This thesis examines the role played by intellectual dissidents in the French Communist Party from 1972 to 1981, focusing primarily on the philosopher Louis Althusser and the historian Jean Elleinstein, whose ideas in relation to the FCP were closer than previously thought. The introduction sets the background out in which the FCP evolved after the Second World War and brings us to the 1970s, the decade during which the FCP lost its steam against most expectations - as the thesis demonstrates it. The first chapter deals with the perception communist intellectual dissidents had of their Party’s internal organisation – an organisation which was deemed too rigid and too inflexible to encompass the plurality of opinion of its members. This rigidity was demonstrated by the Leadership’s refusal to recognise the right to create tendencies within the Party, as the second chapter of this thesis shows. In this context, the third chapter argues that communist intellectual dissidents felt suffocated by a Party which did not give them enough leeway, even more so since it claimed to be the Party of the working class – a position which threatened the Party’s adaptation to social change and which is developed in chapter four. However, this thesis also puts the criticisms expressed by Althusser and Elleinstein into perspective. Indeed, if these intellectual dissidents were free to express des idées libérales et avancées, this was not the case for the FCP leadership. The Soviet Union and its KGB had too strong a grip over the Party and its General Secretary, Georges Marchais, for the FCP leadership to be able to act freely. In that sense, if the FCP gave up the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat in 1976, as the fifth chapter shows, it could not criticise the Soviet Union too much, as chapter six demonstrates, nor get too close to the French Socialist Party as chapter seven shows, nor let its dissident intellectuals go on expressing des vues trop dérangeantes, as chapter eight concludes. Each chapter is set against the Party’s historical background and brings us to the modern times, which have seen the French Communist Party transform itself – a transformation which would have been welcomed by Althusser and Elleinstein back in the 1970s.

This thesis is concerned with the Revolutionary press in the provinces and Paris as it relates to the local female community. It aims to show that the Revolutionary press was a vehicle for community information both aimed at and originating from literate women who had access to printed material. That is to say, literate women used their local papers to advertise themselves and their wares, express their views on a subject, to seek answers to questions and also to refute false information which was circulating about them. In addition, local information which was relevant to women could be publicised in the pages of a newspaper and it would be read. Finally, when describing women in news reports these periodicals employed a stock of phrases and literary or linguistic devices to present a specific picture of the females in question. The way in which women were depicted was intended either to unite the Revolutionary community against a female foe or to exalt a particular woman as a beacon of Revolutionary virtues. The approach to the sources will be one of considering newspapers and journalistic rhetoric as being engaged in the process of creating their own view of the world from the raw material of actual events, views which promoted the political loyalties or the ethos of a particular journal. Since it aims to examine continuity and rupture between the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary press, the time-scale for this thesis is 1780-1800. This allows for comparisons and contrasts to be made and the thesis will show that although the provincial press contained many of the elements found in their pre-Revolutionary predecessors, the cultural changes engendered by the Revolution meant that new elements of journalistic language and new subjects for discussion developed or emerged. This work is located in the existing body of literature on the French regional and Parisian press in the eighteenth century, particularly the work of Jeremy Popkin, Hugh Gough, Jean Sgard, Gilles Feyel and Pierre Rétat. It is also linked to works on the wider world of contemporary print, for example by Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier and to the literature by Olwen Hufton, Sarah Maza and Joan Landes on the experience and roles of eighteenth-century French women. Its place in the midst of all this literature is that of drawing together the strands of Popkin's, Gough's, Sgard's and Feyel's work to argue that the Revolutionary newspaper was an instrument not simply of general information for a particular community or section of the population but also of communication on subjects which were of importance to, or which were deemed by editors or government officials to be of importance to women.

This PhD project examines changing conceptions of physical exercise and bodily health in eighteenth-century France. Enlightenment culture in Europe provided an atmosphere of reform within which both society and individual were viewed as malleable. A new criterion of social utility governed discussions of health and education, and highlighted the unreformed status of certain sections of society. There was an understanding in France that urban life generally, and the urban elite in particular, had degenerated. The idleness of the gens du monde was considered a significant factor in the corruption of modern French society; the physical languor it produced was seen to render people useless to the nation. Fears surrounding depopulation and military weakness gave further impetus to calls for reform. Good health and the physical strength associated with it were perceived to key to the reversal of both urban decline and military fragility. The mother-to-be, the child and the noble officer were targeted in the drive to produce healthy, virtuous citizens. The thesis argues that a transformed conceptualization of physical education, emerging from a preoccupation with preventive medicine, was central to ideas regarding the health and strength of the nation. Drawing on manuals concerned with health and education, discussions of health in the press, polemics on the function of the nobility, and the correspondence of the Société Royale de Médecine, a distinct shift is traced in the ways in which exercise was discussed in the second half of the century. This was characterised by a view of exercise which focused upon adding strength and vigour, in contrast to earlier accounts which defined movement as a means of balancing or stabilizing what entered or exited the body.

