from more remunerative work in the merchant marine. Crowded aboard wooden warships, these men were often discontent and receptive to the idea of a more democratic process for governing ship life. This radical vision was reflected in the demands made by sailors when they mutinied and by the alternate forms of management they adopted. Such mutinies jeopardized operations in navies throughout Europe, until the growing influence of nationalism helped to counteract the influence of the transnational “maritime republic.” Learn more