Content Type: Journal Article / Journal: French Politics, Culture Society

1. The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France

Author:: Patrick Simon
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: For more than a century, statistics describing immigration and assimilation in France have been based on citizenship and place of birth. The recent concern for racial discrimination has given rise to a heated controversy over whether to introduce so-called “ethnic categories” into official statistics. In this article, I make an assessment of the kind of statistics that are available today and the rationale behind their design. I then discuss the main arguments put forward in the controversy and argue that antidiscrimination policies have created a new need for statistics that outweigh the arguments against the use of “ethnic statistics.” In fact, beyond the technical dimension of this controversy lies a more general political debate about the multicultural dimensions of French society.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: France

2. Who is Afraid of Blacks in France? The Black Question: The Name Taboo, the Number Taboo

Author:: Louis-Georges Tin
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In 2005, black people in France decided to create a national organization: the CRAN. The country had lived for decades on the myth of human rights and equality, and as a result, minorities were invisible, and were expected to remain so. Therefore, the two most important goals of the CRAN have been: to give a name, to give a figure. The taboo of the name was broken when black people decided to stand up for what they are, to call themselves “black,” however unusual this might sound in French public discourse; the taboo of the figure was also broken when the CRAN decided to launch the issue of ethnic statistics in France. Until then, blacks would not exist as such in this country, and racial discrimination would remain ignored for the most part. But since this campaign was launched, ethnic statistics have become an important issue. The debate is still going on.
Political Geography:: France

3. From Measuring Integration to Fighting Discrimination: The Illusion of “Ethnic Statistics”

Author:: Alain Blum and France Guérin-Pace
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In this article, we engage in a debate that first took place in France ten years ago, but that has revived today. This debate concerns the question of whether to introduce ethnic categories in statistical surveys in France. There is strong opposition between those who argue for statistical categories to measure ethnic or racial populations as part of an effort to fight against discrimination, and those who argue against such statistics. The latter, including the authors of the present article, discuss the impossibility of building such categories, their inadequacies, and the political and social consequences they could have because of the way they represent society. They also argue that there are better, more efficient ways to measure discrimination and to fight against it. After describing the history of this debate, the authors present the different positions and explore the larger implications of the debate for French public life.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: France

4. La séparation des Églises et de l'État en France et à Genève (1905-1907): une solution pour deux histoires

Author:: Valentine Zuber
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The comparative history of secularization in France and in Geneva can shed fresh light on the separation of church and state in France in 1905 and in Geneva in 1907. Similarities in the timing of events and in the laws of separation in these two settings mask sharp differences in how laïcité was understood and how it was interpreted politically. The establishment of laïcité had neither the same causes nor the same political effects in France and Geneva. Nevertheless, as two examples of “total” laïcisation, the French and Genevan separations of church and state raised the same question about religious liberty and its safeguard by the state. Should a state that is “separate from religion” play an active role protecting the liberty of the different denominations in its territory, or should it uphold a prudent and distanced neutrality?
Political Geography:: Geneva and France

5. French Secularism in Debate: Old Wine in New Bottles

Author:: Véronique Dimier
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article deals with two debates at two different moments in history: the recent 2004 debate on a law proposed by the Chirac government that aimed at forbidding any religious signs (including the Islamic headscarf) worn in an ostensible way at school; and the 1892 debate on native education in Algeria and the opportunity to have a Koran teacher at school. At stake in both debates were two conceptions of Republican laïcité (secularism), one assimilationist, the other more pragmatic.
Topic:: Education and Islam
Political Geography:: Algeria

6. Jewish Identity Politics and the Scarf Affairs in France

Author:: Judith Vichniac
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Much has been written about the scarf affairs in France and the subsequent legislation banning large religious symbols from the classroom. Less has been written about the major religious leaderships' responses from 1989 when the first affair took place until the debates surrounding the Stasi Commission in 2003. This article traces the evolution of their thinking with special emphasis on the splits within the Jewish leadership within the context of a rise of anti- Semitic acts.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: France

7. Tocqueville, Comparative History and Immigration in Two Democracies

Author:: Nancy L. Green
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Tocqueville says nothing about immigrants in America. Neither “immigré(s),” “immigration” or the word “immigrant(s)” appear in De la démocratie en Amérique. This is hardly surprising, for two reasons: the word and the reality, that is, the French language and the American context. In Tocqueville's native tongue, the term is absent in the 1835 (6th) edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. The term émigration was for years the French word of choice to describe those who had changed countries. (Émigrés of course retained its more restrictive meaning, referring to those who fled the Revolution.)
Topic:: Civil Society and Migration
Political Geography:: United States, Europe, and France

8. The Lithographic Conspiracy: How Satire Framed Liberal Political Debate in Nineteenth-Century France

Author:: Amy Wiese Forbes
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article discusses political satire under the July Monarchy. It analyzes how the question of satire's political meaning was generated and framed in the 1830s as debate over abstract rights under the new, supposedly more liberal government of the July Monarchy. Following the Revolution of 1830, lithographic satire became connected conceptually to political conspiracy and was argued to be harmful to the new regime. State institutions, including the police, the courts, and the National Assembly, attempted to understand and define satire politically. The effort to evaluate satire's potential harm to the state shaped French liberalism into a contest between rights to free speech and protection from harm. This process was part of a broader struggle to construct legitimate authority in France.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: France