This thesis investigates the relationship between female performers, mass culture and the avant-garde in fin-de-siecle Paris. The work of the dancers, Jane Avril and Loïe Fuller, has received critical attention as the representation of either the popular stage or of early modernist experimentation, but not as an example of the site where these two artificially constructed classifications coalesced. This study seeks to fill that gap by offering a framework through which the experimental performance of these mass-cultural, female celebrities can be renegotiated in its immediate historical context. The argument is framed within the inherent dualism of the ideology and social constructions that shaped the fin de siecle. These binaries are considered alongside the cultural transformations that were demanded by the rapidly developing commodity culture of the period; a process that reveals the progressive destabilisation of these values and ideas as the new century approached. Chapter one engages with the theoretical concepts of the gaze that have framed approaches to voyeurism and objectification during the period. Chapter two discusses the problematic relationship between feminism and corporeality, a theme that is extended in chapter three with an investigation of responses to the new social role of the female celebrity. Chapter four focuses on the dancer Jane Avril and reveals the manner in which her performance subverted the contemporary associations between femininity, insanity and eroticism. Chapter five concludes this thesis with an exploration of the centrality of the work of Loïe Fuller to autonomous female performance and the avantgarde.

This thesis examines the representations of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux produced by the Carmel of Lisieux in the years between the saint’s death in 1897, and that of her sister Céline Martin (Soeur Geneviève de la Sainte-Face) in 1959. It examines the construction of an iconographical foundation for the saint’s cult, the commercial distribution of this iconography, the debate about its authenticity that emerged in the 1920s, and the efforts by the originators of the image to maintain legal control of it. It explores the process of cultural legitimation of these images by the Carmel of Lisieux and, through these, of the cult itself, through a variety of methods, from the articulation of ideas of spiritual and artistic authority, to presence in the mass market, to apologetic, and the use of legislation. The thesis begins by examining the work of the Carmel of Lisieux to visually reshape Thérèse Martin and recast her as a saint through their posthumous representations of her, giving her a new face to fit the existing devotional landscape. Particular emphasis is placed on Céline Martin, as the director of the visual elements of the cult and author of the canonical images of Saint Thérèse, and her personal conceptions of the authentic holy image. The dissemination of the Carmel’s representations of the saint through a programme of popular publications and consumer products is then examined, exploring how the saint was promoted to the Catholic faithful in the religious marketplace, and how the market was used to establish Céline’s images in the economy of popular devotion, giving Thérèse a foothold as a saint who could be believed in. The thesis then turns to the reaction to the Carmel’s visual recasting of Saint Thérèse, examining a group of popular biographies of the saint that appeared in the early twentieth century. Here a body of literature is identified where anxieties over the authentic representation of holy figures are played out, and the emergence of a new paradigm for the representation of the saint is traced. The Carmel is shown to have responded to this with a series of apologetics, where they again articulated the alleged authenticity of their images. Finally, the series of legal cases launched by the convent against producers of unauthorised images of the saint is examined. Here it is shown that the Carmel sought to define Céline Martin as the sole authentic Theresian iconographer through recourse to ideas of religious and artistic authority, using the law of the secular state to make claims to religious authenticity. The first substantial piece of research placing Saint Thérèse in the context of the history of modern French popular religious culture, this thesis provides an insight into the creation of a commercial, devotional cult at the beginning of the twentieth century and the nature of Catholic visual culture in France in the years between the Dreyfus Affair and the Second Vatican Council. In examining the production and dissemination of a cult’s images, the intellectual and legal controversies that followed, and the use of these processes by the originators of the image to legitimate their representations, it also sheds light on prevalent ideas of religious and artistic authenticity in France in the early twentieth century and the search for the ‘true’ face of the saint during that period.

The Revolutionary era was a period of radical political change in France which dissolved traditional boundaries of privilege. It was also a time of creative experimentation on the stage, the street, and in print. Performance and theatrical language were an integral part of the French Revolution. This interdisciplinary thesis makes a vital contribution to knowledge of the cultural production of the French Revolution by analysing the theatrical influences in its satirical prints. It argues that printmakers drew from different aspects of Revolutionary performance to create their prints, from street singers and fairground performers to unsanctioned Revolutionary events and topics favoured by the stage, including the representation of Revolutionary characters in hell. These depictions – observed for the first time under thematic banners – provide a new insight into the multiplicity of opinions, beliefs and attitudes during the French Revolution.

