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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. 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

12. French Color Blindness in Perspective: The Controversy over "Statistiques Ethniques"

Author:
Daniel Sabbagh and Shanny Peer
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In the United States, while some race-based policies such as affirmative action have faced often successful political and legal challenges over the last quarter-century, historically, the very principle of official racial classification has met with much less resistance. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment, according to which “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was not originally intended to incorporate a general rule of “color blindness.” And when in California, in 2003, the “Racial Privacy Initiative” led to a referendum on a measure—Proposition 54—demanding that “the state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin,” this restriction was meant to apply exclusively to the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment, that is, the three sites where affirmative action was once in effect and might be reinstated at some point, or so the proponents of that initiative feared. In any case, that measure was roundly defeated at the polls.
Political Geography:
United States and California

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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.

17. 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

18. L'enjeu métropolitain des Halles

Author:
Thierry Baudouin and Michèle Collin
Publication Date:
08-2007
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
During the Fordist period, the state transformed the historic site of Les Halles, in the heart of Paris, into the agglomeration's chief mass transit gateway. Efforts to make the site into a veritable tool of social, cultural, and economic metropolitan development are struggling because of governmental modalities that remain very marked by centralism. A majority of citizens, notably those living in suburban Paris, actively stake a claim to this metropolitan dimension and to the rich possibilities of this tool. The article principally analyzes the territorializing practices of suburban youths, whose multiple subjectivities are still poorly integrated into the site. Les Halles thus reveals the question of the correspondence of these establishing metropolitan practices to the reality of the centralized institutions around Paris intramuros.
Political Geography:
Paris

19. Les rapports ambigus entre politiques et citoyens: le cas du réaménagement du quartier des Halles à Paris

Author:
Pierre Diméglio and Jodelle Zetlaoui-Léger
Publication Date:
08-2007
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
While Mayor Bertrand Delanoë had omitted the renovation of Les Halles in his plans for the city in his 2001 inaugural address, in 2002, at the urging of the RATP and Espace Expansion, he decided to create a working group to undertake this project during his tenure. Having made citizen participation a new goal for local government, he also announced that the project would be undertaken with Parisians, especially local associations. The first part of this article emphasizes the different postures that elected politicians, engineers, and experts have adopted over the course of forty years vis-à-vis the question of citizen participation in urban planning. The second part explores the decision- making process for the Les Halles renovation over the last four years; it considers the issues and difficulties linked to the implementation of participatory plans incorporating residents––whether they are members of local groups or not––in complex urban planning projects.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Paris

20. On the Intellectual Sources of Laïcité: Rousseau, Constant, and the Debates about a National Religion

Author:
Helena Rosenblatt
Publication Date:
12-2007
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
That French Protestants gave strong support to laïcité is by now well established. Whether this support was due to ideological dispositions within Protestantism or to Protestantism's practical relationship to history can be debated; what cannot be debated is the disproportionate role Protestants played within the Third Republic and among the early proponents of laïcité. In recent work, Patrick Cabanel has even made a compelling case for the Protestant sources of laïcité, placing particular emphasis on the Protestant entourage of Jules Ferry (1832-1893) and stressing the inspiration provided by the pro-Protestant intellectual, Edgar Quinet (1803-1875).
Topic:
Religion
Political Geography:
Europe and France