9. Pierre Goldman: From Souvenirs obscurs to Lieu de mémoire

Author:: Donald Reid
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Pierre Goldman was born to Jewish resisters in France in June 1944 and lived with the inability to match his parents' achievements during the war. Although a secondary figure in soixante-huitard movements, his trials for murder in the early 1970s made him a central figure in post-soixante-huitard activists' reflections on their situation. This essay examines Goldman's sui generis efforts to establish his identity as a resister and a Jew, his central role in his generation's attempts to define their relationship to the society they wished to change, and his place in the succeeding generation's efforts to differentiate themselves from the generation of their parents, Goldman's generation.
Political Geography:: France

10. 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

11. La naissance d'un géant: Arcelor-Mittal (1948-2006)

Author:: Éric Godelier
Publication Date:: 06-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In 2006 a terrible fight pitted two steel makers, Mittal and Arcelor, against each other. Understanding the dynamic of this enormous takeover requires a historical perspective. The structure, business strategy, and corporate governance of these groups evolved over a long period of time. This article explores the conflict in the context of the history of French steel industry. An examination of Usinor, moreover, as the ancestor and creator of Arcelor, can reveal a lot about the political, social and economical influence of steel makers in French society. Understanding the conflict also calls for an analysis of how a large company could change its corporate culture. Instead of reducing corporate culture to individual or collective “values,” as Edgar Schein did some time ago, this article explores Usinor's culture as a system of representations, material elements, technologies, products and ways of doing and thinking.
Topic:: Governance
Political Geography:: France

12. French Color Blindness in Perspective: The Controversy over "Statistiques Ethniques"

Author:: Daniel Sabbagh and Shanny Peer
Publication Date:: 03-2008
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In the United States, while some race-based policies such as affirmative action have faced often successful political and legal challenges over the last quarter-century, historically, the very principle of official racial classification has met with much less resistance. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, according to which “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was not originally intended to incorporate a general rule of “color blindness.” And when in California, in 2003, the “Racial Privacy Initiative” led to a referendum on a measure—Proposition 54—demanding that “the state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin,” this restriction was meant to apply exclusively to the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment, that is, the three sites where affirmative action was once in effect and might be reinstated at some point, or so the proponents of that initiative feared. In any case, that measure was roundly defeated at the polls.
Political Geography:: United States and California

13. Existe-t-il une religion civile républicaine?

Author:: Jean Baubérot
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: La notion de « religion civile » provient, on le sait, de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, et elle a été, ces dernières décennies, reprise et réinterprétée par des sociologues et des historiens. En France, il est assez courant d'opposer la « laïcité républicaine » (française) à la religion civile américaine. Cet article propose, au contraire, l'hypothèse que la question de la « religion civile » se situe au coeur de la spécificité de la laïcité française dans sa dimension historique comme dans son actualité. La Cour constitutionnelle italienne considère, depuis 1989, le principe de laïcité comme fondamental ; plusieurs pays (Portugal, Russie) ont inscrit la laïcité dans leur Constitution ; le Québec a explicitement laïcisé ses écoles en 2000, etc. Et, pourtant, la laïcité continue d'apparaître souvent comme une « exception française » Or cette exceptionnalité n'est nullement conforme à la pensée des pères fondateurs de la laïcité française : Ferdinand Buisson, le maître d'oeuvre (au côté de Jules Ferry et de ses successeurs) de la laïcisation de l'école, et Aristide Briand, l'auteur principal de la loi de séparation des Églises et de l'État de 1905, envisageaient la laïcité de façon universaliste et non substantialiste : il existe pour eux des pays plus ou moins laïques, et la France n'est pas le pays le plus laïque du globe.
Topic:: Civil Society, Government, and Religion
Political Geography:: United States, Europe, and France

14. Religions, genre, et politiques laïques en France, XIXe-XXe siècles

Author:: Florence Rochefort
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In the French polemics over the Islamic headscarf, the relationship between secularism and sexual equality has sometimes been made out to be an artificial one. The articulation between politics, religion, secularism, and women's rights is examined here over the longue durée. Since the beginning of the secularization process during the French Revolution, a minority has championed an egalitarian conception of secularization. Rivalries between or convergences of political and religious authorities have driven an ambivalent and not very equal secularization, creating secular pacts that rely on gender pacts to the detriment of equality. This dynamic reversed itself beginning in the 1960s with the battle for legal contraception and abortion, which shook one of the very bases of French Catholicism to its foundation. The headscarf affairs revealed the egalitarian effects of secularism and favored the elaboration of thought about secularism in conjunction with sexual equality, which, whatever the various interpretations of that thought may be, could prove to be a non-negligible benefit.
Topic:: Islam
Political Geography:: France

