French Politics, Culture & Society

“Those damned French!” That was President Eisenhower’s reaction back in 1954 when the French National Assembly killed an American-sponsored scheme for a European defense force.1 Almost 50 years later, Senator John McCain, in an off-the-cuff remark during the election primary last year, referred to a minor diplomatic dustup as “one of the many reasons I hate the French.”2 In Washington today such language, at least voiced by officials in public, is extremely rare. But the French, inadvertently to be sure, often seem to provide ample cause for such antipathy. Today, as in the early years of the cold war, the French have taken the lead in bashing the United States.

Les élections municipales et cantonales de 2001 s’annonçaient comme des élections de routine entre les élections européennes de 1999 et les échéances électorales cruciales de 2002. Le gouvernement de la gauche plurielle, après quatre années d’activité, ne semblait pas souffrir excessivement de l’usure du temps. Les élections européennes avaient été plutôt positives pour les socialistes face à une droite éclatée. La majorité plurielle, socialiste, écologiste, communiste, radicale de gauche et « chevènementiste », conservait, malgré des tensions internes croissantes, la cohérence nécessaire pour s’assurer une bonne crédibilité auprès de l’opinion.

France and the United States are commonly portrayed as proceeding from diametrically opposed presumptions in their approaches to race policy.1 The United States, this line of argument goes, has pursued a race-conscious approach to attacking racial discrimination, developing policies such as affirmative action that offer compensatory advantages to members of historically or currently disadvantaged groups.2 The American approach involves directing benefits and opportunities toward individuals who belong to discrete, identifiable groups within society. This sort of targeting, in turn, presupposes that these groups constitute legitimate political categories and that those who fall into these categories are due special consideration.

Marx called France the political nation par excellence, as contrasted to economic England and philosophical Germany. But Marx arrived at his mature theory only after a stern critique of a “merely political” view of revolution. And some of his most important insights are developed in analyses of the failures of revolution in France. While Marx’s observation is insightful, the theoretical conclusions he drew from it are problematic. The monarchy in France was not absolute because it was all-powerful or arbitrary; its power came from the means by which it dominated all spheres of life, transforming an administrative and territorial entity into a political nation. In the wake of the Revolution, the republican tradition became equally absolute; it came to define what the French mean by the political (a concept whose use differs from what “Anglo-Saxons” define as politics).

From the beginning of the Algerian War, the central issue for most of its critics was the use of torture. When confronted with evidence of torture, French governments during the war claimed that it was the result of aberrant behavior by individual soldiers or police officers. Yet, it was used systematically. Beginning in 1955 every regiment of the French army had an interrogation officer attached to it whose job it was to gain information by all means, including torture. Special training schools were established instructing the officers on “interrogation” techniques. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians were tortured during the war. These facts have been known for years and have been most recently documented in a dissertation based on the French army archives.

Souffrance : tel est le premier mot qui vient à l’esprit. Avant d’esquisser une analyse qui, pour être rigoureuse, devra se méfier du sentiment, commençons donc par essayer de nous représenter l’irreprésentable—c’est-à-dire la douleur, physique et morale, de tous ceux qui ont été torturés, souvent jusqu’à la mort, durant la guerre d’Algérie.

Frédéric Martel, The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Le Rose et le noir: les homosexuels en France depuis 1968, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

Florence Tamagne, Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris 1919-1939 (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Daniel Borrillo, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub, eds., Au-delà du PaCS: l’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité, (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1999).

Louis-Georges Tin and Geneviève Pastre, eds., Homosexualités: expression/répression, (Paris: Stock, 2000).

The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, Jo Burr Margadant, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Review by Elizabeth E. Covington, University of California at Los Angeles

Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic for Modern Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Review by Caroline Ford, University of British Columbia

Cécile Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900-25 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, St. Antony’s Series, 2000). Review by Judith F. Stone, Western Michigan University

Linda L. Clark, The Rise of Professional Women in France: Gender and Public Administration since 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Review by Karen Offen, Stanford University

Carolyn Warner, Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and Political Parties in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Review by Kimberly J. Morgan, George Washington University

Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Review by Henry Rousso, IHTP-CNRS

Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War, ed. with intro. by James D. Le Sueur, trans. Mary Ellen Wolf and Claude Fouillade (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Originally published as Journal 1955-1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1962). Review by Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Texas Tech University

Herman Lebovics, Mona Lisa’s Escort: André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Review by Charles Rearick, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

Bernard Lahire, L’Invention de l’ « illettrisme », rhétorique publique, éthique et stigmates (Paris : Éditions La Découverte, 1999). Review by Christian Baudelot, École normale supérieure

Notes on contributors