Fifteenth George Rudé Seminar in French History and Civilisation

Abstracts

Aldrich, Robert

University of Sydney
Marshal Lyautey's Funerals: The Death and Afterlife of a Colonial Hero
Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854-1934) was an iconic figure of French colonialism: after military service as a young officer in Algiers, he helped 'pacify' Tonkin, served as an administrator in Madagascar, was appointed the first proconsular Resident General of Morocco and, late in life, organised the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931. Lyautey's death in 1934 provided the occasion to commemorate the life of this colonial hero and to celebrate France's colonial vocation, as evidenced in Mar-shal Pétain's eulogy at Lyautey's funeral in his native Nancy and at his burial in Ra-bat. In 1962, however, Moroccan and French authorities considered it appropriate to 'repatriate' Lyautey's remains, and he was reburied in the Invalides in what was, ar-guably, the last great imperial ceremony. The ceremony was postponed, however, because of the attempted putsch in Algiers in the closing phase of the war in that French outpost. President de Gaulle's eulogy at the Invalides heralded Lyautey as a precursor of decolonisation, thus transforming him from a proponent of imperial conquest to a prophet of the independence of colonised countries. Lyautey's life spans France's colonial saga, and his funerals reveal the metamorphosis of colonial-ism in French public life.

Bonner, Elizabeth

Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney
Les Clouet connections: New French archival research for three Oxford DNB articles
This paper will briefly outline the extensive new research, undertaken in Paris, London and Edinburgh, regarding the portraits of three Scots for their new biogra-phies recently commissioned for The Oxford DNB [Dictionary of National Biogra-phy] (published 2004). These Scottish gentlemen: Jean Stuart, 2nd duke of Albany (d.1536), Robert Stuart, 4th lord of Aubigny (d.1544) and Sir William Kirkcaldy of Grange (d.1573), all served at some stage in the French kings' armies of Louis XII, Francis I and Henri II from 1499 to 1556; Albany and Aubigny also served in the diplomatic domain. Apart from the new biographies (which have greatly changed received views), this recent new research has revealed that all three had portraits, ei-ther of themselves or of close relatives, executed by the French court artists Jean Clouet and his son François; and that for all three this new research completely changes previously held artistic and historical views. The extent of this new re-search is such that separate articles of all three will be necessary and it is hoped that they will soon be submitted to Art and/or History journals.

Brocheux, Pierre

Maître de conférence honoraire à l'Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot
Spécialiste d'histoire contemporaine de la France, de la colonisation française et plus spécifiquement du Vietnam Contemporain.

L'intelligentsia vietnamienne en quête d'une utopie révolutionnaire
La France dominatrice et colonisatrice était aussi le berceau d'une révolution des droits de l'homme et du citoyen. C'est celle qui fut la destination du " Voyage à l'Ouest " des Vietnamiens. Ce courant migratoire culturel et politique débuta au tournant du 20è siècle ; en France le groupe dit des " Cinq Dragons " fut le pôle de ralliement autour du lettré Phan Chu Trinh de 1918 à 1923. Que venaient chercher ces hommes en France ? Furent-ils déçus ? substitueront-ils une utopie révolution-naire à une autre ?

French imperialism conquered and ruled Indochina. But France was also the cradle of a revolution for freedom and a country of human rights. The Vietnamese in-tellegentsia, disappointed by Meiji Japan in 1908, turned her expectations toward France. Thus began the "Travel to the West," which had cultural and political aims. In France, a group called the "Five Dragons" gather around the literary figure Phan Chu Trinh from 1918 to 1923. What did they expect from the French Republic? Were they disappointed? Did they try to create another utopia?

Brown, Howard G.

Binghamton University, State University of New York
Howard G. Brown is Professor of History at SUNY Binghamton. His most recent book, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, Repression (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, April 2006), won the Walker Cowen Prize in Eight-eenth-Century Studies.

From Trauma to Tragedy: Images of Revolutionary Violence After the Terror
Most people who lived through the French Revolution did not have personal experi-ences of revolutionary violence. Popular agitation was widespread in the weeks fol-lowing the fall of the Bastille, the King's flight to Varennes, and the overthrow of the monarchy, but only a handful of places actually experienced killing. Even the extremes of the Terror were highly localized phenomena. Thus, most Frenchmen did not personally witness revolutionary violence; they learned about it through the dissemination of printed media whose contents were further spread (and distorted) by word of mouth. Printed images played an especially important part in presenting and interpreting revolutionary violence.

In the months after the overthrow of Robespierre, Frenchmen were bombarded with verbal and visual depictions of revolutionary violence. According to these accounts, guillotine scaffolds, firing squads, and massacres had been so ubiquitous in France that any village that had not witnessed an atrocity must have considered itself fortu-nate indeed. Supposed death tolls ran to a million or more. This barrage of misin-formation served to propagate the idea that France had been through a collective trauma unprecedented in its history; one Thermidorian printmaker gave it biblical proportions by drawing parallels to the plagues of Egypt. Whereas popular prints produced in the late 1790s continued to depict the on-going dangers of fanaticism and banditry, expensive elite images became means to explain and contain revolu-tionary violence. In the course of the following decade, a number of ambitious print-makers produced series of prints that served to historicize revolutionary vio-lence by setting images of it in an interpretive chronology. By the time the Napole-onic dictatorship definitively ended the French Revolution, the most important im-ages of revolutionary violence came to present it as tragedy, regrettable and isolated incidents provoked by political extremism.

Burgess, Greg

School of History, Heritage and Society, Deakin University
Territorial limits in the east. The German revolutions in Alsace, 1848-1849.
The paper will deal with responses in the Bas and Haut Rhin to the 1848 and 1849 revolutions in Bavaria and Baden, especially the measures of policing a) German residents living in those departments among whom revolutionary intrigue was sus-pected; b) the Rhine and its crossings into France to identify and intercept socialist revolutionaries; and c) socialist revolutionaries within the eastern departments. The outcome was the definition of more precise territorial limits through the policing of the frontier.

Carroll, Mark

University of Adelaide
Articles of War: The Prague Manifesto (1948) and the Association française des musiciens progressistes
From 20 to 29 May 1948 the Soviet-sponsored Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics was convened in Prague. The Congress addressed what the French Stalinist weekly Les lettres françaises described as the 'profound crisis engulfing music and musical life during our epoch'. The negative assessment was politically motivated in that the crisis was seen largely as a Western phenome-non, one symptomatic of what was in the Soviet view the ideological and social bankruptcy of the West. The resolutions offered by the Prague Congress, which were tabled in the form of a manifesto, had the effect of forcing a number of French composers and critics to confront a pressing cultural dilemma. The dilemma centred on the question as to whether the more extreme manifestations of avant-garde music could engage with the pressing socio-political issues of the day-the Sartrean notion of commitment-while at the same time remaining aesthetically autonomous. The current paper examines attempts made by key French composers and commentators to resolve the dilemma, which continued to resonate in French musical circles for years to come.

Coller, Ian

University of Melbourne
On the Kechaoua Steps: Revolution and Racialization in 1830
The year of 1830 is marked in French history by the invasion of Algiers which launched a century of French colonial expansion, and the overturning of the re-stored Bourbon monarchy a few months later. Was this simultaneity purely acciden-tal, or did these two political transformations share something in common? From the perspective of conventional French historiography, the 'acquisition' of Algeria had no real political or social significance before the 1880s. By re-examining the questions of race and identity around 1830, we can question this assumption.

During the 1820s a space of Arab identity had opened in Paris with the arrival of a second generation of Arabs raised and educated in France. But at the same time a transformation in racial conceptions, and particularly in the understanding of "French" and "Arab," was taking place around them. This paper investigates these new ideas about race and imperialism, and their intersection with Franco-Arab iden-tities on the steps of the Kechaoua mosque in Algiers.

Cordelle, Délphine

With Thao Tran-Minh
Université Paris IV - La Sorbonne
Delphine Cordelle is a first-year doctoral student in political sociology at the Uni-versité Paris IV - La Sorbonne, working under the direction of François Chazel. Her main field of research deals with the processes of political unification. Her doctoral work focuses on Canada and Switzerland. Her contribution to a recent conference in Bulgaria concerned the processes of regional integration of the Hel-vetic Confederation, and will soon be followed by a publication

Les paradoxes des identités collectives en France
"Jamais peut-être sur cette terre, à aucune époque, depuis l'incarnation de l'idée chrétienne, un pays ne produisit, en un si court espace de temps, une pareille éruption d'idées, d'hommes, de natures, de caractères, de génies, de talents, de catastrophes, de crimes et de vertu, que pendant cette période qu'on appelle du nom de la Révolution française." Alphonse de Lamartine, 1846.

De tous ses héritages, la Révolution Française n'a pas seulement donné naissance à l'élaboration de l'avenir social et politique de la France. Elle a aussi permis au peu-ple français de prendre massivement conscience d'une puissante identité commune. La pensée jacobine, les principes républicains ainsi que les valeurs universelles de liberté, égalité et fraternité y tiennent, entre autres, une place centrale.

Plus de 200 ans après, qu'en est-il? Le contexte social actuel oblige en effet à ré-interroger la notion sous des perspectives différentes. Les changements dé-mographiques et sociaux causés par l'histoire de l'immigration française ont amené de nouvelles questions sociales à résoudre. Parmi elles, la question identitaire est au centre de nombreuses polémiques. Avec une population de plus en plus diverses quant à ses origines, peut-on encore parler d'identité française ? Et si oui, de quelle(s) identité(s) s'agit-il ?

Afin d'éviter de tomber dans la traditionnelle dichotomie simplificatrice entre ré-publicanisme et communautarisme, nous préférons considérer la notion d'identité par rapport aux générations actuelles d'enfants nés en France, de parents issus de l'immigration ou non. Faisant fi des origines et des " différences ", leurs systèmes de références et leurs cadres d'appartenance se croisent et se mélangent en permanence, créant une identité hybride mais homogène, plurielle mais commune, paradoxale-ment constituée des particularismes de ceux qui la composent. Comment concilier ces nouvelles identités tout en étant français ? Par quels chemins peuvent-elles se rattacher à l'idée d'identité française ? Quelles nouvelles interrogations soulèvent-elles ? Quels paradoxes doivent être résolus ?