15. The Muslim Presence in France and the United States: Its Consequences for Secularism

Author:: Jocelyne Cesari
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: All too often, the question of Muslim minorities in Europe and America is discussed solely in socioeconomic terms or with a simplistic focus on the Islamic religion and its purported incompatibility with democracy. This article focuses instead on the secularism of Western host societies as a major factor in the integration of Muslim minorities. It compares French and American secularism and argues that while French-style secularism has contributed to present tensions between French Muslims and the French state, American secularism has facilitated the integration of Muslims in the United States-even after 9/11.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: United States, America, and Europe

16. Fascinating Les Halles

Author:: Rosemary Wakeman
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article considers the site and space of Les Halles as an ongoing intellectual fascination. It specifically looks at how architects have historically approached Les Halles as a “site of modernity” and puts into context the most recent renovation and the architectural competition to design Les Halles in 2004-2005. It will consider the projects and their viability from a cultural perspective and open the question of the site and the city's future form.

17. Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles

Author:: Meredith TenHoor
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Until 1969, when Paris's wholesale food markets were moved to the Parisian suburb of Rungis, Les Halles, the market district in the center of Paris, fed much of the city's urban population. Les Halles was not simply a place where food was bought and sold, but also a highly visible and symbolically charged node of communication between the countryside, the state, and the bodies of Parisian citizens. Due to its centrality and visibility, Les Halles came under enormous pressure to physically symbolize the state's relationship to the “market.” In turn, the architecture of the markets at Les Halles came to stand in for the powers of the state to organize a flow of goods from farm to body. From the 1763 construction of the Halle au blé, to the 1851 ground-breaking on Victor Baltard's iron and glass market pavilions, to the construction of the Centre Pompidou and the Forum des Halles in the 1970s and 1980s, the markets at Les Halles were regularly redesigned and rebuilt to accommodate and/or produce shifting notions of architectural, social, and financial order.
Topic:: Communications
Political Geography:: Paris

18. L'enjeu métropolitain des Halles

Author:: Thierry Baudouin and Michèle Collin
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: During the Fordist period, the state transformed the historic site of Les Halles, in the heart of Paris, into the agglomeration's chief mass transit gateway. Efforts to make the site into a veritable tool of social, cultural, and economic metropolitan development are struggling because of governmental modalities that remain very marked by centralism. A majority of citizens, notably those living in suburban Paris, actively stake a claim to this metropolitan dimension and to the rich possibilities of this tool. The article principally analyzes the territorializing practices of suburban youths, whose multiple subjectivities are still poorly integrated into the site. Les Halles thus reveals the question of the correspondence of these establishing metropolitan practices to the reality of the centralized institutions around Paris intramuros.
Political Geography:: Paris

19. Les rapports ambigus entre politiques et citoyens: le cas du réaménagement du quartier des Halles à Paris

Author:: Pierre Diméglio and Jodelle Zetlaoui-Léger
Publication Date:: 08-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: While Mayor Bertrand Delanoë had omitted the renovation of Les Halles in his plans for the city in his 2001 inaugural address, in 2002, at the urging of the RATP and Espace Expansion, he decided to create a working group to undertake this project during his tenure. Having made citizen participation a new goal for local government, he also announced that the project would be undertaken with Parisians, especially local associations. The first part of this article emphasizes the different postures that elected politicians, engineers, and experts have adopted over the course of forty years vis-à-vis the question of citizen participation in urban planning. The second part explores the decision- making process for the Les Halles renovation over the last four years; it considers the issues and difficulties linked to the implementation of participatory plans incorporating residents––whether they are members of local groups or not––in complex urban planning projects.
Topic:: Government
Political Geography:: Paris

20. On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion

Author:: Helena Rosenblatt
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: That French Protestants gave strong support to laïcité is by now well established. Whether this support was due to ideological dispositions within Protestantism or to Protestantism's practical relationship to history can be debated; what cannot be debated is the disproportionate role Protestants played within the Third Republic and among the early proponents of laïcité. In recent work, Patrick Cabanel has even made a compelling case for the Protestant sources of laïcité, placing particular emphasis on the Protestant entourage of Jules Ferry (1832-1893) and stressing the inspiration provided by the pro-Protestant intellectual, Edgar Quinet (1803-1875).
Topic:: Religion
Political Geography:: Europe and France

21. Religion, politique et régulation juridique aux États-Unis

Author:: Fabienne Randaxhe
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: From a French perspective, the relationship between the state and religion in the United States may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the American nation was the first one to have established, by constitutional means, a separation between religious bodies and the political realm. On the other hand, religious and political spheres in the US still seem to overlap to some extent. While French approaches tend to regard US laïcité as uncertain and incomplete, this article discusses whether laïcité is in the US incomplete or aware of tensions to be lessened among religious, political and social forces. I focus on legal regulation and consider the notion of accommodation as a particular form of legal laïcité.
Topic:: Politics
Political Geography:: United States and America