This thesis puts under examination the linguistic and non-verbal elements of early medieval clothing on the basis of semiotic systems that pertain to the use and function of early medieval textiles in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England. An attempt is made here to address the possibilities in the research of the diverse messaging systems which reflect social roles and identities communicated visually through dress and dress accessories. In the course of this examination the relationship of early medieval people with dress and their concepts about their bodies is explored. While seeking to establish the most important elements in the structure of early medieval dress, we will also try to explore and deploy the methodologies of corporeal semantics, the criteria of visibility of the vestimentary display and the elements that make up the key focus of the apparel. The empirical evidence is drawn from both Merovingian and Carolingian Frankish and Anglo-Saxon contexts and comprises both texts of diverse genres which set the framework of a historical narrative for the subject in the light of comparative historical analysis. This framework is set against, is compared and challenged by the archaeology from early medieval burial sites and relics. My aims are, first the establishment of a common semiotic plane of interaction and comparison between two types of source material, the historical sources and the archaeology. In order to accomplish this, the disparities between the quality and quantity of textual and artefactual evidence and their inherent limitations are also researched and evaluated. My second aim is to find out ways to extract information about textile and metalwork artefacts from the written sources and organise it so that it will be possible to visualise and understand the structure and the role of dress in early medieval societies in reference to the construction of social and personal identities. This is an interdisciplinary task and the interpretative tools suggested here and the theory of verbal and non-verbal meaning of textiles could also be used as suggestions for further research directions of other types of linguistic and artefactual expression. Moreover, this task - to the point that the above issues and aims are resolved - could form the premise upon which a new system of artefact evaluation of the finds pertaining to dress from early medieval burials, a key feature of early medieval archaeology, could be exploited.

This thesis intends to investigate how educated British women travellers challenged conventional female roles and how they participated in the political culture in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Part One will discuss those who tried hard to challenge or to correct traditionally-defined femininity and to prove themselves useful in their society. Many of them negotiated with and broadened the traditionally defined femininity in this age. Part Two will take Burke and Wollstonecraft’s debate as the central theme in order to discuss chronologically the British women travellers’ political responses to the Revolution controversy. When the Revolution degenerated into Terror and wars, the Burkean view became the main strand of British women travellers’ political thinking. Under the threat of Revolutionary France and during the Napoleonic Wars, a popular conservatism and patriotism developed in Britain. Part Three will use the travel journals of the women who went to France during the Amiens Truce and after the fall of Napoleon in 1814 to analyse the formation of British national identity and nationalism in this period. In the end, these educated British women both stimulated and contributed to the formation of British political and cultural identity at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This thesis explores ceremonial entries in Renaissance France from the perspective of the townspeople who designed and produced them. Existing studies of French entries have tended to see them as expressions of monarchical power, with townspeople coming in submission before the majesty of the king. In contrast, this thesis demonstrates that ceremonial entries were nuanced civic ceremonies which demonstated urban pride and power. Chapter 1 details the weeks of preparations that went into staging a civic reception and the townspeople’s numerous efforts to ensure that the entry was a success. Chapter 2 examines the extramural greeting, where the civic council and other notables came out of the town in procession to greet the visitor and make the formal welcoming speech. The extramural greeting was an important part of the ceremony, as it was the first point of personal contact between the urban elite and the dignitary. The intramural procession is discussed in chapter three. During this part of the ceremony, the dignitary entered through the town gate and processed through the streets until they reached the town’s principal church, where a short service was held. The urban fabric was decorated with flowers, linens, triumphal arches and other decorative structures, while theatrical performances were staged along the length of the processional route. The streets were thronged with ordinary townspeople who had come to both watch and participate in the ceremony. Chapter 4 is concerned with the post-entry festivities, which included banquets, further processions and jousting. The exchange of gifts between the royal guest and the town council was an important element of the post-entry ceremonies, as it was the occasion when the civic councillors could win significant new economic grants for the crown in return for providing a valuable item of silverware.

This study analyses the evolution of France's relations with Iraq since 1958. It seeks to understand the motivations behind French government, state and private sector interests in Iraq. This is done in the dual context of France's economic rivalry with other western powers in the Middle East, and the Iraqi state's attempts to follow an independent foreign policy while using its oil revenues to rapidly industrialise and arm itself. The text first charts France's rivalry with Britain in the ex-Ottoman empire and its fears of Anglo-American domination of oil supplies. It then demonstrates that while France's early links with Israel continued under President De Gaulle, by the mid sixties they had been eclipsed by the commercial importance of trade with Arab states. The core text then focuses on France's relationship with Iraq since 1958, the year in which new governments came to power in both states. Despite the 1972 nationalisation of the Iraq Petroleum company, in which France had a 25% stake, French politicians and businessmen nevertheless gained favourable access to oil supplies, greatly increasing their exports of defence and high technology products, including a nuclear reactor, to Iraq during the seventies. The Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) intensified both bilateral trade links and the indebtedness of Iraq to France. By the mid-eighties what become a de-facto alliance generated severe problems for France's middle eastern policies, particularly towards Iran. The central themes of the study are the processes of foreign policy formation in France, and the extent and impact of economic interests underlying policy making. The thesis argues that substantial state ownership in France's oil, defence and aeronautical industries, coupled with the common interests and interpretations of a relatively homogeneous and interconnected corps of businessmen, politicians and civil servants, helps explain the continuity of French policy in the region. This is seen to be true despite the change of government (from Gaullist to Socialist) in France in May 1981.