Nous proposons donc dans notre communication d'observer la construction des identités collectives en France sous une perspective historique et sociologique. Nous illustrerons également notre propos par une micro analyse élaborée à partir de données de terrain autour d'un phénomène de langue en France : le " parler jeune " afin de mieux poser les paradoxes des identités françaises aujourd'hui.

Courtright, Nicola

Amherst College
Nicola Courtright, who received her B.A. at Oberlin College, her M.A. at Yale, and a Ph.D at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1990, has taught the art and architecture of early modern Europe in the Fine Arts Department at Amherst College since 1989. She has received numerous grants to pursue her research, in-cluding a Fulbright, a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and Ameri-can Council of Learned Societies and American Association of University Women post-doctoral fellowships. Her book, The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Six-teenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII and the Tower of the Winds in the Vatican (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), was recently awarded honorable mention for the the Premio Salimbeni per la Storia e la Critica d'Arte.

Courtright has been a member of the College Art Association Board of Directors since 2000, Vice President of Publications since 2004, and has been elected presi-dent for a two-year term beginning in May.

Themes in the Iconography of Rule: Queens' Apartments from the Louvre to Versailles
Owing to the political crises and dynastic breakdown of the sixteenth century in France, queens from the late sixteenth through seventeenth century in France, in-cluding king's spouses and widowed queen regents, were called upon to give the appearance of stability to a fragile state and to a unity only tentatively achieved un-der Henri IV. The sequential early deaths of kings and their young sons, and the ne-cessity for a queen who would see to the continuation of the dynasty, resulted in powerful metaphorical imagery embedding the queen in an iconography of rule, which for a time became the norm in France. Consequently, the art and architecture of queens' realms within royal residences increased in size, symbolic import, and nature of the claim of queens' authority over the course of the hundred years that stretched from Catherine de Médicis' regency for her sons to Marie-Thérèse's queenship as wife of Louis XIV. Imagery incorporating queenship became part of the imaginative apparatus surrounding the monarchy, even when the queen was in no position to wield power but only embodied the appearance of authority.

This paper will focus upon tracing representations of the goddesses Diana, Minerva, and Juno - many now destroyed but known through descriptions and drawings - which threaded throughout royal residences in Fontainebleau, the Louvre, the Tuil-eries, and Versailles, expanding and altering over time to fit the changing purposes of the varied political situations which led to the projects' commissions in the queens' chambers and galleries. These subjects often intentionally paralleled themes developed in the kings' realms, and, regarded in tandem with them, suggest a new political understanding for the decoration of royal domiciles.

Cryle, Peter

Director, Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland
Building a Sexological Concept Through Fictional Narrative: The Case of "Frigidity" in Late Nineteenth-Century France
This paper focuses on a particular publishing milieu which flourished in and around Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century. The paper draws attention to the role played by a group of authors who took the title "Docteur", and published compendia of medical knowledge related to sexuality. These docteurs helped in ef-fect to produce a new set of commonplaces about psychosexuality. Alongside them in the publishers' catalogues there appeared dozens of romans de mœurs. How did the medical knowledge purveyed in the medical compendia compare with that mo-bilised and elaborated in the novels? This question will be pursued by taking the ex-ample of propositions about "frigidity".

Culpin, D. J.

University of St Andrews
Perceptions of France: French books in the early libraries of South Australia
In 1848, the South Australian Library and Mechanics' Institute came into existence. It was the first stable library in South Australia. In 1856 its books passed to the li-brary of the South Australian Institute, whose holdings continued to grow until 1883, when many of the books were transferred to the fledgling Public Library, forerunner of today's State Library. Between 1848 and 1883 the two early libraries built up a collection of nearly 20,000 works of which a little over 500 were by French authors, and almost half of those books were in French. This paper will fol-low the growth of the collection of French books and examine the nature of the books that were acquired. Its purpose is to highlight the place of French culture within the intellectual life of early South Australia and to demonstrate the changing tastes of readers with regard to French culture.

Cunningham, Michele

University of Adelaide
Michele Cunningham is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History & Politics
'French Pictures In English Chalk' - A Love-Hate Relationship
The relationship between England and France has ever been one of alliance and mis-alliance, enmity and uneasy friendship, but the term 'love-hate' would most aptly describe the anomalies that prevailed in that relationship during the period of the Second French Empire. English writers in this period produced innumerable ar-ticles and letters relaying their perceptions of France and the French to the English public. Satirical writers such as Grenville Murray gave a mocking and amusing por-trayal of French customs, the French Emperor, political figures and government administration that complemented and enhanced the images portrayed in the carica-tures of the day that were circulated in magazines such as Punch.

At the same time more serious writers and intellectuals such as Walter Bagehot, Thomas Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill exam-ined political processes and happenings in France. Much of their thought was di-rected to determining whether the French would ever be able to achieve the moral and political stability and liberty that, in their minds, was unique to England. Bage-hot was one who went further by depicting the differences between the national characters of the French and the English - fundamental differences that perhaps added to the constant misunderstandings during the reign of Napoleon III.

This paper will explore the extent to which the views of these writers were reflected in the relationship between British ministers and the French Emperor and his ministers.

Dauphin, Cécile

Fellow of the Centre de recherches historiques (CRH) Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Cécile Dauphin's major works include:
"L'enquête postale de 1847." (With Pier-rette Pézerat and Danièle Poublan) in La correspondance: Les usages de la lettre au XIXe siècle, ed. Roger Chartier, 21-119. (Paris: Fayard, 1991). "Les femmes seules" in Histoire des femmes, vol. 4: Le XIXe siècle, ed. Georges Duby and Mi-chelle Perrot, 445-459, ( Rome: Laterza, and Paris: Plon, 1991). "Women Alone" in A history of women in the West, vol. 4: Emerging feminism from revolution to world war, ed. Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot. Ces bonnes lettres. Une cor-respondance familiale au XIXe siècle, (With Pierrette Pézerat and Danièle Poublan). (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). De la violence et des femmes (With Arlette Farge.) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). Prête-moi ta plume… Les manuels épistolaires au XIXe siècle, (Paris: Kimé, 2000). Séduction et sociétés: Approches historiques. (With Arlette Farge.) (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

La lettre au XIXe siècle : du texte à l'image
Dans le cadre de recherches sur la culture épistolaire, on ne peut ignorer les gra-vures et les vignettes qui ont abondamment illustré le thème de la lettre et qui enva-hissent l'édition au XIXe siècle. De cette enquête en cours, je présenterai quelques exemples tirés des manuels épistolaires et des partitions de chansons : a quoi ser-vent les images ? quels savoirs construisent-elles sur les pratiques ? Que disent-elles des relations sociales et du contexte historique?

Davey, Eleanor

University of Melbourne
Eleanor Davey has just completed an Honours degree in history and French at the University of Melbourne. She is passionate about human rights debates and their influence on political discourse. This is Eleanor's first conference, but - all things going well - hopefully not her last.

La mémoire indifférente: Vichy, the Holocaust, and the Bosnian Crisis
Focusing on the most intense phase of the Bosnian crisis, this paper examines the relationship between debates about Vichy and the French response to the Yugoslav conflicts. If the memory of Vichy and the Holocaust was confined to memorials and trials and didn't translate into action against ethnic violence, Alain Finkielkraut ar-gued, then it could only ever be a 'mémoire indifférente.' While ethnic cleansing and concentration camps operated in Bosnia-Herzegovina, much energy was given over to France's attempt to weigh up the meaning of the Occupation. Successive contro-versies ignited over Mitterrand's tributes to Pétain, the Vélodrôme d'Hiver com-memorations, trials of collaborationists, and the president's own 'Vichy past.' The intellectuals' campaign for intervention in Bosnia, which vied for public attention amidst the Vichy debates, has been recognised as exceptional for the way it united such important figures as Jacques Julliard, Rony Brauman, Bernard Kouchner, Ber-trand Poirot-Delpech, and the inimitable Bernard-Henri Lévy. The paper traces these debates through the French media from 1992 to 1995, including newspapers and other journals, public speeches, and more substantial publications from some of the key participants. This is the story of a period, to quote Finkielkraut again, 'haunted by Nazism but blind to that which resemble[d] it the most.' The paper ar-gues that Chirac's 1995 'Vél d'Hiv' speech, in which he invested presidential author-ity simultaneously in the recognition of French responsibility for Vichy and in a call for action in Bosnia, offered both symbolic and political resolution to three years of intense historical debate.

Dickson, William

Glasgow
From l'école laïque to the regional novel: the creation of identity in Modern France
This paper will look at the question of French identities from a literary viewpoint, confronting late 19th century attitudes in education with late 20th century attitudes to laïcité and the countryside. The argument will be that a certain identity is created at the end of the 19th century and that this falls apart as from .1968, while simulta-neously becoming recreated as a Third Republic myth.

The paper will centre not so much on education from a political or theoretical point of view as on its translation into practice, via the use of textbooks in the teaching of history, ethics, geography and French, and confront the principal issues in this with the narratives which we find in the second half of the 20th century, especially in what may be called the 'regional novel'.

This can be seen as one of the sources for the current attitude in France to what can be seen as 'Third Republic' myths concerning education and 'la France profonde.' The 'lieux de mémoire' can thus be seen as being transformed from historical mate-rials to a selective memory based on modern literary (and televisual) translations of the past.