22. Religion et politique en France dans le contexte de la construction européenne

Author:: Jean-Paul Willaime
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Strongly marked by the weight of the past, the French approach to State-Religion- Society relations has distinct qualities, and especially a strong confrontational and emotional dimension. This essay address the evolution of these relations and their tensions by focusing on three subjects that make manifest the relationship between politics and religion in important ways, namely, schools, sects, and Islam. The arena of the school is especially significant in three respects: the link between public and private schools; the question of what should be taught about religion, and the display of religious expression by students. The essay considers these matters within the context of wider transformations in religion (secularization) and politics (disenchantment and changes in the state's role in society). It concludes by situating recent developments in the context of globalization and especially Europeanization.
Topic:: Development, Globalization, and Islam
Political Geography:: Europe and France

23. Les élections françaises de 2007

Author:: Gérard Grunberg
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The 2007 presidential elections have been the most important in France since 1981 because they provoked ruptures in the way the state and the French political system function. These ruptures, which this essay explores, include: the structural advantage the Right now has over the Left in national elections; the extension of the president's power and role in the regime; the transformation of the French political parties system into bipartism; and, finally, evolution inside the two major French parties due not only to the personality, ideas and choices of their respective candidates but also to the growing role of the president in the regime and its effects.
Political Geography:: France

24. Analyse de l'élection présidentielle des 22 avril et 6 mai et des élections législatives des 10 et 17 juin 2007: une rupture politique?

Author:: Pascal Perrineau
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Nicolas Sarkozy's victory in the 2007 French presidential elections represents a true rupture: rupture with years of political apathy, rupture with what was an escalating rise of political protest, rupture with a “law” that since 1981 seemed to require that every outgoing majority be beaten. Sarkozy's electoral victory was substantial. It was built on a notion that what the French were looking for was a strong sense of direction, and it gave rise to a dynamic of striking change right after the election (a political opening to the left, a shift in presidential style, disarray in the Socialist Party, and the marginalization of the National Front).
Topic:: Politics and Law

25. La singularité française: la campagne présidentielle de Ségolène Royal

Author:: Frédérique Matonti
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: For the first time, a woman has come close to becoming the president of France. This essay examines the conditions that account for why Segolène Royal was chosen as Socialist candidate for the presidency. These conditions were above all political and were linked to key features of the Socialist Party. But her nomination also needs to be understood in the context of the parity law. To an important extent this law reinforced the gendered order, and Ségolène Royal's candidacy emerged readily in the wake of the law. The essay goes on to analyze the candidate's campaign. Before and during the primary campaign, the general framework was conducive to her ascendancy. But, after the primaries, critics were sharp: Royal was portrayed as ever less competent. Although there is a sociological basis for the voting of 2007, misogyny also played a part in Ségolène Royal's defeat.
Topic:: Law
Political Geography:: France

26. Once Again, From a Distance: Martinique and the French Presidential Election of 2007

Author:: William Miles
Publication Date:: 12-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In May 2007, Martinique did not follow the rest of France in endorsing Nicolas Sarkozy in his bid to become president. Along with the other overseas French states Guadeloupe and Réunion (but not Guyane), Martinique supported rather the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. Martinique thereby distanced itself from the rest of the République—as it had done in 1995—by backing a left-wing presidential candidate rather than the ultimately victorious right-wing one. 2007 represents the converse of 1981, when Martinique voted for the rightist candidate but France as a whole elected a leftist (François Mitterrand). Over time, being at electoral odds with the nation as a whole has become less troubling for Martinicans: independence, which most islanders oppose, is no longer seen at stake in presidential outcomes. On the other hand, Martinicans have become progressively resigned to their peripheral status within French presidential politics.
Political Geography:: France

27. The Writer's Responsibility in France: From Flaubert to Sartre

Author:: Gisèle Sapiro
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: As Michel Foucault observed in his famous essay, “Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?” before discourse was a product, it was an act that could be punished. The author's appropriation of discourse as his personal property is secondary to its ascription to his name through penal responsibility. In France, authorial responsibility was introduced in 1551 through royal legislation directed at controlling the book market. The Chateaubriant edict made it compulsory to print both the author's and the printer's names on any publication. The notion of responsibility is thus a fundamental aspect of the emergence of the figure of the modern writer. The state first imposed this conception of responsibility in order to control the circulation of discourses. But after writers internalized the notion, they deployed it against the state in their struggle to establish their moral right on their work and to have literary property recognized as individual property, a struggle that culminated in 1777 with a royal decree recognizing literary compositions as products of labor from which authors were entitled to derive an income. This professional development reinforced the writer's social prestige and status, in Max Weber's sense.
Political Geography:: France

28. “Pour Aider Nos Frères d'Espagne”: Humanitarian Aid, French Women, and Popular Mobilization during the Front Populaire

Author:: Laurence Brown
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The Spanish Civil War stirred an array of humanitarian relief campaigns in France that placed women in the front lines of popular mobilization. As communists, socialists, liberals, antifascists, feminists and pacifists, French women invoked the iconography and language of sexual difference to construct pro- Republican aid appeals as an expression of gendered social concern above party politics. Through exploring the female leaderships, organization, and popular participation in different relief campaigns, this article emphasizes the extent to which Spanish aid efforts were dominated by tensions within the Front Populaire.
Political Geography:: France

