Yolande Cohen, Féministes et républicaines: Parcours de femmes à l’origine du CNFF (1880–1901) [In French]

This article aims to show that the foundation in 1901 of one of the most prominent French feminist associations, the Conseil national des femmes françaises (CNFF), was the result of the encounter between republican and feminist activist networks. Studying the trajectories of the CNFF’s pioneers, using biographical and archival sources, permits us to better evaluate the influences of free-thinkers, freemasons, and liberal Protestants on the movement. The author shows that these networks, which came together in the fight for the abolition of the regulation on prostitution, were at the heart of first wave feminist struggles for gender equality and the democratization of the Third Republic. Their intervention in the public sphere, especially in this movement, led to an unexpected interplay between feminists and republicans. This feminist moment must also be understood as a republican moment.

Keywords: France, turn of the twentieth century, feminism, republicanism, social reform, prostitution

Nimisha Barton, Marrying into the Nation: Immigrant Bachelors, French Bureaucrats, and the Conjugal Politics of Naturalization in the Third Republic

This article illuminates the conjugal politics of French naturalization bureaucrats during the Third Republic. Against the background of a severe depopulation crisis that heightened anti-bachelor sentiment, unmarried immigrant men came to be seen as a grave threat to the stability of the French nation. In the context of massive immigration, officials endorsed the institution of marriage as an effective means of policing the morality, mobility and sexuality of the foreign-born. Thus, this article demonstrates how French officials used marriage as a disciplinary tool to contain the mobile and moral threat posed by immigrant bachelors rapidly pooling on French soil from 1880 onward. In the process, this article is the first to highlight the gendered and sexual policing logic of the modern French state towards immigrant men while bringing to light the mutually reinforcing histories of immigration, heterosexuality, and marriage in modern France.

Keywords: immigration, marriage, naturalization, sexuality, citizenship

Margaret Cook Andersen, The Office de la Famille Française: Familialism and the National Revolution in 1940s Morocco

This article explores the influence of Vichy’s National Revolution in the empire by looking at the establishment of the Office de la Famille Française (FFO) in Morocco in 1941. The purpose of the FFO was to develop reforms aimed at assisting French families and increasing the French settler birthrate. The Residency, in consultation with settler familialist organizations, created this administrative body in the hopes that it would encourage French population growth, something they considered to be essential to the preservation of French interests in the protectorate. The FFO dispensed a variety of financial benefits to French families including birth incentives and marriage loans. All French citizens were obligated to join the FFO, thereby making the colony’s French children a collective responsibility. Those who lacked sufficient numbers of qualifying French children were required to pay the familial compensation tax to help fund the FFO and in this way support other French families.

Keywords: Morocco, Vichy, family policy, pronatalism, settlers

Nadia Malinovich, Francophonie and Sephardic Difference in the Postwar United States

Drawing on archival material, oral interviews, and memoir literature, this article explores the changing meanings of France, the French language, and French colonialism for francophone Sephardic Jews who immigrated to the United States in the post-World War II years. Initially, both francophonie and a larger sense of connection to France and French culture were points of positive connection that set Jewish immigrants from the Muslim world apart from the Ashkenazic American mainstream. By the turn of the millennium, however, Sephardic francophonie in the United States had become largely attenuated. While this was due in part to demographic factors, it was also the result of changing attitudes towards France and francophonie on the part of both Sephardic immigrants and their descendants, as well the general American and American Jewish population more broadly.

Keywords: post-colonial, Sephardic Jews, sub-ethnic, Mizrahi Jews, francophone

Laura Jeanne Sims, Rethinking France’s “Memory Wars”: Harki Collective Memories, 2003–2010

Since 2005, scholars and politicians have employed a framework of “memory wars” to interpret conflicts over the colonial past in France. The case of the Harkis, Algerians who fought with the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence, and their descendents, challenges basic features of this paradigm. Disputes among children of Harkis about how to interpret the French colonial project in Algeria and their fathers’ motivations for supporting the French reveal the limitations of considering the Harkis and other participants in the Algerian War as unified memory camps, a constituent element of the memory war model. Conceiving of memory debates in terms of a “war” also obscures the ways in which narrating the past can constitute an act of reconciliation and signal a desire for inclusion, as it has for Harki sons and daughters.

Keywords: Harkis, memory wars, Internet, Algerian War, collective memory

Scott Gunther, How and Why “Bobos” Became French

“Bobo” is short for “bohemian bourgeois.” David Brooks coined the term in his book, Bobos in Paradise (2000), where he defined bobos as upper-middle class individuals who espouse liberal politics and who eschew conspicuous consumption. This article examines why use of the term has become widespread in France and has almost disappeared in the United States, despite its American origins. Analysis of representations of bobos in popular media and in interviews with Parisians living in “Boboland” indicates that the relative success of the term in France can be attributed to the fact that the bourgeois part of the definition is more important than the bohemian part, the fact that the term “bourgeois” is more readily understood in France than in the United States, and especially, the inaptness of Bourdieusian notions of cultural capital in the United States and their centrality to the definition of Bobo.

Keywords: gentrification, bobos, Bourdieu, Paris, bourgeois

Gabriel Goodliffe, From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal Elections in France

The March 2014 municipal elections in France confirmed the electoral effectiveness of the Front national’s (FN) strategic reorientation under Marine Le Pen by validating the party’s organizational gambit to wrest local political control from the mainstream parties. This article analyzes the FN’s performance in these elections from the standpoint of political demand and supply. First, it elaborates the social, economic, and partisan conditions of political demand that have enhanced the party’s electoral traction among a growing segment of French voters. In turn, it focuses on the factors of political supply—notably the discursive and organizational aggiornamento undergone by the FN under Marine Le Pen’s leadership—by which the party has been able to expand its local appeal. The article then assesses what the electoral results bode for the FN’s positioning and status within the French party system, arguing that they herald its transformation from serving as a protest party to occupying a direct policymaking role.

Keywords: Front national, Marine Le Pen, French radical Right, French elections, French local elections