Drapac, Vesna

University of Adelaide
Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951): the crisis of the individual as a precursor to the death of resistancialism
The 'nation of resisters' became the 'nation of collaborators' relatively soon after the war. Generally, historians identify the 'Paxtonian revolution' as the definitive turning point, noting that from the early 1970s France began (grudgingly) to confront the dark years of the war eventually debunking the so-called myth of resis-tance. The focus was on the relationship between the crimes of the Vichy regime, notably its complicity in the Holocaust, and the demise of resistancialism. Some argue, wrongly, that the two are mutually incompatible. I am interested in exploring the relationship between evocations of the resistance ideal and its subsequent demise rather than juxtaposing collaboration and resistance. My particular focus is the early opus of the filmmaker Robert Bresson (1907-1999). Emphasis on the individ-ual and private over the collective or institutional and public face of resistance, combined with the privileging of the heroic over the everyday led to a resistance ideal that could not be sustained in the post-war world. Technically and thematically, Diary of a Country Priest prepared the way for Bresson's quintessential film of the resistance, A Man Escaped (1956), and the 1951 film sheds light on the intel-lectual and cultural precursors of the death of resistancialism.

Emerson, John

Law School, University of Adelaide
Representing or Re-presenting the colonial past in French and Australian cinema
France and Australia have such different cultural and historical identities that they are not usually compared in any real depth. But both have troubled colonial pasts - France as a former coloniser and Australia as a successful British colony - that have had a legacy on their quest for a post-colonial cultural identity. Many colonial prac-tices contradicted fundamental modern Western philosophical and moral principles.

Both countries have also had a strong national cinema in the post-colonial period and around a dozen films from each have been released between 1970 and 2000 set in the colonial past with white directors.

This paper draws on my PhD thesis to explore the characteristics of these films and whether they are evidence of a genuine questioning, or are they simply re-presenting history in a way that is more digestible to contemporary audiences.

Are some themes favoured and others omitted? Why are there so many rural land-scapes? Are there similarities in the narratives? Who dies and what effect does that have? Who are the main characters? Is there is bias to fictional or historical events? How are colonised people represented? Is it even possible to represent the Other?

The surprising similarities reveal both the themes that each country avoids and the degree to which the colonial past is reworked or genuinely reviewed.

Evans, Martin

University of Portsmouth
Martin Evans is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Ports-mouth, United Kingdom. He is the author of the Memory of Resistance; French Op-position to the Algerian War 1954-62 (1997) and the co-author (with Emmanuel Godin) of France 1815 to 2003 (2004). He is the editor of Culture and Empire (2004) and the co-editor of War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (1997) and The French Army and the Algerian War (2002). He has just completed a co-authored history of Algeria to be published by Yale University Press in 2007. Mar-tin would like to acknowledge the British Academy for supporting his attendance at the conference.

The Civilising Mission, Islam and Torture: The French Socialist Party and the Algerian War 1954-62
The aim of this paper is to outline a major reinterpretation of the Algerian War 1954-62 by focusing upon the intensification of the conflict in spring 1956. At this point the Socialist led Republican Front government, elected on a platform of peace in the January general election, rejected negotiations with the National Liberation Front (FLN), called up 400,000 reservists and gave the army special powers to eradicate the insurrection. Yet, the fundamental significance of this moment has been ignored because the new historiography looks at the end of the war and its leg-acy. This paper, therefore, confronts these lacunae. By charting how the clash of ideas led to the institutionalisation of torture, the use of conscripts and the ascen-dancy of the FLN, it will demonstrate how this period marked the turning point that framed the subsequent phases of the conflict. As such the paper will present a re-conceptualisation of the war's origins.

Within this paper I will draw upon original source material from the governor-general (series CAB/CM) at the Colonial Archive, Aix-en-Provence; intelligence on FLN military strategy (series 1H 1558-2), French counter-insurgency tactics (series 1H 1119-1 and 1H2573-5) and the state of civil-military-military relations (IH 11123-1 and 1H 2473-1) at the French Army Archive, Paris; and the minutes of the Socialist Party annual conferences 1955-57, at the Socialist Party Archive, Paris. I will also use material from the National Assembly debates and oral evidence from key actors as well as ordinary party members, including André Mandouze who was closely linked to Pierre Mendès-France and has been extremely informative in terms of explaining the lines of communication that were open between the gov-ernment and the FLN in spring 1956. In doing so this paper will highlight the key ideas (republicanism, universalism, secularism) which legitimised the mission to civilise Muslim Algeria. It will also reveal the existence of a Munich syndrome where the settlers were likened to the Czechs in 1938 and Nasser's pan-Arabism perceived as the new Nazism. Moreover, the paper will provide new insights into the mechanisms by which these ideas became policy, analysing now the Republican Front fashioned a strategy to win over the Muslim population (above all Muslim women) and isolate the FLN. Finally the paper will consider how Algeria inter-sected with policies towards America, Israel, European integration and concepts of Eurafrique.

In structural terms the paper will organised around the following five themes - ideological justifications; attitudes towards Algerian nationalism and pan-Arabism; perceptions of Islam; practical policy on the ground to win hearts and minds; and the issue of torture and human rights. As such, by providing an in-depth of analysis of French responses to FLN's guerrilla warfare, this paper will make a specific con-tribution to the historiography of insurgency and counter-insurgency, facilitating in-triguing comparisons with Ireland, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. In this way the conference paper will have important implications for policy formation in the con-temporary world.

Foley, Susan

Principal Fellow, History Department University of Melbourne
Feminine Forms: Femininity and Identity in the Letters of Leonie Leon and Leon Gambetta
Nineteenth century epistolary manuals - mostly written by men - frequently repre-sented both the writer and the reader of the letter as female. Moreover, they con-structed the letter as the 'feminine' form par excellence, extolling the talents of epistolary luminaries such as Madame de Sévigné. This picture, as Cécile Dauphin has argued, says more about gendered social norms than about real social practices. It has inspired this paper, which will explore representations of femininity in the correspondence of Léonie Léon and Léon Gambetta. Léonie drew on contemporary conventions of femininity to represent herself (as did Gambetta in imagining her), but at the same time her epistolary 'self' was deeply subversive of those norms. 'Femininity' proved sufficiently malleable to serve a variety of ends. This play of feminine forms was an integral element in the game of seduction which bound Léonie Léon and Léon Gambetta together.

Fornasiero, Jean

University of Adelaide
The Compleat French Scientific Explorer: Nicolas Baudin
The rehabilitation of the much-maligned French navigator, Nicolas Baudin, com-menced in a patchy fashion in the mid-twentieth century and gradually gathered momentum until the present day, when, for scholars of maritime history, the recog-nition of his expedition's achievements is almost universal. In spite of this belated recognition - a recognition which extends mainly to the scientific results of the Baudin expedition to Terra Australis (1800-1804) - , persistent rumours and myths continue to affect the evaluation of Baudin himself. The commander's personal qualities and skills tend to be undervalued, particularly in comparison with those of other European navigators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, such negative or tentative assessments of Nicolas Baudin, whether as navigator, leader of men or man of science, are indeed rarely based upon an objective evalua-tion of his entire career or even upon a detailed knowledge of his last and best-known voyage. From a detailed review of the existing facts, a different picture emerges. Not only can a case be made for a full and frank rehabilitation of this complex and intriguing personality, but also for his elevation to the rank of com-pleat French scientific voyager.

Freadman, Anne

University of Melbourne
Colette's Early Writing on the Cinema

Garrioch, David

Monash University
David Garrioch teaches history at Monash University in Melbourne. His most re-cent book is The Making of Revolutionary Paris (University of California Press, 2002).

The Protestants of Paris and the Old Regime
Little is known of the Protestants of Paris in the eighteenth century. Officially they did not exist, and certainly the 5-8,000 strong community of the early 1680s had been drastically reduced by emigration and forced conversion. Yet many Protes-tants maintained their faith, despite the persecution. Focussing on the early part of the eighteenth century, this paper asks how they managed to do so.

Gildea, Robert

University of Oxford
Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern French History at the University of Oxford and has been appointed Professor of Modern History there from October 2006. His books include The Past in French History (1994), France since 1945 (1996) and Marianne in Chains: in Search of the German Occupation, 1940-1945 (2002), which won the Wolfson History Prize. He is co-editor of 'Surviving Hitler and Mussolini: Daily Life in Occupied Europe', to be published by Berg this summer. He is cur-rently working on a history of nineteenth-century France for Penguin, to appear be-tween the volumes by Colin Jones and Roderick Kedward, provisionally entitled Children of the Revolution, and is putting together a collaborative project on 1968 in Europe.

Eternal France: crisis and national self-perception in France, 1870-2005
This paper was provoked by the incomprehension felt at the rejection by the French electorate of the European Constitutional Treaty on 29 May 2005, which effectively brought the movement towards a federal Europe to a stop. My understanding of France's relationship with its past, explored in The Past in French History, assumed that it switched between De Gaulle's confident and thrusting 'France cannot be France without greatness', and the open, generous conception of la patrie as the bearer of universal values of liberty and civilization, captured by Michelet in 1831 when he described France as 'the pilot of humanity's vessel'. The 'no' vote seemed to articulate a deep-seated anxiety about outside threats to French national identity which has in fact manifested itself frequently at times of national crisis since 1870. This paper explores the construction of a closed, fearful, defensive view of the fa-therland in the older sense of an ancestral homeland, indeed of an 'eternal France', whose identity was designed to counter the ravages of time in a turbulent and men-acing world.

Greenhalgh, Elizabeth

University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy
Elizabeth Greenhalgh is a Research Fellow at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences at UNSW at ADFA, and is Joint Editor of War & Society.

The Question of Command in a Coalition War: The Case of Marshal Ferdinand Foch
For too long Foch has been remembered solely as the unthinking apostle of the 'of-fensive à outrance'. This paper examines what Foch did between 1914 and 1918, as opposed to what his pre-war writings hypothesised. Using archival records in the Archives nationales and the Service historique de la Défense, it concentrates on the various command positions that Foch occupied, emphasising the diplomatic skills required to manage the allied relationships involved in those command positions. The road to the clearing at Rethondes where Foch accepted the German signature on the Armistice was more rocky and required greater navigational skills than has usually been acknowledged.

