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Begin New Search Topic War Political Geography France Content Type Journal Article Journal French Politics, Culture Society

1. Apology and the Past in Contemporary France

Author:
Julie Fette
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In societies coming to terms with historical injustices, public apology has recently emerged as a potent trend. This is particularly true of France, where the state served as a catalyst for a wave of public apologies for acts of intolerance committed during the Second World War. Following Jacques Chirac's 1995 official apology for Vichy's anti-Semitic policies, various groups in civil society publicly atoned for their particular Vichy roles in discrimination against Jews: the medical profession, the law bar, the Catholic Church, and the police. How does public apology, as distinct from court trials, historical commissions, and reparations, affect contemporary France's reconciliation with its past? This article also analyzes how apologizing for Vichy has created demand for an official French apology for the Algerian War. By 2006, the politics of memory in French society decidedly shifted attention from Vichy to post-colonialism: in both cases, the apology turn imposes new dynamics of remembering and forgetting.
Topic:
Politics and War
Political Geography:
France

2. Les Assurances sociales: Une contribution à la modernisation de la société française dans l'entre-deux-guerres?

Author:
Bruno Valat
Publication Date:
03-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The 1930 law creating social insurance was the Third Republic's great achievement in the social arena. However, the historiography of contemporary France contains barely a trace of this achievement. Victim of the regime's discredit as well as of the lack of any reformist political efforts in its favor, social insurance of the 1930s has also suffered by comparison to later achievements, particularly the creation of Social Security in 1945. However, if we study social insurance in its own historical context––and not in reference to the postwar period––, it can constitute an original source for the study of the modernization of French society. This article proposes three approaches: social insurance constitutes a vector for the acculturation of the working class to retirement and to the medicalization of health, contributing to the history of working class uses and representations of consumption and social rights. On a more institutional level, the experience of social insurance reveals the first legal experiments with cogestion involving employers, workers, and insurance organizations. Finally, a prosopographical study of the militant trajectories linked to social insurance could contribute to the history of the working-class movement between 1930 and the end of the Thirty Glorious Years: is there a "social insurance generation" within French syndicalism?
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
France

3. Artistic Community and Urban Development in 1920s Montmartre

Author:
Jeffrey H. Jackson
Publication Date:
06-2006
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
By the 1920s, the physical transformation in the urban space of Montmartre led two groups of artists to "secede" from the city of Paris, at least in spirit. Calling themselves the Commune Libre de Montmartre and the République de Montmartre, these painters, illustrators, poets, writers, and musicians articulated a distinctive community-based identity centered around mutual aid, sociability, and limiting urban development. They also reached out to the poor of the neighborhood through charity efforts, thus linking their fates with those of other area residents. Through these organizations, neighborhood artists came to terms with the changes taking place in the city of Paris in the 1920s by navigating between nostalgia and modernism. They sought to keep alive an older vision of the artists' Montmartre while adapting to the new conditions of the post-World War I city.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Paris and France

4. Remembering the Battle of Paris: 17th October 1961 in French and Algerian Memory

Author:
Joshua Cole
Publication Date:
09-2003
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In October 1961, an as yet undetermined number of Algerian protesters were killed by the police in Paris while demonstrating for Algerian independence. In the last two decades, these killings have become the focal point of a public controversy in France, as questions about the memory of the Algerian war converged with debates about immigration and citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s and with the willingness of the French state to confront the crimes committed during the last phase of decolonization between 1945 and 1962. Most commentaries have emphasized the connections of this debate with an earlier bout of French soul-searching over the question of the Vichy government's collaboration with Germany during World War II. This connection seemed all the more relevant when the man who was the prefect of police in Paris in 1961, Maurice Papon, was accused and eventually convicted of assisting in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux in 1942-1944. This article argues that the public attention to the connections between Maurice Papon and the Holocaust have obscured the extent to which the debate in France about October 1961 has been driven by developments in Algerian politics in the last four decades. The extent to which historical accounts of the events of October 1961 are shaped by very contemporary political concerns presents particular challenges to the historian, who must find a way of retelling the story without merely reproducing the ideological conflict that produced the violence in the first place.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
Paris, France, Germany, and Algeria

5. War and Liberation: Histories from Below

Author:
Steven Zdatny
Publication Date:
03-2001
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Little remains today of the so-called Resistencialist Myth, the notion that France was a nation of resisters, save for a handful of treasonous collabos. It was a useful and ingenious fiction. Maybe it spared the country civil war. It certainly bought France selfesteem and saved civil society for the Fourth Republic and the resurrection of liberal democracy. But it's hard to imagine anyone believes it anymore, if anybody truly believed it then. We know that these sorts of political legends do not die all at once; they fall apart in stages, like Francisco Franco. In this case, the stages are well known. In the late 1960s, Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity offered a countermyth of Collaborationist France. A few years later, Robert Paxton's careful, irrefutable scholarship ravaged the legend of la France résistante and re-ignited interest in the real history of Vichy. His Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order depended on research in German occupation sources because French documents were closed. But actors die, fifty-year rules expire, politicians and archivists tack with the wind, all of which has prodded French historians to an unprecedented scrutiny of the nation's experience of war and occupation.
Topic:
War
Political Geography:
France