Megan Brown, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. Bibliography and index. 369 pp. $39.95 (hb) ISBN 978067425114.
Peter Mulholland, Love's Betrayal: The Decline of Catholicism and Rise of New Religions in Ireland. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2019. Bibliography and index. 362 pp. $90.95 (hb) ISBN 9781787071278.
Using eyewitness accounts by some French writers who sojourned in Macau during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article investigates Macanese history from French perspectives. Attention is given to history, culture, and literature within writers’ interpretations. A distinct feature of Macanese history in this period is a story of the conflict between changed and unchanged, glory and decline, temporariness and timelessness. Imbued with admiration, reminiscence, and critique, the observations made by the French writers form a unique panoramic view over Macau. Such observations illustrate how Western culture examined itself, here represented as Portuguese culture, and the manifestations of this particular culture after being transplanted into another country far from the homeland. Integration of French perspectives can enhance the writing of Macanese history by providing particular insights and literary discernment.
The early twentieth century saw a renewed critical interest in the expressive potential of dance, sparked by the overwhelming success of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Taking Camille Mauclair's 1912 review “Karsavina et Mallarmé” as a point of departure, this article explores contemporary attitudes toward the dancing woman, the sexual potential of her body, and the desire to transcend (or erase) her corporeality. For Mauclair, Mallarmé's writings provided an intellectual lens through which dance could be detached from the physicality of the danseuse and recast as a serious artistic and intellectual pursuit. This article argues that Mauclair and other critics who sought to abstract dance from the dancer collectively articulated a cohesive alternative to the supposed “physical imperative” of this period.
This article examines a dramatic aporia in modern European intellectual history, involving what it calls “perspectival thinking”—a way of thinking in which an individual assumes and thinks from the perspectives of others. This paradox appears in the work on totalitarianism of Europe's three foremost thinkers on totalitarianism—Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. Examining their explorations of perspectival thinking, this article argues that, taken together, they are strikingly discordant. While Arendt exalts it, Koestler and Orwell problematize perspectival thinking, and Orwell even sees it as evil. The three thinkers thus articulate a dramatically polyvocal understanding of perspectival thinking, creating a remarkable dissonance in modern European thought.
This article engages with the role of the parish priests in Malta in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on their degree of professionalization by examining their relations with the bishop and with the other members of the clergy and the laity. It concludes that, as in other countries, it was difficult for the decrees of the council of Trent to be fully implemented in Malta. If some parish priests were diligent in exercising their duty, others preferred to put their personal interests before those of their flock. For some, the gaining of money was their besetting sin with the result that running feuds were an inseparable part of most parishes.
Over the last forty years, scholars have interpreted the early modern public execution ritual variously as an affirmation of state power, a chance for victims to fashion a memorable identity on the scaffold, and a site of festivity for those gathered to witness. What, though, do we make of the public execution of a dog? This article considers the 1677 hanging of a dog and its female owner for the crime of bestiality, focusing on early modern English beliefs about animals, human sexuality, and punishment. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, reasons for killing animals involved in bestiality found their basis in interpretations of biblical texts, anxieties about animal familiars, fears of crossbreeding, and a desire to maintain boundaries between beasts and humans. This dog's execution, which occurred publicly and was memorialized in print, complicates the usual understandings of public execution, effectively queering the ritual by destabilizing its meaning.
Emulating Arthur Hertzberg's study, The French Enlightenment and the Jews (1968), many scholars have condemned Voltaire for anti-semitism without considering his ironical writing style, amply evident in Candide. The Philosophical Dictionary, a synopsis of his views on diverse historical, ethical, political, and religious matters, may be culled for matter pertaining to his opinion of Jews and Judaism. A careful analysis of some of Voltaire's controversial statements in the Philosophical Dictionary, often interpreted as anti-Jewish, reveals that he appreciated the Jewish people's abilities and aspirations. His most satirical and hostile comments about the “barbarity” and relative historical insignificance of the Jews—contrary to some historians, he never said that they sought to rule the world, until some former Jews catastrophically transitioned into the infâme, the Christian Church, epitome of evil—usually involved his discussion of the mythical, biblical Jews of Old Testament stories, in whose truth he occasionally pretended to believe.
Britain sheltered thousands of French refugees fleeing the Revolution. Relief organized on their behalf was unique at the time because it included both charitable and government-funded aid to temporary foreign residents. Resources were channeled through nongovernmental voluntary bodies in the French community and distributed by Jean-François de la Marche, the exiled Bishop of Saint Pol de Léon. The emigrants of the 1790s were agents of their own survival, but they also depended on diverse forms of support in host countries. That story has clear parallels in our own time. Eighteenth-century British relief also served as a precursor for subsequent humanitarian funding for victims of war and persecution.
The French Revolution profoundly influenced many of the ideas and institutions that created the modern world. This far-reaching revolutionary upheaval drew widely on eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture to construct and spread modern ideas about human rights, republicanism, legal equality, nationalism, and the value of scientific knowledge. At the same time, France's revolutionary leaders began to create new institutions that France and other modern countries would use to develop large state bureaucracies, mass conscription armies, centralized monetary and taxation systems, nationwide legal codes and police surveillance, carefully orchestrated public rituals, and new plans for public education.
During the French Revolution, thousands of French refugees migrated through the Channel borderlands. At least four thousand settled there. The Channel Island of Jersey served as the loci of migration where economic life operated under “refugeedom,” a polity both apart from and particular to state authority. Refugeedom—in its alterity—suggests a matrix of economic conditions, legal codes, and social relations that can explain the lives of people in the French Revolution's emigration. This study of economic migration offers a way to reframe the French emigration as opportunism and resilience. Refugeedom serves as the analytic framework to understand economic migration, not only as a political crisis of displaced people in the midst of revolution—those seeking refuge from war, persecution, famine, and other hardships—but also as part of a strategy of survival, one that includes the economic migration of labor.
