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Photography, Identity, and Migration

Controlling Colonial Migrants in Interwar France and Senegal

Johann Le Guelte

Abstract

This article examines the politics of interwar colonial identification practices put into place by the French colonial state in order to curtail the mobility of colonial (im)migrants. I argue that photography was used as a tool of imperial control in both French West Africa (AOF) and metropolitan France, since colonial men's inability to provide the required photographic portraits often prevented them from moving around the empire. In response, colonial subjects appropriated photography in alternative ways to subvert these administrative restrictions. Moreover, they took advantage of metropolitan racial stereotypes to contest Western identification practices.

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Radio Broadcasting, Disability Activism, and the Remaking of the Postwar Welfare State

Rebecca Scales

Abstract

Through the history of the short-lived 1947 radio show La Tribune de l'Invalide, this article examines how the social and political context of the Liberation offered disability activists a unique opportunity to demand pensions, medical care, and social services hitherto denied to them by the French state. Drawing on transcripts of the broadcasts and correspondence between listeners and the show's host Maurice Didier, the article demonstrates how disability activists played a pivotal, if little acknowledged, role in the construction of the postwar welfare state by highlighting French society's historic neglect of disabled civilians.

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Remembering the “Forgotten Zone”

Recasting the Image of the Post-1945 French Occupation of Germany

Corey Campion

Abstract

In much of the English-language scholarship on the post-1945 Allied occupation of Germany, French officials appear as little more than late arrivals to the victors’ table, in need of and destined to follow Anglo-American leadership in the emerging Cold War. However, French occupation policies were unique within the western camp and helped lay the foundations of postwar Franco-German reconciliation that are often credited to the 1963 Elysée Treaty. Exploring how the French occupation has been neglected, this article traces the memory of the zone across the often-disconnected work of French-, German-, and English-speaking scholars since the 1950s. Moreover, it outlines new avenues of research that could help historians resurrect the unique experience of the French zone and enrich our appreciation of the Franco-German “motor” on which Europe still relies.

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Women and the Language of Statistics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France

Reading the Graphs of Madame Pégard

Hélène Périvier and Rebecca Rogers

Abstract

This article considers how women adopted a “scientific” statistical language at the end of the nineteenth century to draw attention to their role in the moral and social economy. It explores in particular the messages contained in La Statistique générale de la femme française, a series of eighteen murals that the moderate feminist Marie Pégard sent for exhibition at the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. The article begins by considering the place statistics held in France in the final decades of the century within the context of universal exhibitions. It then examines Pégard's choice of quantified categories of social analysis to convey a sustained argument about the comparative weight of women in a modernizing French economy. The article seeks to understand how contemporaries read and interpreted the graphs, and how this mode of rendering visible the issue of women's work played into the politics of an emerging feminist movement.

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François Mitterrand and the Gray Zone of Vichy

Hugh McDonnell

Abstract

This article examines the 1994–1995 controversy surrounding President François Mitterrand's past involvement with Vichy France through the concept of “the gray zone.” Differing from Primo Levi's gray zone, it refers here to the language that emerged in France to account for the previously neglected complicity of bystanders and beneficiaries and the indirect facilitation of the injustices of the Vichy regime. The affair serves as a site for exploring the nuances and inflections of this concept of the gray zone—both in the way it was used to indict those accused of complicity with Vichy, and as a means for those, like Mitterrand, who defended themselves by using the language of grayness. Paying attention to these invocations of the gray zone at this historical conjuncture allows us to understand the logic and stakes of both the criticisms of Mitterrand and his responses to them, particularly in terms of contemporaneous understandings of republicanism and human rights.

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A French Paradox?

Toward an Explanation of Inconsistencies between Framing and Policies

Henri Bergeron, Patrick Castel, and Abigail C. Saguy

Abstract

The French news media has framed “obesity” largely as a product of corporate greed and social inequality. Yet, France has—like other nations including the United States—adopted policies that focus on changing individual-level behavior. This article identifies several factors—including food industry lobbying, the Ministry of Agriculture's rivalry with the Ministry of Health and alliance with the food industry, and competition with other policy goals—that favored the development of individual-level policy approaches to obesity in France at the expense of social-structural ones. This case points to the need to more systematically document inconsistencies and consistencies between social problem framing and policies. It also shows that national culture is multivalent and internally contradictory, fueling political and social struggles over which version of national culture will prevail at any given moment.