29. Soixante ans après: pour un état des lieux de mémoire

Author:: Nathan Bracher
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In reviewing various commemorations that highlighted the year 2005 in France, this article points out the major evolutions of memory visible primarily in the press and media coverage of these events. If public memory remains as highly charged and polemical as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, attention is clearly turning away from the Occupation and Vichy to focus more on Europe and on France's colonial past, as we see not only in the ceremonies celebrating the “liberation” of Auschwitz, the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, and the dedication of the Mémorial de la Shoah, but also in the many articles devoted to Russian and Eastern European experiences of the war, as well as to the bloody postwar repressions of colonial uprisings in Algeria and Madagascar. Now that racial and ethnic tensions are exacerbating an increasingly fragmented public memory, the work of history is more urgent than ever.
Political Geography:: Russia, Europe, Eastern Europe, France, Germany, Algeria, and Madagascar

30. France, une géographie à inventer: un nouveau contrat politique entre la société et son espace

Author:: Jacques Lévy
Publication Date:: 03-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article argues that the way French society comprehends its territory is not only an aspect of a more general identity crisis, but also an acting component of an overall political model. France can be characterized as a “state-fatigued” society. Centralism has had an important spatial consequence: an alliance of the nation-state and provincial “notables” against the city. The major cities, especially Paris, produce for the rest of the country but continue to be denied effective local and regional political power. In this context, the peculiar tradition of aménagement du territoire can be analyzed as a discourse based on the myth of a demiurge, the state, which would be the only legitimate actor able to restore France's grandeur by reconquering the deprived parts of its territory. Correlative public polices target moral compensation for a supposed injustice: a partial reimbursement of the debt France once contracted by incorporating the provinces into the national territory. After reviewing disappointing recent changes in the geographical architecture of political power, the article makes some proposals. They are based on the dual framework that an empowerment of relevant spatial units will be necessary and that only a profound and massive debate involving ordinary citizens can overcome the current institutional gridlock.
Political Geography:: France

31. Corps et politique: Individu et société

Author:: Arlette Farge
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In this essay, two themes––the body and the political and the individual and society––are used to reflect upon the historian's task. By focusing upon the body as represented in the police archives of the eighteenth century, for example, we learn about the lived experience of domination, and the body-as-royal subject provides us with insight into the mechanisms and preoccupations of political power. The often incoherent and chaotic efforts of thinking bodies to engage with or resist that power are at the very matrix of social relations, and it is up to the historian to reconstruct these efforts in their very incoherence in order to remain as true as possible to the reality in which our historical subjects dwelled. An emphasis on articulating the experience of the individual reinforces this ability to reconstitute the ways in which subjects defined themselves via ruptures, interrupted trajectories, and reconstructed paths, which, in turn, underscores the fact that disorder is the ordinary course of social communities. Individual choices themselves reveal the lack of coherence of the social, and it is by relating and taking account of this incoherence that a historian may provide a non-teleological interpretation of the past that emanates from the interior of a society's fragile and hesitating common fate, that allows him or her to understand and recapture for contemporary readers a world that sought only to exist.
Topic:: Fragile/Failed State

32. The Market of Honors: On the Bicentenary of the Legion of Honor

Author:: Olivier Ihl
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article focuses on the findings of a study of titles and honors in twentieth-century France, in which these signs are analyzed as a government technique in their own right. This paper shows how, transformed into a state emulation, a style of bureaucratic authority was created, a mode of coercion that favored an impersonal style of control over and between various corps of administrators, artists, managers, journalists, or elected representatives. A government technique was constituted in the distribution of the croix de la légion d'honneur, the most famous of these decorations––one with a conception of exemplarity French Politics, Culture Society, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 2006 (that of marks of distinction serving as a model for behaviors transcending the frame of legal obligations) and an emphasis on the soundness of behaviors, the guarantee and objective of a policy of conduct openly intended to replace the policy of rights or classes inherited from the French Revolution. Philosophers and intellectuals were to transform this intuition into a political paradigm: virtue can also, in its own way, be a rule of policing. Rationalized by a fast-growing bureaucracy, these marks of grandeur that constituted a means of emulation have now been trivialized to the extent of no longer being analyzed as such. Reconsidering the conditions in which they operate, this article proposes an interpretation of uses and functions through which the decoration invented by Napoléon spawned an administration of honors, the crucible of a full-blown government science.
Political Geography:: France