Gutman, Sanford

State University of New York
Sanford Gutman is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the State University of New York at Cortland. He regularly teaches courses on the French Revolution, Modern France, and the Holocaust. Professor Gutman carries out research and has published in two very distinct areas of French history. He be-gan his work on the French Restoration and interpretations of the French Revolu-tion, but for many years has pursued his interest in the Jews of France in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a book on France During the Holocaust.

Artificial Schemes for the Creation of An Aristocracy During the French Restoration
In an effort to buttress the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814-1815 a number of thinkers across the conservative-liberal divide advocated the frequently artificial creation of an aristocracy. The schemes varied, but they all opposed basing an aristocracy on the traditional noblesse, especially defined in "racial" terms, of the Old Regime. These thinkers, many of whom played important roles in the Restora-tion, sought to create a hereditary aristocracy in order to preserve (or create) order, stability, and social cohesion, but also a form of liberty. In various ways they wanted to "create" a tradition that amalgamated aspects of the Old Regime and Revolution. Benjamin Cottu and Bigot de Morogues advocate for two of the most "creative" plans, but some of the more famous names of the Restoration, such as Constant, Guizot, Lanjuinais, and even the ultra-royalist Bonald, also weigh in with their aristocratic schemes.

Hewitt, Nicholas

University of Nottingham
Marseille qui Jazz: Popular Culture in the Second City Between the Wars

Horne, John

Trinity College, Dublin
John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College, Dublin, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an executive member of the Centre de Re-cherche at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France. He has published widely on the history of both the Great War and of twentieth-century France, in-cluding Labour at War: France and Britain, 1914-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and (ed.) Démobilisations cul-turelles après la Grande Guerre (Paris: Noêsis, 2002). With Alan Kramer, he wrote German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which has been translated into German and French. In 2005 he delivered the annual Marc Bloch lecture at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, on 'Entre expérience et mémoire: les soldats français de la Grande Guerre', published in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 60, 5, September-October 2005, pp. 903-19. He is currently working on a history of the French experience in the First World War.

Demobilizing the Mind: France and the Legacy of the Great War, 1919-1939
Twice in the twentieth century, France has been engulfed by a world war that over-turned Clausewitz's celebrated dictum. For rather than being the pursuit of politics by other means, this kind of war dwarfed politics and left the countries concerned struggling for decades to come to terms with the experience. The legacy of France's defeat and occupation in the Second World War is still tangible. However, the ear-lier experience of the Great War, which France ostensibly won but at the cost of 1.4 million dead and the destruction of its northeastern region, was no less traumatic. How that was so will be addressed by considering the ways in which the French sought to return to peace in the 1920s, as they dismantled the mind-sets and values of wartime. They engaged in a process of cultural demobilization that meant, among other things, seeing war, not the Germans, as the true enemy, investing the soldiers' wartime sacrifice in a peaceful future, restoring humanity to the enemy by myriad forms of contact, and reconstituting the international 'communities of truth' shat-tered by the war.

Hulliung, Mark

Brandeis University
Mark Hulliung is Professor of History at Brandeis University. His major publica-tions include Montesquieu and the Old Regime (University of California Press 1976); Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, 1983); The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Harvard, 1994); Contemporary Political Ideologies [co-author of 6th edition] (HarperCollins 1996); and Citizens and Citoyens: Re-publicans and Liberals in America and France (Harvard 2002).

Why was Sartre unable to finish the Critique of Dialectical Reason?

Jankowski, Paul

Brandeis University
Paul Jankowski, Chair of the Department of History at Brandeis University, is the author of Communism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919-1944 (Yale University Press, 1989) and Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Cornell University Press, 2002).

Verdun in French History
Very occasionally cities in wartime transcend whatever strategic significance they boast, and acquire the enduring quality of legend. Verdun, like Saragossa before and Stalingrad after, is one of them. Verdun quickly became the defining episode of the war for the French, and has remained so ever since. For good reasons: most of the French army took part, with divisions moving in and out on a regular basis; the density of the suffering made the ten-month ordeal the emblem of attrition; the un-precedented scale of the artillery bombardments marked the ascension to extremes of industrial warfare, announcing the scorched earth of 1918 and the century of total war.

Yet the grim consensus hides an unsettled question. Even before the siege ended in a defensive French victory, it provoked competing views of its place in the history of the nation. Was it the moment when Germany failed, or when France finally ac-knowledged her own weakness? A triumph of Republican civilization, or the end of French messianism? The last major victory of French arms, or the origin of their de-feat in the following war?

These and other questions form the subject of this paper.

Jennings, William

University of Waikato
William Jennings is Convenor of the French Studies programme at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has published in the field of Creole Studies, with par-ticular emphasis on early French colonial history.

The Historiography of Early French Voyages of Exploration: from Myths to Realities
The Normans were trading in West Africa as early as 1364; Jean Cousin reached Brazil four years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic; Binot Paulmier de Gonne-ville found Terra Australis Incognita in 1504. Gonneville's voyage in particular in-spired many fruitless expeditions to the southern ocean, and is the reason that the French flag flies today over the Kerguelen Islands. This paper examines how these tales of early French exploration were for centuries accepted as authentic, and re-views the recent research on the voyages.

Jones, Adrian

La Trobe University, Melbourne
Moreau de Brassey in Moldavia in 1711
On the banks of the Prut River in Moldavia in 1711, an Ottoman army commanded by Grand Vizier Baltacý Mehmed Paþa (a Topkapý Sarayý divan poet from Kasta-monu) surrounded a Russian force commanded by Peter the Great. A day of retreat and two days of battle ensued. Jean-Nicole Moreau de Brazi wrote a memoir of the campaign. Commanding a regiment of dragoons from Kazan, Brazi witnessed the campaign. Tsar Peter and his wife-to-be, Catherine (formerly a Lithuanian peasant named Marta) were with the army. All feared defeat and, worse still, capture -- the fate of Charles XII of Sweden, languishing in the Ottoman fortress in Bender, after his defeat at Poltava in Ukraine in 1709. The Tsar sued for peace, sending his best diplomat, a Jewish former market stall-holder, shtats-kantselr Peter Shafirov, and his best old-Muscovite general, Count Boris Sheremet'ev. Catherine collected cash and the crown jewels for them to take. The Grand Vizier indulged their request.

Many Turks say he also had an assignation with Catherine. He ordered his huge Ot-toman army of janissaries, Balkan Christians, Anatolian Turks, and Budzhak and Crimean Tatars to part, allowing Peter and his force of 40,000 to scurry back to Ukraine. This paper considers this French source on the campaign, a source that once fuelled the curiosity of Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet and would-be historian.

Kalifa, Dominique

Centre d'histoire du XIXème siècle, Paris-1
L'Archipel pénitentiaire de l´armée française en Afrique du Nord (fin XIXe siècle)

Lambelet, André

University of Adelaide
André Lambelet teaches history at the University of Adelaide.

'Partir pour un pays inconnu': Command, culpability, and community in the 17th Infantry Regiment's 1907 Mutiny)
In June 1907, at the height of the winegrowers' revolt in the south of France, sol-diers of the 17th Infantry Regiment erupted in mutiny. Although the mutiny was quickly contained and bloodlessly quelled, it brought into sharp focus the tensions inherent in the French military system and in the ideology that created the system. Whose interests ought the army defend? The mutineers' actions suggested that the common soldiers of the 17th Infantry Regiment, joined by some of their officers, had drawn the alarming conclusion that army must not be used to defend the state against popular insurrections. Within the army's higher echelons, the mutiny pro-voked a re-examination of the intricate connections between morale, discipline, and the links tying soldiers to their localities and the patrie.

Macknight, Elizabeth C.

Department of History, University of Melbourne
Nuptials and Afterwards: Marriage in Parisian High Society 1880-1914
What did it take to make a successful marriage in Parisian High Society? Did love count, or was it purely wealth and status that guided aristocrats in the search for a spouse? My paper explores the function and significance of marriage for the Pari-sian nobility in the three decades before 1914. It focuses particularly on nobles' views of marriage between two people of different faiths, nationalities, or political allegiances. The subtle changing balance of "power" within couples is also dis-cussed. Who "ruled" the roost in an aristocratic coop?

Marshall, Jonathan

Edith Cowan University
Dr Jonathan Marshall is a Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. An interdisciplinary historian, his prin-cipal research is in the interactions between the history of performance & that of medicine (psychiatry, neurology, physiology). His PhD thesis was entitled 'Perform-ing Neurology: The dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot' (University of Mel-bourne: 2003). In it, he examined the theatrical models & techniques employed in Charcot's pedagogical & clinical practice at the Salpêtrière Women's Hospice, Paris, 1862-1893. In 2005, Marshall was awarded a Visiting Researcher Grant at the Bakken Library & Museum of Electricity, Minneapolis, to research the relation-ship of fin de siècle parascience to early French neurophysiology. Material from Marshall's thesis has been published in the Proceedings of the Western Society of French History (2002), Double Dialogues (2003), & his paper from the 'Sexuality at the fin de siècle' conference (Queensland University: 2005) is currently pending. Marshall is also a leader in the research of contemporary Australian performance & the avant-garde, with articles in Australasian Drama Studies & Performance Paradigms. Marshall is a contributing editor for the national arts journal Real Time Australia.

The Nude in Movement, 1862-1940: Medical approaches to the history of art & the aesthetics of the body after Charcot
While considerable scholarship exists on the work in neurology and hysteria con-ducted by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Women's Hospice, Paris, 1862-1893, comparatively little has been written on his former students Paul Richer and Henry Meige, who taught at the School of Fine Arts, Paris, 1903-1922 and 1922-1940 respectively. I will examine this legacy, providing a close reading of their writings, illustrating how Charcot's school developed a novel art-historical approach structured around a visual, dramaturgical critique of the neuropathologically sensi-tive body; a body liable to choreographic excess and other symptoms. Their work constitutes, in this sense, an inversion of the very same terms as those identified in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which Dionysian motifs, religious dance and possession were seen rather as diagnostic signs of illness.

