Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

The three articles in this issue each problematize, if in different ways, common narratives about French trajectories after World War II. Directly or indirectly, they each call into question the expansive, linear mythology that Jean Fourastié coined as France's Thirty Glorious Years in his 1979 book.1 As part of a growing body of scholarship that questions Fourastié’s periodization, Drew Fedorka, Brooke Durham, and Amelia Lyons expose how his chronology papered over France's decline as an international power during the polarized Cold War, its role in brutal colonial wars, the coup that ended one republic and ushered in another, the long road to economic recovery that thirty-year statistical averages belied, and the social and economic stagnation that the younger generation felt even at the supposed crest of postwar growth.2 All three articles explore questions related to France's effort to rebuild the nation's reputation and influence, particularly through the construction of a new generation trained to look to the future without fixating on the past, or even the shadowy corners of the present. The articles in this special issue highlight that postwar challenges—consumer shortages, the housing crisis, the Fourth Republic's revolving cabinets, the violence on the ground in Algeria, the problems associated with implementing development schemes in newly independent Africa—could not be hidden from view and reminded those who lived through this period of traumas in their nation's past and present. The historians contributing to this issue demonstrate how France's interest in creating a new sense of the nation, innocent of the dark years and all their baggage, as well as its obsession with maintaining its influence on the world stage as its empire crumbled, weighed heavily on the next generation of leaders.

This article tracks the rise and eventual fall of the jeune cadre social type in postwar France. The term evoked the young and university-educated middle manager, an upwardly mobile member of the salaried middle class. The jeune cadre was at the center of postwar modernization and was also an emblematic part of France's “golden age of growth,” the Trente Glorieuses. Building on scholarship that questions the periodization and its underlying notions of material and social progress, this article uses the jeune cadre as a case study to explore the limits of the modernizing project. It highlights the persistent gap that separated elite discourse from the lived experience of ordinary workers and university students who did—and did not—conform to the technocratic ideal.

At the height of the Algerian War of Independence, the French government sought to convince the metropolitan public to support its modernization initiatives in Algeria. This article examines the government's outreach to university students through summer internships in administrative, health, and welfare roles in Algeria. Students, however, were not always convinced that France was a force for “good” in raising Algerian living standards. In surveys and reports reflecting on their experiences living and working across the Mediterranean, students identified obstacles to the French administrative and military interventions, especially mistrust between Europeans and Algerians, and the high human and material costs of waging war against Algerian nationalists. This article contributes to scholarship on youth, modernization, and decolonization.

This article examines small-scale development programs targeting women in Niger and Senegal between 1962 and 1975. Development's attention to large-scale public works and programs targeting men as productive laborers obscures UNESCO's promise to provide men and women in developing countries equal access to and an equal role in the transformation of their nations. Studying women's animation, a grassroots approach to modernizing rural African villages, allows us to better understand the gendered and raced dimensions of development and explore tensions among and between development planners. This article asks how white women experts, who sought to emphasize women's needs and to valorize their contributions, fit into development. It examines women practitioners’ efforts to counter gendered assumptions about the agents of change in Africa. It shows that women experts adhered to development's universalist worldview, yet simultaneously encountered and critiqued failures to uphold the development ethos. It demonstrates that development's modernization programs perpetuated ideas about women's labor, relegating it to the domestic and reproductive spheres.

Can property ownership be essentially equated with the absolute and individual right to exclude others from a resource? By critically assessing this question, this article reconstructs the republican conception of property, explaining the way it was formerly shaped by the ancient natural law, and then by the Lockean tradition. Both intellectual and conceptual influences molded modern republican's property conception as a kind of fiduciary relationship, namely, as an institutional and juridical agreement between a trustor or principal and its trustees or agents with overlapped and interdependent interests, necessities, and rights. This view differs from the so-called “classical liberal property” commonly understood as an absolute dominium relying on an individual and exclusivist right enabling their holder to freely alienate and freely accumulate material things. The article concludes by suggesting that important legal areas of our contemporary market societies are certainly established in accordance with this republican-fiduciary conception of property rights.

The history of the Dreyfus Affair, and the anti-Semitic movement that gripped France and Algeria, is well-documented. Though scholars have demonstrated that anti- Protestantism and Protestants were central to the Affair's metropolitan context, few have examined anti-Protestantism in the empire. This article explores the untold story of two British Protestant clerics, Arthur Liley and Frederick Yandell, who were accused of undermining French Algeria, amid charges of espionage and sedition in the press and in the Chamber of Deputies. By restoring the Liley and Yandell scandals to a shared context with both the Dreyfus Affair and the history of fin-de-siècle Algeria, we see that outrage about these two figures underscored anxieties about French colonial rule, as well as frustrations with French liberalism.

Shonaleeka Kaul (ed.), Retelling Time: Alterative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 2023. Preface, List of Contributors, Chapters, 232 pp. ISBN 978-1-032-06205-1 (pb); ISBN 978-1-032-06193-1 (hb); ISBN 978-1-003-20278-3 (eBook). Paperback $52; Hardback $170.00; eBook $39.71.

Lei X. Ouyang, Music as Mao's Weapon: Remembering the Cultural Revolution. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2022, xvii +198 pp. 13 black & white photographs, 13 music examples, 13 tables, glossary. ISBN 978-0-252-08621-2 (pb); ISBN 978-0-252-04417-5 (hb); ISBN 978-0-252-05311-5 (ebook). Paperback $28.00; Hardback $110; Ebook $19.95.

Andrew Prescott and Alison Wiggins (eds), Archives: Power, Truth and Fiction. Oxford Twenty- First Century Approaches to Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. xxviii +544 pp. 55 illustrations. ISBN 9780198829324 (hb). Hardback £155.