33. Scientists in Time of War: World War II, the Cold War, and Science in the United States and France

Author:: Dominique Pestre
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Before addressing its central concern––the convergence of science, war, institutions, and politics in the postwar period in France and the United States––, this essay evokes how scientific knowledge had been of importance to warfare and economic elites in the preceding centuries. In the 1940s and 1950s, scientific activities were profoundly redefined. A culture of laboratory solutions, of calculus, and management won the day. For the scientists, that meant versatility and a willingness to work between disciplines and métiers and to confront the nation's main concerns. It also led to increasingly technocratic versions of politics. Due to science, the state became a managerial apparatus, a "modernizer" arbitrating among different scenarios. Contrary to what happened in the United States, science was not center stage in France in the 1940s and early 1950s. The habitus of scientists was that of the prewar period, and they were still not technique- oriented. They had a more cultural definition of their trade and were not opportunists whose aim was to become pragmatically efficient in the world of business and military action. From the mid-1950s, things started to evolve due to a strong economic recovery and because French scientists had now caught up with the latest developments. The final break, however, occurred in France only when de Gaulle abandoned the Algerian war and elected for an autonomous nuclear deterrence system. By putting la stratégie de l'arsenal at the core of national development, de Gaulle significantly transformed French science, society, industry, and the military.
Topic:: Cold War and Politics
Political Geography:: United States and France

34. "Paradoxes of the Gender Gap in France"

Author:: Mariette Sineau
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In France, the 21 April 2002 presidential election result has renewed interest in the electoral cleavage between women and men, who cast their votes very Abstracts 152 differently to qualify candidates for the second round of the election. Among women voters, Lionel Jospin (the Socialist leader) came in second behind Jacques Chirac, with Jean-Marie Le Pen (leader of the Front national) being eliminated from the contest; among men, Le Pen came out on top followed by Chirac. On the basis of a major quantitative election survey conducted in France in 2002 by the Centre de Recherches Politiques de Sciences Po, this article undertakes to understand why fewer women than men vote for the extreme Right. Sociologically, Le Pen made his lowest scores among two groups of women that contrast in numerous aspects: young, highly educated professional women, and older, retired, widowed women. Strong ideological logics lie behind this contrasted sociology of female anti-Lepenism, rationales that are generation- specific, but gender-specific as well: feminism and Catholicism "process" male and female identity differently. (This research was first published in French in Bruno Cautrès and Nonna Mayer, eds., Le Nouveau Désordre électoral (2004), 207-28.)
Political Geography:: France

35. What's in a Scarf? The Debate on Laïcité in France

Author:: Nicolas Weill
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The issue of the Islamic headscarf has troubled French society since the end of the 1980s and led to legislation, enacted on 15 March 2004, proscribing the wearing of headscarves or any other "conspicuous" religious symbol in schools. But what strained relationship between the state and religions, and more generally minorities, is hidden by this long controversy that preceded the centennial of the 1905 law separating church and state? This article aims to summarize for American readers the stakes involved in this long debate while putting it into historical perspective by trying to clear up misunderstandings that may crop up in discussions (on both sides of the Atlantic) of a subject where the famous "French exception" seems to be crystallized, that is, the practice of laïcité. Underlying these discussions, one must locate the treatment of religious minorities as put into place during the Napoleonic era in the case of the Jews, which has remained, mutatis mutandis, a model for the organization of Islam in the Hexagon at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such a model is one of an assignment community, organized with the goal, inherited from the Revolution, of emancipating its members and responding to questions of public order.
Topic:: Islam
Political Geography:: America and France

36. Protestant and Jewish Philanthropies in France: The Conseil National des Femmes Françaises (1901-1939)

Author:: Yolande Cohen
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Focusing on the history of the Conseil national des femmes françaises, composed mainly of Jewish and Protestant women, this paper shows how women's philanthropies played an important role in defining the scope and the type of welfare policies concerning mothers and children in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Their version of laïcité raises also several questions: did the religious question recede behind the social question? What role did the different religious distinctions continue to play in shaping welfare measures during the Third Republic? What was their role in defining the meaning of laïcité for social policies at this time? This paper shows that the main French social policy of allocations familiales, adopted in 1932, is the product of intense tensions between Church familialism and state maternalism. Catholic familialism promoted the home as the center of women's activity, lobbied against women's professional work, and refused any intervention of the state in family affairs. State maternalism, promoted primarily by religious minorities and some nonreligious feminists, wanted state intervention in protecting mothers and children. These deeply convinced republicans sought to change family laws and improve family morals. If these Protestant and Jewish philanthropies succeeded in defining the mainstream of laïcité during the first thirty years of the Third Republic, they failed to have a bigger impact on social legislation when the big leap to a national family allowance system was established in 1932.
Political Geography:: France