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An Indochinese Vichy Syndrome?

Remembering and Forgetting World War II Indochina

M. Kathryn Edwards and Eric Jennings

Abstract

This article analyzes the complex memorial stakes of the events that unfolded in French Indochina during World War II. It first considers the wartime years and analyzes the French frameworks for understanding the Vichy period and the Japanese takeover. It then delves into two memorial trends: the rehabilitation of the French resistance in Indochina and the commemoration of victims of the 9 March 1945 Japanese coup. These trends have produced a double elision: the focus on resistance to the Japanese has displaced previous allegiance to Vichy, and the emphasis on the victimhood of the French settler community has overshadowed responsibility for colonial violence.

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Les entreprises françaises face aux occupants (1940–1944)

Entre collaboration, opportunisme et « nécessité de vivre »

Sébastien Durand

Abstract

Amid severe shortages of raw materials, labor, and transportation, companies in occupied France (1940–1944) sought alternative paths to what is commonly called “economic collaboration.” They worked to find substitute supplies, convert to new product lines, alter their manufacturing methods, and even adapt to the black market. But few businesses could avoid the question of whether to provide goods and services to the occupier. The opportunities to do so were widespread, though they varied according to occupation, economic branch, and the passage of time during the Occupation. The German occupiers thus benefited from the French economy. With decisive help from the Vichy regime, the occupiers managed to force, induce, or entice French enterprises into their war economy—be they large industries formerly mobilized for French national defense, small and medium-sized firms, or agricultural producers.

Résumé

Dans un contexte de graves restrictions (matières premières, main-d'œuvre, moyens de transport), les entreprises de la France occupée (1940–1944) sont à la recherche d'alternatives à ce qu'on appelle communément la « collaboration économiqÏue » : utilisation de produits de remplacement, reconversion des activités, réadaptation de l'appareil productif, essor des pratiques illicites (marché noir). Mais rares sont les patrons à ne pas devoir se poser la question de l'opportunité de proposer une offre de services à l'occupant. Cette offre est largement répandue, mais variable selon les métiers, les branches et les temps de l'Occupation. Les occupants tirent ainsi profit des atouts du tissu économique national, puisqu'ils parviennent, avec la collaboration décisive du régime de Vichy, à insérer à leur économie de guerre par différentes manières (forcée et induite), à la fois les grosses industries anciennement mobilisées pour la Défense nationale, les petites et les moyennes entreprises et les richesses tirées du sol français.

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Making Sense of the Anti-Same-Sex-Marriage Movement in France

Scott Gunther

Abstract

This article examines the political style and rhetoric of the Manif pour tous (MPT), the main organization opposing same-sex marriage in France, from summer 2013 to the present. It exposes how the MPT's style and rhetoric differ from those of their American counterparts, and what this tells us about the different strategies of political movements in France and the United States generally. It is based on an analysis of the language used by activists whom I interviewed in 2014 and 2015 and on a discourse analysis of the MPT's website, Facebook page, Twitter feed, and press releases since 2013. This analysis of the distinctive features of the MPT brings to light underlying concerns about French identity in the face of globalization. In other words, for the MPT and its members, what is at stake is not just same-sex marriage but the very definition of Frenchness.

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When Paris was “à l'heure chinoise” or Georges Pompidou in China and Jean Yanne's (1974) Les Chinois à Paris

Catherine E. Clark

Abstract

This article looks at two seemingly disparate events: Georges Pompidou's 1973 presidential visit to the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the filming and release of Jean Yanne's blockbuster comedy Les Chinois à Paris (1974). Both produced flawed visions of Franco-Chinese relations. During Pompidou's visit, officials and the press attempted to demonstrate that France enjoyed warmer relations with the PRC than any other Western nation. Yanne's film parodied the French fad for Maoism by imagining the People's Liberation Army invading and occupying Paris. His film caused an uproar in the press and sparked official Chinese protest. The article ultimately argues that the two events were deeply related, part of a wave of popular and official interest in China in the early 1970s that extended well beyond the well-known stories of student and intellectual Maoists. This interest paved the way for Franco-Chinese relations as we know them today.