Charcot and Richer's The Demoniacs in Art (1886) was read by physicians and laymen as well as by artists. This history of possession and religious ecstasy was one of several art-historical studies in which Charcot's followers proposed that con-temporary aesthetics be modified in the light of their discoveries in physiology, neurology and applied athletics. It was Richer and Meige who later fleshed out Charcot's medical description of the choreographic revels practiced by various peo-ples while in the throes of religious ecstasy throughout history. Richer's particular focus was the healthy athletic model Particularly in a 1921 lecture, Meige con-structed ancient religious performance as a totalising dramaturgical form, in which rich décor, thrumming beats and hypnotic passes generated "a psychoneuropathic tumult … exteriorised by prophetic words and rhythmic gestures"; a veritable "cho-reomania" of psychophysical excess. As one of Charcot's last remaining supporters, Meige systematised this condemnatory model of classical religious dance just as the writings of Nietzsche and others were being reflected in celebratory readings of those friezes depicting such classical revels. Proponents of modern dance such as Isadora Duncan and Maurice Emmanuel claimed these images provided a precedent for their innovative styles, while Aby Warburg saw the dynamism of body in such art as a marker of its immanent truth and modernity.

McCormack, Jo

Institute for International Studies, University of Technology, Sydney
French Identities in the Classroom: Teaching French History of the Algerian War
The French education system, particularly through the teaching of history and phi-losophy, has long been an essential pillar of the French Republican model of soci-ety. However as France enters the twenty first century, the system is clearly under considerable strain. For years memory battles have raged over Vichy and more re-cently the Algerian War. Concomitantly, the education system has changed consid-erably - with massification and a far more culturally diverse student body. Whereas for Henry Rousso the educative vector of memory is the "the primary social means by which memory is transmitted from generation to generation" for Pierre Nora "Ce n'est plus à l'école, instrument central du dispositif traditionnel […] que s'exprime l'esprit de la commemoration […]". This paper will, through reference to a case study of the teaching of the Algerian War in French secondary schools conducted in the late 1990s and other sources, assess the extent to which the teaching of history can still be seen to be important to nation building in contemporary France. How, if at all, are the changing identities of the student body reflected in the "common memory" that the history programme represents? It will show that from the State prescribed link in the educational chain - textbooks, programmes, bulletins officials - to the classroom (through interviews with teachers and pupils) the teaching of his-tory is still very much dictated by Republican secular principles, limiting the amount that can be discussed on a divisive topic such as the Algerian War. Conse-quently the education system is unable to meet some of the objectives it sets itself.

McPhee, Peter

University of Melbourne
Peter McPhee is an historian of revolutionary France. He has published widely on France since 1780. Major works include A Social History of France 1789-1914 (London, 2003) and The French Revolution 1789-1799 (Oxford, 2002). He is Dep-uty Vice-Chancellor (Academic) of the University of Melbourne.

Lecture: "Daily Life in the French Revolution"
How do we recapture the lived experience of the French Revolution for the millions of people who lived in France's country towns and villages? Did the Revolution's laws affect daily life, or did people make changes to their own lives? In the end, were the most important aspects of family and private life beyond the reach of revo-lutionaries? This lecture suggests that they were not: life could never be the same again for anyone.

Moore, Alison

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland
The Invention of the Unsexual: placing female frigidity within a history of sexuality
Studying the construction of the idea of feminine sexual frigidity in France at the beginning of the twentieth century is a particularly useful pivot for theoretical con-sideration of what it means to write history of sexuality more broadly. Historians have frequently overlooked concepts of non-pleasure within discourses of sexuality since these appear on the surface to have little to do with the creation of medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic attempts to categorise and hierarchise sexual behav-iour. But this paper will argue that the imagining of the unsexual feminine subject in medical, literary, and vulgarised hybrid texts of the fin-de-siècle was a part of an effort to define sexuality as a quantifiable and tangible thing via a delineation of its failures and absences. The frigid woman stood not in opposition to the perverse of nymphomanic one, but was considered one and the same, since the failure to ex-perience appropriate pleasure was as much a 'perversion' of the norm as any other sexual pathology. While late nineteenth-century visions accorded greater multiplic-ity to explanations of frigidity, in the early twentieth century there was a growing interpretation of frigidity as a failure of femininity, and a phallic resistance to the gender order. The frigid woman, by refusing to partake in the experience of pleas-ure fails to cast her bid in the defense of heterosexual normativity and is thus an en-emy of it. Tracking changing concepts of frigidity thus allows us to look afresh at the periodisation of sexual discourses suggested by Foucaldian historians.

Moschetto, Bruno-François

Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie
Je suis actuellement en poste à l'Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie et je travaille sur Montesquieu dans le cadre d'un doctorat que je mène à l'issue de mes études (un peu anciennes déjà) à l'Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud ou j'ai passé l'agrégation de lettres modernes.

L'idée de résistance dans 'Les Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence', de Montesquieu.
Ce petit ouvrage, publié pour la première fois en 1734, alors que la France sortait de la guerre de Succession d'Espagne et qu'elle allait bientôt s'engager dans la guerre de Succession d'Autriche, contient les prémices d'une philosophie de l'histoire et d'une réflexion sur le pouvoir, que la critique moderne met de plus en plus souvent en valeur. Les lectures d'aujourd'hui en font également ressortir la dimension d'his-toire paradoxale, insolente ou inactuelle sur les Romains. L'idée de résistance, in-carnée par des figures diverses comme, par exemple, Pyrrhus, Annibal, Mithridate, Attila ou Bélisaire, selon que l'on se place en dehors ou à l'intérieur de l'espace ro-main protéïforme, concentre de façon originale le caractère novateur de l'écriture de Montesquieu sur le thème romain, topique de l'érudition et de l'idéologie classiques. Cette idée est en effet subtilement valorisée dans l'ouvrage et soutient une critique implicite de l'impérialisme territorial, menée par le futur auteur de L'Esprit des loix."

Murray, William

Reader in History, La Trobe University
'Surtout pas de sport': sport and the French'
The reputation of the French for being less interested in sport than other cultural pursuits has been seriously contested in the last decade and more, particularly with the success of the French national football team. France's presumed lack of interest in sport is despite it being the country that founded most of the great international sporting organizations, the Olympics (1896) and the World Cup in football (1930) in particular, but also all of the European football competitions still in existence to-day, while in cycling and car racing the Tour de France and the 24 Hour Le Mans road race are the pinnacle of their particular sport. A majority of today's interna-tional sporting competitions are known by their French acronym, FIFA the most famous of these.

Little of this has been incorporated into the general histories of France, despite sport being the private passion of literary people like Henri de Montherlant and Paul Valéry, most famously Albert Camus, while Jean Giraudoux, whose condemnation of sport ("surtout pas de sport") indirectly indicates how popular it was in private conversation, played rugby with great enthusiasm.

French academics came later to sport history than those of the anglophone countries who were among the first. But the relatively new discipline incorporating one of the world's oldest pleasures is still treated with a certain disdain, even in the anglo-phone countries. This is more an indication of academic snobbery than a reflection of the importance of the subject.

This paper takes up some of these questions with particular emphasis on the period leading up to the Second World War, above all the election of the Popular Front government in the summer of 1936. which came at the same time as the heated de-bates over French participation in the Popular Olympics in Barcelona in July 1936 and the Nazi Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in February 1936 and the sum-mer games in Berlin the following August.

Nettelbeck, Colin

University of Melbourne
Colin Nettelbeck is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Languages at the Univer-sity of Melbourne. He has published extensively on contemporary French literature, cinema, and cultural history. His most recent book is Dancing with de Beauvoir: Jazz and the French (2004), Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. .

Joint ASFS/Rudé Seminar Panel: Kechiche and the French Classics: On the Difficulty of Safeguarding an Outsider's View

Kassovitz and Sarkozy's racaille: Art and the Alienation of Politics in Contemporary France
When, in late 2005, the suburban housing estates around Paris and other French cit-ies exploded into a maelstrom of rioting and burning, the French Interior Minister and Presidential candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, dismissed the events as the work of la racaille. In response to this remark, which many judged unwise and indeed literally incendiary, the filmmaker Mathieu Kassovtiz posted a searing attack on Sarkozy on his web page, and in turn, this led to a public reply from the Minister. Kassovitz, who had made his name in 1995 with La Haine, a ground-breaking exposé of the multiple failures of French society to provide effective structures for the integration of the growing numbers of disaffected, unemployed and humiliated youth in the ci-tés, and who had gone on to become a major representative figure in the world of French culture, was not someone Sarkozy felt he could ignore. But why? This paper will argue that what was at stake in the sharp exchange between the filmmaker and the politician was not a matter of personalities or even of the particular events con-cerned. At its heart is a profound conflict between culture and politics that it is de-stabilising contemporary French society. Sarkozy's motivation in engaging with Kassovitz was to reassert the absolute primacy of the political over all other aspects of French identity. Kassovitz, for his part, was speaking for a world of art and art-ists, one of whose keenest insights is that the political sphere in France has become tragically alienated from the realities of life.

Offenstadt, Nicolas

Université de Paris 1 - Panthéon
Nicolas Offenstadt teaches history at the Université de Paris I-Panthéon. He wrote Les Fusillés de la Grande Guerre et la mémoire collective (1914-1999) (Odile Jacob, 1999, 2002), directed and contributed articles to Le Chemin des Dames, de l'événement à la mémoire (Paris, Stock, 2004); edited Abel Ferry's Carnets secrets 1914-1918 (Paris, Grasset, 2005); and directed (with Didier Lett) Haro ! Noël ! Oyé ! Pratiques du cri au Moyen Age (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003).