37. Law and Politics in Interwar France: Pierre Laroque's Search for a Democratic Corporatism

Author:: Eric Jabbari
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Pierre Laroque, the architect of French social security, emerged during the 1930s as an advocate for the corporatist management of industrial relations. Laroque's corporatist views were an outgrowth of his educational background and his experiences as a young civil servant. A member of the Conseil d'État, he came under the influence of the main doctrines of French public law. During the first half of the twentieth century, legal thinkers such as Léon Duguit and Maurice Hauriou elaborated theoretical justifications for the growing interventionism of the state. As a student of the law, Pierre Laroque became concerned with maintaining the balance between the necessity of state intervention and the preservation of individual and collective rights, thus explaining his interest in administrative decentralization. By the mid-1930s, after being assigned to the Conseil National Économique, he became interested in industrial conflict and applied a similar approach to the issue of collective bargaining. Impressed by the social achievements of Fascist Italy, Laroque advocated the corporatist management of industrial relations, an objective that he promoted in a succession of political and intellectual forums associated with the nonconformist movement. A new collective bargaining mechanism would bring together the state, business, and labor in order to mediate and resolve industrial disputes. Unlike the Fascists, however, this form of corporatism did not break with democratic or republican principles; rather, it was a decentralized administrative structure that compensated for the weaknesses of the collective bargaining process while providing a new forum for the cultivation of social solidarity.
Topic:: Politics and Law
Political Geography:: France

38. 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

39. Review Essay -- Saving France's "Lost Boys": Vichy and the Reform of Juvenile Justice in France

Author:: Laura Lee Downs
Publication Date:: 03-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In 1944, Léo Joannon's now-forgotten film Le Carrefour des enfants perdus opened in cinemas across France. The film (which starts in August 1940) recounts the struggle of impassioned journalist Jean Victor and a small group of friends to found a new kind of reform school without locks on the doors or bars on the windows, a vocational school for the professional training of delinquent youth whose methods were to be based on forging bonds of trust with the young offenders, rather than on their simple repression.1 Victor and his friends had all experienced firsthand the terrible bagnes d'enfants (children's penal colonies) of the Third Republic's pitiless juvenile justice system in their youth, and the story of the Carrefour (as their school was named) turns on the dedicated faith of these men in the abilities of children, even those deemed "guilty" in juvenile courts, to remake their own lives along healthier lines. Over the course of the film, the adventures of the Carrefour's 400 "enfants perdus" unfold inside an unexpected blend of progressive pedagogy (confidence in the children) and Vichy's fascistic elevation of the chef (organization of the school in hierarchically-ordered teams, run by older street toughs who are converted from caïdisme to the purer, if no less masculinist, ideology of the chef).
Topic:: Reform
Political Geography:: France

40. 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

41. Family Values and the Radio: The 1937 Radio Elections and the Miniseries France

Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In early 1937, French radio owners participated in elections for governing boards of their local public stations. The election, which had occurred once before in 1935 to little fanfare, became a locus of political and social debate about the state of both government and radio in France. Two parties emerged; one, Radio-Liberty, was supported by the Popular Front and had an overtly democratic and political mission and slate of candidates. The other, Radio-Family, was supported by a coalition of right-wing groups and claimed to champion French listeners and families in a nonpolitical fashion, protecting listeners from far-Left political rhetoric and immoral broadcasts. Radio-Family handily won the election, and state radio responded to the conservative message by producing radio plays like France, a miniseries that espoused a conservative vision of French history, seemingly at odds with the left-wing coalition in government.
Political Geography:: France

42. Born in 1925

Author:: Alan B. Spitzer
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The May 1948 issue of Les Temps Modernes published three short essays entitled "Nés en 1925." The young authors were Jean-François Lyotard, who was to become a philosopher of international distinction; Paul Viallaneix, his generation's outstanding Michelet scholar; and Pierre Gripari, the author of a wide variety of works including popular books for children. They had been comrades (along with the future sociologist Alain Touraine), at the khâgne of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, which prepared a student elite to compete for entrance into the École normale supérieure. Their contributions reflected the experience of an intense traditional education under the pressures of war and the Occupation. Their subsequent careers reveal the relation of the permanent stamp of a common formation and the individual experience of particular circumstances.
Topic:: War

43. Comparing Lives: Issues of Balance in Biographical Writing

Author:: Belinda Thomson
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article praises the methodology used by Debora Silverman in her book Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, in particular her exhaustive exploration of the two artists' religious and cultural formation, seeing this as a long-overdue reinstatement of the value of what are inescapably and quite properly biographical concerns. Silverman's book demonstrates that, taken over the long term, such considerations, far from being extraneous to and distractions from the works of art, offer valuable new ways of explaining them. The author considers the usefulness of applying a similar model to a different artistic pairing, the relationship between Gauguin and his first mentor and teacher, Camille Pissarro, and sees good reason to suppose it would yield similarly illuminating results. Considering the issue of comparative studies more generally, however, the author perceives certain dangers in allowing their built-in imperatives and momentum to skew the researcher's findings. She illustrates this point with two examples of ambiguous documents that point up the potential for over-eager biographers to find significance in every chance piece of data and to force connections for the sake of the overall pattern.

44. "Spiritualizing the Material" and "Dematerializing the World" in Modernist and Avant-Garde Practice: On the Wider Import of a Distinction Debora Silverman Develops in Van Gogh and Gauguin

Author:: Jerrold Seigel
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This essay seeks to extend Debora Silverman's distinction between van Gogh's project of "spiritualizing the material" and Gauguin's related but opposed one of "dematerializing the world" to a wider range of modernist and avant-garde projects. It employs this distinction in connection with Astradur Eysteinsson's analysis of the problems of using such terms as modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism in relation to realism and the various revolts against it that have taken place since the age of romanticism. Eysteinsson's general approach is followed, but also in part questioned and given a different direction through discussions of Duchamp, the surrealists, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.

