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Begin New Search Content Type Journal Article Publishing Institution Conference Group on French Politics Society Publication Year within 25 Years

11. Apology and the Past in Contemporary France

Author:
Julie Fette
Publication Date:
06-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In societies coming to terms with historical injustices, public apology has recently emerged as a potent trend. This is particularly true of France, where the state served as a catalyst for a wave of public apologies for acts of intolerance committed during the Second World War. Following Jacques Chirac's 1995 official apology for Vichy's anti-Semitic policies, various groups in civil society publicly atoned for their particular Vichy roles in discrimination against Jews: the medical profession, the law bar, the Catholic Church, and the police. How does public apology, as distinct from court trials, historical commissions, and reparations, affect contemporary France's reconciliation with its past? This article also analyzes how apologizing for Vichy has created demand for an official French apology for the Algerian War. By 2006, the politics of memory in French society decidedly shifted attention from Vichy to post-colonialism: in both cases, the apology turn imposes new dynamics of remembering and forgetting.
Topic:
Politics and War
Political Geography:
France

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. Fascinating Les Halles

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

20. Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles

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