Keynote address: Le Cri objet d'histoire
The Chemin des Dames - from event to memory

Pekacz, Jolanta T.

Dalhousie University, Canada
Jolanta T. Pekacz earned a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Polish Academy of Sci-ences and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Alberta, and currently holds a Canadian Research Chair in European Studies at Dalhousie University, Canada. She is the author of Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (1999) and Music in the Culture of Polish Galicia, 1772-1914 (2002; co-winner of the 2003 AAASS/Orbis Book Prize); editor of Musical Biography: To-wards New Paradigms (2006) and co-editor of World Maps 1200-1700: A Bibliog-raphy of Scholarship on Mappaemundi and Early World Maps (1997) and Polonia in Alberta (1995). Her articles on Old-Regime French salons, Fryderyk Chopin, bi-ography, popular music, and aspects of nineteenth-century Polish history, appeared in Journal of the History of Ideas, Canadian Journal of History, 19th-Century Mu-sic, Journal of Musicological Research, Popular Music, Journal of Ukrainian Stud-ies, Lumen, The European Legacy, The Polish Review, and in the collections Con-texts of Musicology, Progrès et violence au XVIIIe siècle, and Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms.

French Identities: Memory, History and the Persistence of the Salon
This paper concerns the discursive construction of the notion of salon in post-Revolutionary France and the process that made the salon an emblematic form of French sociability and part of French cultural identity. The invention of the salon-which included introducing the term salon as a metonym for social gatherings-began when social life revived soon after the Thermidorian coup and was first a re-action to a variety of forms and styles of social life in which the new post-Revolutionary society indulged. This process involved the idealization and my-thologization of Old-Regime sociability primarily through commemorative litera-ture and retrospective studies on salon sociability that began to appear in large quantities in the 1830s and 1840s for the purpose of recreating the aura of Old-Regime sociability. These writings originated not only out of nostalgia for the past but also as an attempt on the part of the disgruntled elite to regulate and censor this new post-Revolutionary social life. They not only undermined the variety of new forms of sociability by contrasting them with the golden age located in the Old Re-gime, but also singled out laudable examples from among the post-Revolutionary salons which adhered to what each of these authors believed the salon to be.

The post-Revolutionary invention of the salon was not a mere transmission of the Old-Regime tradition, but involved a careful selection and appropriation of the past where the salon was constructed by various groups in such a manner as to stabilize and convey these groups' self-image and to serve their political claims in response to the need of the present. I argue that different groups in French society invented a salon tradition for their own purposes and appropriated the salon in a specific man-ner which served their needs and cultural aspirations. Hence many definitions of the salon, at times conflicting, and a diversity of social practices referred to as salons.

Although there were competing attempts to appropriate the notion of salon and there were critics who considered the salon a thing of the past incompatible with the democratic process, by the end of the nineteenth century the salon became a lieux de mémoire; a memory place constructed a posteriori and grounded in the Old Re-gime; not an object of contested appropriations but a site of idealized and fictitious class and gender relations, and the preserve of good manners and polite conversa-tion in which women reigned supreme. This idealized image of the salon still occu-pies a prominent symbolic place in French social and cultural identity, as well as in the present day historiography of the salon.

Pickford, Sophie

St John's College, Cambridge University
Sophie Pickford is completing her PhD in History of Art, St. John's College, Cam-bridge University, under the supervision of Prof. Jean Michel Massing.

Interior and Identity in the French Renaissance Château
Sixteenth-century châteaux are extraordinary monuments to the skill, taste and iden-tity of the French Renaissance nobility. Although much work has been carried out on the architecture of these houses, surprising little research has been done on their interior decoration. In particular, the various objects, both domestic and aesthetic, that made up the contents of château rooms have been sadly neglected by historians. These ranged from paintings, tapestries, books and objets d'art, to furniture, linen, clothing and tableware. War and revolution over the centuries in France have left little reminder of these objects, and not one decorative scheme survives in its en-tirety today, frustrating efforts at reconstruction.

I will present in this paper my work consulting château inventories, of which a sig-nificant number survive from the 1500s (to date I have collected over fifty exam-ples). These offer a privileged glimpse into the material lives of the French nobility, and facilitate a new and exciting picture of the identity of château owners through their possessions. Renaissance châteaux are commonly characterised as either bar-ren of interesting objects, or at the very least extremely basic in their contents, how-ever I have found this to be far from the case in many instances. My proposed paper will summarise the most interesting of my discoveries, presenting in a new and un-usual light the château interior and its relationship to the identity of château proprie-tors.

Santich, Barbara (with John West-Sooby)

University of Adelaide
Culinary exotica in mid-eighteenth century France
In the mid-eighteenth century, the works of Menon introduced a 'nouvelle cuisine' to France, simplified and more systematic than the cuisine of La Varenne. It relied more heavily on vegetables, and on a greater variety of vegetables - although the potato, tomato and pepper (capsicum) were still regarded with suspicion - and in-corporated 'foreign' ingredients such as cheeses from Italy and Holland, citrus fruits from Spain and Italy, coffee and chocolate from the Caribbean. Nevertheless, en-tries in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert suggest that in the mid-eighteenth century the French were acquainted with a much more diverse range of foods and ingredients, whether or not they actually consumed them.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the exotic foods included in the Encyclopédie.

Seward, Kate

University of Melbourne
'Reconceptualising French culture under occupation: a case study'.
In 1990, the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent published a collection of essays on cultural life under Vichy. In the introduction, editor Jean-Pierre Rioux empha-sised a new research focus, to complement and augment existing scholarship of the 'dark years'. Despite being one of the most written about periods of French history, he argued that cultural and daily life offer the historian a multitude of fresh insights into the occupation years. In 1999, Rioux again called upon historians to take up the challenge of researching daily life. Similar problems of methodology and sources face the historian of the quotidian and the cultural alike, thus it is possible to see these areas in the same light. The intersection of these research gaps is accentuated in the example of the zazous. Using this youth subculture as a case study, I intend to formulate a response to Rioux's call. By discussing the zazous, who are hitherto under-examined, I will argue that there is much to be gained in problematising new historical subjects and placing this project alongside burgeoning reinterpretations of the occupation years.

Smyth, Jonathan

University of London
Jonathan Smyth is a post-graduate student at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. University of London. He has a first-class Degree in Humanities from the Open University and is preparing a PhD thesis on aspects of the Fête de l'Être Su-prême under the supervision of Professor Pamela Pilbeam. Royal Holloway and New Bedford College, University of London

The Fête de l'Être Suprême in June 1794: an example of the imposition of Power from the centre.
The Fêtes Révolutionnaires of the 1790's were highly organised mass celebrations. Following Robespierre's Rapport sur les idées religieuses et morales to the Conven-tion on 18th Floréal Year 2, the Fête de l'Être Suprême was celebrated throughout the whole of France on the 20th Prairial Year 2 (8th June 1794), and is often re-garded as the greatest of them as well as being the event seen as marking the apogee of Robespierre's power before the beginning of his descent towards the events of Thermidor.

My paper will concentrate on this particular Fête which, I suggest, can be regarded as an example of the exercise of power over the population by a ruling elite, in very much the same way as the mass rallies of the totalitarian regimes of the Twentieth Century. I argue that this event was as carefully organised and orchestrated in every detail as any of the Nuremberg Rallies or the parades in Moscow or Peking.

To do this, I intend to look at the organisation of the Fête in Paris and in some pro-vincial centres, not only as an exercise in the imposition of power from the centre but also as an effort to control and channel the need for popular festivals to replace the religious festivals of the ancien régime.

I shall look at the practical and political problems which affected the celebration in Paris and at some of the organisational differences between Paris and the provinces. I intend to suggest that there was evidence of certain changes of political emphasis between Paris and some of the larger provincial centres, as well as between the inland and frontier cities.

Sowerwine, Charles

University of Melbourne
Charles Sowerwine is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. Among his many publications are Sisters or Citizens? Women and Socialism in France since 1870 (Cambridge: CUP, 1982) and France since 1870: culture, politics and society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)

Patriotism Authoritarian and Democratic: Nationalism and Republicanism in French Political Discourse, 1895-1914

Speedy, Karin

Macquarie University
Dr Karin Speedy is a lecturer in French in the Department of European Languages at Macquarie University. Before coming to Australia, Karin taught at the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and at the University of Auckland where she graduated with a PhD in 2003. Karin is interested in the role, status and position of the "other: in the post-colonial context and has published in a variety of areas including the history, de-mography, linguistics and literature of francophone countries. She is particularly interested in the impact socio-historical research can have on understanding how creole languages developed. Her current project traces the history of the immigra-tion of Reunion Islanders to New Caledonia in the nineteenth century and its impli-cations for the formation of the creole language, Tayo, spoken in the village of Saint-Louis.

Identifying the Reunion Coolies of Nineteenth-Century New Caledonia: Arrival, Settlement and Adaptation in a Sometime Hostile Land
The history of the immigration or, rather, importation of "coolie" labour from Reun-ion Island to New Caledonia in the nineteenth century is little known. Most histori-ans make fleeting references to groups of "Malabars" who were brought in to help with the setting-up of the New Caledonian sugar industry. Yet, with the exception of J-C Roux and J. Delathière who have researched the Indian communities of La Foa, few have delved into the backgrounds or indeed identities of this particular group of contract labourers. Who were they? Where did they come from? What lan-guages did they speak? What was their status in the colony? What became of them after the demise of the sugar industry? Based on extensive archival research, this paper traces the arrival and settlement history in southern New Caledonia of the sugar industry "coolies" and discusses the problems of status and identity among this surprisingly heterogeneous group.

Stephens, Elizabeth

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland
Venus Uncovered: Nineteenth-Century Anatomical Waxworks of the Female Body
From the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth century, anatomical waxworks known as "Venuses" were popular both as museum exhibits and as teaching tools in medical colleges. Venuses were ornate and naturalistic-looking models of the female body, sometimes posed as figures from famous artworks, with detachable panels to expose the reproductive organs (including, often, a foetus). The aim of this paper is to ex-amine the mutually informing relationship between anatomical and aesthetic con-cepts of female sexuality embodied by these waxworks. In particular, it will focus on the sexualised poses in which these opened female bodies are exhibited, and ex-amine the eroticisation of the medical gaze they represent.