45. Matisse at Vence: An Epilogue to Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art

Author:: Kenneth E. Silver
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Silverman's intent is to emphasize the "critical role of religion in the development of modernism." As an addendum to that pursuit, it should be pointed out that, well into the twentieth century, religion remained crucial to artistic innovation and development (and still is). We now recognize how important apocalyptic imagery was to Wasily Kandinsky's abstraction. In the wake of the Second World War, and French occupation by the Germans, religion made a powerful reappearance in the art of the avant-garde. Henri Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary at Vence is one of the great works of this period; it is worth briefly examining the ways in which Matisse understood the intersection between modern art and his reengagement with Catholicism.
Topic:: Development and War
Political Geography:: Germany

46. Painting, Self, And Society At The Cusp Of Abstraction: Comments On Art And Comparative Cultural History

Author:: Debora Silverman
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: It is very gratifying, at the end of the long journey this book entailed, to have responses generated from two fields and from some of the scholars whose writings have inspired me along the way. What I'd like to do in my comments is not to rehash material in the book—I hope those of you who haven't yet will get a chance to read it. (It is now available in a paperback edition.) Rather, I'd like to raise some broader issues for our future work relating to the position of navigating between the disciplines of art history and cultural history as we try to write in the links between biography, society, and style in specific national contexts, and the particular benefits of comparative analysis as we do so.

47. Did Historians Make History?

Author:: Arthur Goldhammer
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: Belief in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of French society sustained much of the political and cultural ferment in France in the quarter century following the end of World War II. Perry Anderson, in two articles published in the London Review of Books, argues that the decline of this faith has cast a pall over France, and he traces this decline in large part to the work of historians François Furet and Pierre Nora. It is argued here that Anderson neglects broader economic, societal, and cultural forces that combined to undermine belief in the transformative power of revolution and is therefore led to an unduly pessimistic interpretation of the cultural turn of the 1970s.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: France and London

48. Les débats autour du mouvement pour la décroissance

Author:: Françoise Gollain
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: The last four years have seen the rise of a movement on the French radical left positing a fundamental conflict between economic growth and ecological sustainability and calling for a reversal of growth (décroissance) against the current consensus around the concept of sustainable development. This challenge to the growth imperative and, more widely, of the ideology of progress, represents a return to the explicitly antiproductivist approaches that emerged in the early 1970s with the rise of radical political ecology. This article charts the birth of the décroissance movement, which is comprised of two components: anticonsumerist and antidevelopment. It also contrasts the movement with other closely- related ideological elements of the French antiglobalization and anticapitalist movements, elements that belong to the dominant, mainly Marxist tradition, whose anticapitalist struggle builds on the legacy of the Enlightenment period. The article concludes that, by placing antieconomicist and antiutilitarian thought drawn from social sciences on the agenda of the French radical Left, the décroissance movement could potentially generate a major paradigm shift founded on a critical evaluation of the heritage of modernity.
Topic:: Development

49. Review Essay -- The Evolution Of The Welfare State: Social Rights And The Nationalization Of Welfare In France, 1880-1947

Author:: Kristen Stromberg Childers
Publication Date:: 06-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: In late May 2005, French voters resoundingly defeated a proposal to adopt a new constitution for the European Union, voting 55 percent to 45 percent to reject a document in which President Jacques Chirac had invested more than a little of his personal political capital. While there were many reasons cited for this negative vote, one issue that surfaced frequently in discussions of the constitution was the French people's concern for their social security benefits and the fear that "liberal" and "Anglo-Saxon" models of the welfare state might come to dominate the EU and would threaten France's hard-won social rights. Here, of course, "liberal" referred to a model of unrelenting laissez-faire economics, rather than the moniker hurled in contemporary American political debates. It is highly significant that the deathblow to the constitution should come from France, where the EU symbolized for many a chance to regain grandeur on the international scene and an opportunity to counterbalance the "hyperpower" of the United States.
Political Geography:: United States, Europe, and France

50. Des quartiers sans voix: Sur le divorce entre la Gauche et les enfants d'immigrés

Author:: Olivier Masclet
Publication Date:: 12-2006
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:: Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:: This article examines why the activism of the children of North African immigrants has not been noticed or recognized by elected officials of the Communist Party. Through historical and ethnographic study of a Communist municipality in the greater Paris region, the article first demonstrates that this militancy, far from being a new thing, is inscribed in the traditional forms of the militancy associated with the "banlieues rouges." In order to understand the urban activists' invisibility in politics, the author analyzes the negative representations of the group from which they come and the tensions between North African immigrants and local officials of the Left, tensions linked to urban renewal in the industrial suburbs. The detour through the history of the "red suburbs" thus reveals the structure of the tense relations between the Left and the housing projects, which seem to be disowned not only economically but also politically.
Topic:: Economics
Political Geography:: North Africa

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COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS