New Books In French Studies

Charly Coleman's latest book, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021) is at once a history of ideas, the economy, religion, and material culture. Pursuing the imbrication of the economy and theology with respect to both worldly and spiritual value and wealth, the book explores the emergence and development of a specifically Catholic ethic of capitalism particular to the French context in the century and more leading up to the French Revolution. In its six chapters, the book examines the Eucharist, John Law's system, speculation and debt, usury, consumption, luxury, and more. By the time this reader reached the epilogue, it became clear that The Spirit of French Capitalism is both a history of the Age of Enlightenment and a genealogy/prehistory of the commodity fetishism elaborated by Marx and Marxist thinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Faith in infinite wealth creation, obsessive consumption, pleasure, abundance, and enc

In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Cappella Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. To the modern eye, these works are perceived as culturally diverse. As Reilly demonstrates, the multiple sources for Norman visual culture served to expand their meaning. Norman artworks represented the cultural mix of each locale, and the triumph of Norman rule, not just as a military victory but as a legitimate

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But in Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State (Princeton UP, 2021), Elisabeth Anderson shows that the regulatory welfare state began a half-century earlier, in the 1830s, with the passage of the first child labor laws.  Agents of Reform tells the story of how middle-class and elite reformers in Europe and the United States defined child labor as a threat to social order, and took the lead in bringing regulatory welfare into being. They built alliances to maneuver around powerful political blocks and instituted pathbreaking new employment protections. Later in the century, now with the help of organized labor, they created factory inspectorates to strengthen and routinize the state’s capacity to intervene in industrial working conditions. Agents of Reform compares seven in-depth case studies of key policy episodes i

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte (Rutgers University Press, 2021), by Yveline Alexis is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte's political movement and citizens' protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

Patronage has long been an important topic of study in musicology, but is much more likely to be one that specialists in medieval or renaissance music research. In The Creative Labor of Music Patronage in Interwar France (Boydell Press, 2021), Louis Epstein turns to patronage in the twentieth century to reveal an important part of the musical economy that is often overlooked. Many different types of patrons existed in this period, from music publishers and the French government to institutions and wealthy individuals. Far from mere sources of funding, early twentieth-century patrons collaborated closely with composers, treating commissions for new music as opportunities to express their own artistry. Although some of these patrons tried to interfere with the compositional process, most were engaged in a more subtle form of labor. For instance, they curated like-minded composers, encouraged people to write in expensive genres like opera or orchestral music, and supported French nationalism. Epstein also finds

In popular understandings of the modern history of Vietnam we are familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s anti-imperialism, but we know much less about the anticommunist nationalism of South Vietnam – officially the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). The RVN tends to be viewed as a creation of the French and later a “puppet” of the Americans. But as Nu-Anh Tran shows in her book, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (U Hawaii Press, 2022), the RVN was heir to a revolutionary tradition that developed out of the anti-French resistance, that was quite distinct from the communist one to the north. Although the many different political and religious factions in the south shared a fierce anticommunism, the RVN was plagued by disunity. And ironically, despite the democratic ideals that these groups claimed to advocate, the RVN was subject to authoritarian rule for most of its brief existence. Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at th

According to the definition offered by Tate on the occasion of the exhibition Surrealism Without Borders, Surrealism “aims to revolutionise human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Surrealism, therefore, produces images and artefacts that are rooted outside the real and that evade rational description. For many artists, however, the practice of Surrealist art took on an explicitly political and therefore practical dimensions. In Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021), art historian Abigail Susik argues that many Surrealists tried to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. Abigail Susik speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what the politics of work meant to the early French Surrealists, the ambiguous labour practices of artists like Simone Breton, and the imagery of typewriters and sewing machines that permeates the work of artists such as Oscar Domínguez. She brings these questions i

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on anothe

All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State (Oxford UP, 2022) attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: what is the relationship between modern states and disasters? Disasters are commonly understood as exceptional occurrences that ruin societies and inspire ad hoc rituals of legal, administrative, and scientific control called 'disaster management.' States and the international institutions perform disaster management to protect society. The book challenges this traditional narrative. It interprets 'disaster management' as a historical struggle to conservate the existence and experience of catastrophes and produce idealized authorities capable of protecting society from uncertainty. It examines the emergence of this struggle in the eighteenth century and reveals how rulers and experts struggling to master God, Nature, and each other, inaugurated modern meanings of risk, normalcy, power, and responsibility. By recovering this history of disaster management, the book reve

In The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contesta

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? And what lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?: Radical Idealism and Its Tragic Consequences (Princeton University Press, 2020), Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world--from the late eighteenth century to today--to provide important new answers to these critical questions. From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn't, although its failure to resolve th

Eliza Jane Smith's Literary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France (Lexington Books, 2021) applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as "literary slumming", or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritised lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere. Pallavi J

Sarah Farmer's Rural Inventions: The French Countryside After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a history of national, regional, and local transformations during the period known as the Trente Glorieuses in France from 1945 to 1975. Rural communities and landscapes did not disappear during these years, but existed in complex relationship to urban populations, spaces, economies, and culture. "Modernization" was also a phenomenon in the countryside in various ways and the myth of an unchanging peasant world was just that.  Examining state infrastructural and agricultural plans and projects; a rising French and international interest in second, "country" homes; utopian rural experiments and environmental activisms; peasant autobiographies; and (sometimes) nostalgic representations of rural life and landscapes in photographs and other visual sources, the book considers a range of objects and perspectives from/on the French countryside. Packed with compelling stories, actors, and arguments about some of the

Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps (Verso, 2020), Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times. Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmo

In Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), Sarah Shortall examines the twentieth-century transformation of Roman Catholicism by tracing the origins and evolution of the so-called nouvelle théologie. Developed in the interwar years by French Jesuits and Dominicans, “new theology” reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. By recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, and colonialism and nuclear war. Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wo

Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, she became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available, the midinette became the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world. The lived experiences and activisms of the women workers who inspired these projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array of sources--state and police documents, municipal and philanthropic archival collections, press, fic

It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers. Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, Stuart Elden's The Early Foucault (Polity Press, 2021) is the most detailed study yet of Foucault's early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translation

In Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare (Oxford UP, 2021), Dr. Nathaniel L. Moir studies the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Dr. Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials. Moir demonstrates how these critical events made Fall “an insightful analyst of war because of the experience and knowledge he brought to his study and his early recognition of the Viet Minh’s approach to warfare, which they used to defeat the French in 1954 during the First Indochina War.” Dr. Moir investigates how Bernard Fall understood and described Vietnamese revolutionary warfare in Indochina after World War II.The book tells a history indelibly tied to Bernard Fall, but also centers on the u

As the old cliché goes, “there must have been something in the water.” A new book by historian Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (Cambridge UP, 2021), courses a thread through the various disorders that riddled the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century. Alpaugh searches for and brings to light commonalities that spread through regions circling the North Atlantic. From the Caribbean islands to Ireland; France, colonial America, and the United Kingdom, “Liberty” and “Freedom” conjoined a patchwork of disparate people who gave rise to social movements roughly at the same moment in history. Alpaugh’s archival research is astounding and unearthed new ways of looking at eighteenth-century revolutions beginning with the United State and ending with Haiti. In Friends of Freedom, Alpaugh reconfigures Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” as a social leviathan that swept the eastern seaboard of North America thereby becoming emulated by similar clubs of men