Stocks, Lyn

University of Adelaide
Théophile Gautier : Advocate of Art for Art's Sake or Champion of Realism?
Théophile Gautier must rate as one of the most undervalued and most misrepre-sented identities in 19th century French history. The extent and importance of the critical role he played in the evolution of 19th century artistic expression towards that which we term "modernism", remains unrecognised. His support and encour-agement of young and or innovative artists in their search for new techniques and individual expression, including those who pursued the new realist aesthetic, was indefatigable. His contribution to the debate surrounding the nature and the role of art in a society in rapid social, political and industrial metamorphosis was consider-able but is still largely ignored today. His forty odd Salons and numerous other trea-tises on art remain largely unstudied.

At the heart of this oversight is the continued misrepresentation of the true or com-plete nature of his aesthetic. Throughout much of the twentieth century Gautier was hailed solely as the advocate of a notion of Art for Art's Sake perceived as the ap-preciation of a purely formalist even "classical" or ideal art, devoid of ideas, where sentiment is purely instinctive, and where the artist observes total impartiality to-wards his subject. He was therefore presumed to be the archenemy of social art and, by association, of realism and was even attributed a total lack of political and social interest, involvement or commitment.

This rather narrow perception of Gautier and of his aesthetic is incompatible with his disdain of formalist academic art, with his romantic open mindedness towards the art of all cultures, with his encouragement of innovation, truth and beauty in all its manifestations and even with his ardent fight for the freedom of artistic expres-sion from its potential subordination to utilitarian, social and or political ends.

To ignore Gautier, the highly respected "feuilletoniste" and art critic, in which guise he was perhaps better known to his contemporaries than in any other of his literary personae, is to ignore half the man and to be in serious danger of misunderstanding and misrepresenting his many aesthetic pronouncements.

Théophile Gautier was quite simply one of the most charismatic and well known of French 19th century identities and one whose overwhelming interest in everything artistic and literary, but also his interest in the philosophical peregrinations and even in the political upheavals of his time, make him the epitome of a true mid-19th cen-tury figure.

Thomas, Ashley

University of Adelaide
A French Fascist at the Nuremberg Rally
Lacking the sort of example that they desired within France, the French fascists of the 1930s turned to the startling changes happening in their eastern neighbour. At-tention was drawn to the rise of a party led by a failed artist that was reshaping the German people.

Robert Brasillach, along with a delegation of other journalists from all political per-suasions, was present at the famous Nuremberg Rallies that the Nazis put on in 1937. Brasillach was there to report on the event for Henri Massis's Revue uni-verselle, where his essay "Cent heures chez Hitler" appeared in the October issue. Brasillach was impressed by the event, and he incorporated the article into a novel, Les Sept Couleurs , in 1939, and into his memoir, Notre avant-guerre, in 1941. There are in fact significant variations between the text as it appeared in its original form in the Revue universelle and how it appeared in his memoir. The later version is rather less critical of the Germans and Nazism than the original, and there have been various explanations.

This paper examines the differences between the permutations of the piece and at-tempts to explain if and how Brasillach's ideas about Nazism and Fascism changed over the course of half a decade.

Tombs, Robert

St Johns College, Cambridge
Robert Tombs is teaches modern French and European history at Cambridge Uni-versity. His published works include The War Against Paris 1871 (Cambridge: CUP, 1981): Thiers 1797-1877: A Political Life, with J.P.T. Bury (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Nationhood and Nationalism in France before the Great War (Lon-don: Harper Collins, 1991); France 1814-1914 (London: Longman, 1996); La guerre contre Paris, 1871 (Paris: Aubier, 1997); The Paris Commune, 1871 (Lon-don: Longman, 1999); and, with Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy : The French and the British From the Sun King to the Present (William Heinemann, 2006).

Anglophobia in the making of French identity, c. 1750-1850.
In her well known book Britons: Forging the Nation, Linda Colley argued that Brit-ish identity was constructed round the long conflict with France. Could a compara-ble thesis be applied in reverse? Traditionally, French historiography (a notable ex-ample being Pierre Nora's Lieux de mémoire) has assumed that the elaboration of French identity was an internal matter. Some important recent works on France - notably by Edmond Dziembowski, David A. Bell, and Philippe Darriulat - have looked afresh at certain key episodes and periods. This paper will take a long view, centred on the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and will argue that crucial ideas of what 'Frenchness' entailed were developed in conscious and consis-tent opposition to perceptions of Englishness, which was seen not only as a threat to French power and prestige, but as a challenge to French values. It will argue that the Revolution was not in every way a break, and that there are deep continuities be-tween the Anglophobia of the Old Regime and that of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Left. If 1848 was in some senses a watershed, nevertheless crucial themes persisted, shaping anti-Americanism and the concept of the 'Anglo-Saxons'.

Tran-Minh, Thao (with with Délphine Cordelle)

Université Paris III - La Sorbonne Nouvelle
Thao Tran-Minh is in the third year of her doctorate in language and cultural di-dactology under the direction of Daniel Véronique at the Université Paris III -- La Sorbonne Nouvelle. She studied English and French as foreign languages before undertaking research about the relationship between language and identity of chil-dren in the immigration context in France. She also teaches a sociolinguistic semi-nar at the University of Paris III. A number of publications are forthcoming, includ-ing one about communities of integration, another about the notion of syncretism and a last one about the teaching of minority languages in French schools

Les paradoxes des identités collectives en France
"Jamais peut-être sur cette terre, à aucune époque, depuis l'incarnation de l'idée chrétienne, un pays ne produisit, en un si court espace de temps, une pareille éruption d'idées, d'hommes, de natures, de caractères, de génies, de talents, de catastrophes, de crimes et de vertu, que pendant cette période qu'on appelle du nom de la Révolution française." Alphonse de Lamartine, 1846.

De tous ses héritages, la Révolution Française n'a pas seulement donné naissance à l'élaboration de l'avenir social et politique de la France. Elle a aussi permis au peu-ple français de prendre massivement conscience d'une puissante identité commune. La pensée jacobine, les principes républicains ainsi que les valeurs universelles de liberté, égalité et fraternité y tiennent, entre autres, une place centrale.

Plus de 200 ans après, qu'en est-il? Le contexte social actuel oblige en effet à ré-interroger la notion sous des perspectives différentes. Les changements dé-mographiques et sociaux causés par l'histoire de l'immigration française ont amené de nouvelles questions sociales à résoudre. Parmi elles, la question identitaire est au centre de nombreuses polémiques. Avec une population de plus en plus diverses quant à ses origines, peut-on encore parler d'identité française ? Et si oui, de quelle(s) identité(s) s'agit-il ?

Afin d'éviter de tomber dans la traditionnelle dichotomie simplificatrice entre ré-publicanisme et communautarisme, nous préférons considérer la notion d'identité par rapport aux générations actuelles d'enfants nés en France, de parents issus de l'immigration ou non. Faisant fi des origines et des " différences ", leurs systèmes de références et leurs cadres d'appartenance se croisent et se mélangent en permanence, créant une identité hybride mais homogène, plurielle mais commune, paradoxale-ment constituée des particularismes de ceux qui la composent. Comment concilier ces nouvelles identités tout en étant français ? Par quels chemins peuvent-elles se rattacher à l'idée d'identité française ? Quelles nouvelles interrogations soulèvent-elles ? Quels paradoxes doivent être résolus ?

Nous proposons donc dans notre communication d'observer la construction des identités collectives en France sous une perspective historique et sociologique. Nous illustrerons également notre propos par une micro analyse élaborée à partir de données de terrain autour d'un phénomène de langue en France : le " parler jeune " afin de mieux poser les paradoxes des identités françaises aujourd'hui.

Van de Weyer, Aidan

King's College, London
Aidan Van de Weyer earned his PhD from King’s College London in 2006. His dissertation, “Centrists in Central France: The Radical Party in the Corrèze, 1919-1939?” was supervised by Dr. Richard Vinen.

The development of political identities: Radical and secular associations in small-town France
While Radicalism dominated politics in the Third Republic, its grassroots party structures were weak and ineffective. Instead, Radicalism relied on many other or-ganisations with similar ide-ological aims to create a vibrant and durable political identity that could be translated into electoral support. There were a huge range of groups close to the Radical party. Some, like Freemasonry and the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH), were overtly political and constituted places of debate for po-litical activists. However, there were many other groups with a much wider audi-ence in the towns and villages of France and which engaged in political activism of a more subtle kind.

This paper draws its data from the Corrèze department of central France, a poor ag-ricultural region where Radicalism was well implanted. I will examine three types of semi-political organisation with mass memberships: secular educational organi-sations, war veterans' groups and peasant unions. For each, I will discuss what they contributed to the Radical political identity and how they interacted with the party and politics more generally. I will also look closely at the role that these organiza-tions played in the crisis of Radical identity from 1934 to 1939.

The groups that defended laïque education came out of the resurgence in centre-left organisations at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and the Bloc des gauches, which also saw the creation of the LDH and of the Radical party itself. They developed meth-ods of supporting state schools against the Catholic competition and of aiding pupils materially and educationally. They became more structured and better targeted dur-ing the interwar years. The other two types of organisation grew only after the First World War. The centre-left Union fédérale des combattants, active mainly among the war wounded, helped create a progressive and pacifist identity among veterans, while claiming to remain outside politics. The peasants unions which flourished in the 1920s made similar claims, but served to reinforce the ideal of the small prop-erty owner and combated the incursions by the far right and the Communist party. Through close study of groups like these, we can discern how the Radical identity, usually examined through elite political discourse, was experienced on the ground by the mass of Radical supporters.

Vince, Natalya

University of London
Natalya Vince is a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, under the supervision of Professor Julian Jackson. The title of her thesis is 'To be a moud-jahida in Independent Algeria: itineraries and memories of women veterans from the Algerian War of Independence, 1954-1962'. She completed a BA in History and French at Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK, in June 2004 (First Class Hons). She also currently teaches at the University of London in Paris, France.

Colonial and post-colonial identities: women war veterans of the Algerian War of Independence
The focus of this paper is a group of Algerian women who have always been part of a minority. They were amongst the rare 'French Muslim' girls to have received an education under colonial France. They went on to become part of the National Lib-eration Front's (FLN) armed struggle between 1954 and 1962. In Independent Alge-ria, these female war veterans were amongst the few women to occupy a place in the public sphere. The trajectories of these women are clearly exceptional. Yet at the same time, a consideration of how these moudjahidate (female fighters in Ara-bic) have constructed their identity - born under French colonialism, to grow old under the single party regime of the FLN - is highly revealing of the contradictions of two Republican systems. This paper begins by considering the relationship be-tween these Muslim women and the French colonial state: a relationship character-ised on both sides by a chasm between the image and reality of the 'Other'. The second part of this paper examines how Algerian post-colonial identity has been constructed against France linguistically, culturally and historically, and the prob-lems and opportunities that this presented for the moudjahidate. Finally, this paper looks at the recent re-opening of the debate on the use of French torture during the War of Independence, and how this has begun to undercut previous constructions of identity.

West-Sooby, John

University of Adelaide (with Barbara Santich)
Culinary exotica in mid-eighteenth century France
In the mid-eighteenth century, the works of Menon introduced a 'nouvelle cuisine' to France, simplified and more systematic than the cuisine of La Varenne. It relied more heavily on vegetables, and on a greater variety of vegetables - although the potato, tomato and pepper (capsicum) were still regarded with suspicion - and in-corporated 'foreign' ingredients such as cheeses from Italy and Holland, citrus fruits from Spain and Italy, coffee and chocolate from the Caribbean. Nevertheless, en-tries in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert suggest that in the mid-eighteenth century the French were acquainted with a much more diverse range of foods and ingredients, whether or not they actually consumed them.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the exotic foods included in the Encyclopédie.

Williams, Allan

University of Wake Forest
Having worked with R.R. Palmer and Peter Gay at Yale, I began my career at Wake Forest University in North Carolina as a historian of the Old Regime, publishing a book on the police of Paris and articles on both this subject and eighteenth-century families. Still at Wake Forest as Professor of History, I have abandoned the Old Regime for the Revolution, sucked, like others, into its vortex. My current project bears a tentative title which is the same as that of the paper I'm presenting in Ade-laide.

Identities, Selves, and Revolution
How might we most usefully construe the problematic notions of "identity" and "self"? Drawing on the work of psychologists, sociologists, and social psycholo-gists, I will suggest an answer to this question, go on to distinguish the two terms, and show why it seems to me vital that we do so. Finally, I will argue that taking selves seriously may afford fresh perspectives on the French Revolution.

Winter, Bronwyn

University of Sydney
Bronwyn Winter is a Senior Lecturer in the Dept of French Studies at the University of Sydney. She has been working, as an activist and an academic, on questions of sex, sexuality, nation, religion and ethnicity in France and internationally for over twenty years and on the Islamic headscarf issue since 1990; her most recent article on the subject, 'Secularism Aboard the Titanic: Feminists and the Debate over the Hijab in France' will be appearing in Feminist Studies 32(2), Summer 2006. She is also contributing co-editor of September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives (Spinifex, 2002) and has contributed to a new Handbook of Women's and Gender Studies (Sage, 2006) with an article on women, feminism and religion.

Caught between les Mariannes and les Indigènes (de la République): Muslim-background women in France and the political manipulation of identity
The French debate over the Islamic headscarf in schools, which had raged off and on since the first 'Headscarves Affair' in 1989, gathered steam once again in 2003, with the setting up of a Commission to look into the matter and the adoption, in 2004, of a new law outlawing 'conspicuous' religious insignia in schools. To the surprise of many, this law was generally well observed and the start of the 2004-2005 school year relatively calm. The debate has, however, been revealing of many fractures, including within feminist and antiracist movements. New developments at the time of the 2003-2004 debate were the emergence of three vocal and highly-mediatised organisations: Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissive), an organisation of Maghrebian-background women that defends secularism and the Republic and condemns violence against women in the ghettos, and two others that are closely linked, Une Ecole pour Tou-te-s, an organisation co-founded by, among others, Christine Delphy, Tariq Ramadan and Laurent Lévy, which campaigned against the 2004 law, and Les Indigènes de la République, in which these three are also active, that condemns the continuation of the colonial attitudes and policies of the French government in 'postcolonial' France.

This paper will briefly examine the discourse and the agendas of these organisations and, drawing on critical analyses made by other individuals and organisations within France, ask to what extent the above three (a) truly challenge national, racist and/or masculinist ideologies and (b) are truly representative of the women in whose name they claim to speak.

Wolfe, Michael

Penn State Altoona
Michael Wolfe is Professor of History at Penn State Altoona. His areas of research and teaching expertise are medieval, early modern and modern Europe. He is the author of, among other things, The Conversion of Henri IV : Politics, Power, and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Harvard University Press, 1993), and the editor of The Medieval City Under Siege (Boydell & Brewer, 1995) and Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Duke University Press, 1992).

Antiquarianism and Urban Identity in Sixteenth-Century Nîmes
My paper will examine some of the new ways in which urban identity in France came to be expressed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of erudite histories. Some erudite histories approached the subject by focusing on the ecclesiastical history of a particular town, looking at its religious institutions, laws, and monuments. Others delved into the ancient past or antiquité of a town modeled after the laudes civitatum found in Classical exemplars and quite popular during the Middle Ages, sought to aggrandize a town's image and standing by tracing its ori-gins back to the Gallo-Roman and even Celtic eras, often with large dollops of fan-tasy and myth thrown in. Many of these histories combined legend, biblical antece-dents, medieval chronicles, topographical descriptions, archival research, and even archaeological excavations to paint what seem at first glance rather eclectic portraits of particular towns. This interest in the urban France's hoary past grew just as the last vestiges of the towns' semi-autonomy as bonnes villes vanished. Antiquarian representations of towns thus came to replace the earlier, but now fast disappearing or increasingly irrelevant symbols of urban identity found in a town's walls and charter. Intellectual curiosity and a desire to improve administrative organization through the founding of public archives also informed erudite histories. The appear-ance of antiquarian urban histories, such as Gilles Corrozet's La Fleur des Antiq-uitez de la noble et triomphante ville et cite de Paris (1532) and his 1539 compen-dium entitled the Cathalogue des villes et citez assises en trois Gaulles, reflected a localizing of the established historical genres that recreated royal genealogies or rewrote the history of ancient Gaul, typified in the works, for example, of Jean Le-maire des Belges and Jean Bouchet. It thus represented an effort to historicize par-ticular places in the emerging national narrative, tied as it was so closely during the period to the story of the monarchy, to carve out in historical space, so to speak, a place a town could call its own. Jean Poldo d'Albenas's Discours historial de l'an-tique et illustre cité de Nisme, published in Lyons in 1559 and then again in 1560, offers a very interesting example of how this new genre sought to recover an urban past and express through it a new sense of urban identity. In concentrating on Poldo d'Albenas's tome, my paper will offer a preliminary investigation into the manifold reasons behind the rise of this new kind of urban history, survey the various forms it took, and relate how these books strove to reconstruct urban identity during a time when towns came under the growing sway of the monarchy.

Zizek, Joseph

Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Auckland
Engraving Revolution: "History" in Images during the French Revolution
In September 1789, a leading revolutionary newspaper demanded recognition of the patriots who had died taking the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Yet the journalists of the Révolutions de Paris also insisted that memory was perishable; proper recognition of the sacrifices made by heroic citizens required tangible incarnation: "We must ceaselessly tell the people of their glory by means of public monuments, and we must not forget the powerful effect of the language of signs in this Revolution." 1

This paper examines one specific manifestation of this revolutionary fascination with the power of signs: engravings and illustrations devoted to the representation of "contemporary history," namely the events of the Revolution itself. Recent stud-ies have done much to shed light on the role of printed images in propagating the myth of the Bastille, shaping the understanding of revolutionary violence, visualis-ing gender boundaries, and caricaturing revolutionary politics. This paper instead focuses on how and why revolutionaries sought pictorially to "freeze" moments that were perceived to be historically significant, propagate them for wider readership in political ephemera (pamphlets and illustrated newspapers), and use them to define the day-to-day history of the Revolution as it unfolded. The paper emphasises the myriad difficulties-selection, representation, narration, commemoration, efface-ment-facing contemporary observers who sought to employ the "language of signs" to construct a visual history of the Revolution.

1. Révolutions de Paris 9 (5-11 September 1789), 26-7.

Zuckerman, Ric

The University of Adelaide
Policing the Russian revolutionary emigration in France, 1880-1914: the 20th century as a century of political police
The growth and spread of modern political policing institutions across European so-cieties from London to St. Petersburg is one of the major cultural and political phe-nomenon to be identified with the changing complexion of European society at the turn of the twentieth century and afterwards. The rapid development of professional political police forces could take place because traditional elites embraced these forces of order as necessary bulwarks against dissent and change.

On one level the paper discusses this process in comparative perspective by analys-ing the professionalisation of both the tsarist political police (the Okhrana) and the political police of the Paris Prefecture through a case study of the harassment and repression of Russia's 'revolutionary' emigration resident in Paris.

On another level this study serves as a means of acquiring an understanding of how political police systems, as they became more professional, began to interact with each other for what they believed was the common good, overcoming or ignoring-in the French case this was fairly often-the roadblocks placed in their path by the inhibitions of their political cultures, as they do today