Although historians have acknowledged the importance of gender as a factor in the social and political life of post-revolutionary France, and bibliographical studies have revealed that vast quantities of memoirs were composed during the half century after the outbreak of the Revolution, the lives of women between the late 1790s and the 1830s, and the works in which they wrote about their lives and about the age in which they lived, have hitherto attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and historians. Previous research, moreover, has concentrated on women as writers of poetry and fiction, on the portrayal of women in novels, and on their position in society as it was defined by legislators, doctors, philosophers and the authors of manuals on female education and conduct. As a result, the diversity of women's writing and the complexity of their lives as historical subjects during this period have often been obscured. It is this diversity and complexity which are revealed by studying memoirs. This thesis examines women's memoirs from both a literary and a historical perspective, focusing on the relationship between gender, genre and historical circumstances. It argues that women wrote memoirs and wrote them in the way they did because of the political and social conditions of the age in which they lived. A short introduction outlines the reasons why the memoirs written by women in the first decades of the nineteenth century have been neglected: the preoccupation of literary scholars with memoirs of the ancien regime; the memoir's apparent lack of depth compared to 'true' or 'literary' autobiography; the weakness of most women's memoirs as sources of information on political and military affairs for the Revolution and Empire; and the narrow focus of recent women-centred histories. The rest of the thesis is an attempt to fill in some of these gaps.

This study is an analysis of the changes to the institutions and doctrines of French development aid between 1998 and 2002, and specifically the reforms announced by Prime Minister Jospin in February 1998. This includes analysis of institutional reorganisation and of new policy doctrines. The study considers the implications of these changes for the relations between France and former French colonies of sub- Saharan Africa, including detailed analysis of the aid relationship between France and Cote d’Ivoire. Using qualitative data, especially personally conducted interviews in Paris and Côte d’Ivoire and analysis of official documents, this is the first major study of these reforms that puts them into historical and theoretical perspective. It thereby contributes to the wider debate over continuity and change both in French aid policy and in France’s relations with sub-Saharan Africa. It also furthers understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics of reform within French state administration. This study compares French development aid policy and institutional architecture from the 1960s up to the mid 1990s with the new institutions and policies put in place in the 1998–2002 period. Chapter 1 looks at the creation of French aid policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s and considers its imperial origins. Chapter 2 examines French aid from 1960 to 1995 and places it in the context of the global politics of development aid and the policies of other donors, in order to highlight the specificities of the French case. The French reaction to the emergence of the structural adjustment and later good governance agendas is considered. Chapter 3 examines the content of the reforms put in place by Jospin and associated changes in the 1998–2002 period, including the reactions of officials and critics. Chapter 4 is a case study of the changes made to the aid relationship between France and Cote d’Ivoire and the effects of instability in Côte d’Ivoire on French policy. The impact on French policy of the growing role of multilateral donors in Côte d’Ivoire is also considered. Chapter 5 examines the evolutions in French doctrine which have run in parallel to the Jospin reforms, looking at French attitudes to major development issues, particularly the relationship between the state and the market. French development aid is part of the long-term continuities of French foreign policy, and especially France’s desire to demonstrate the universal validity of its cultural and political achievements. In this study French aid is analysed as an extension of these foreign policy aims within the specific post-colonial relations with sub-Saharan Africa. French aid has helped to maintain a protected environment within which the French have sought not only to support close political allies, but also to reproduce a “model” of society and politics. This study asks whether the French can continue to use aid in this way in the light of the Jospin reforms and the events of the 1998–2002 period. This study asks whether the changes of this period can be seen as a convergence between French aid and the policies, practices and norms of other aid donors. To this end, the notion of an aid donor “regime” is used. This helps to show that reform of French policy occurs in a context of interaction with other aid donors, and to show how that interaction affects French policy

Paris is one of the key sites of meaning regarding France's cinematic output. This thesis surveys the contribution German émigré filmmakers made to the French cinema of the 1930s through a series of case studies of their depiction of the nation's capital city. It argues that this contribution was both typical and singular. The émigrés engaged directly with traditions of Parisian representation, but they also played a distinctive role in the important debate over the direction early French sound filmmaking should take. The body of the thesis contains detailed textual analysis of many émigré productions which have hitherto been ignored within film history. It contextualises this analysis with comparative discussion of films made by indigenous professionals and an examination of past and present intertextual aspects of Parisian culture. The thesis moves beyond aesthetic concerns to also consider the political, industrial and social significance of the work of the émigré Filmmakers. The reception of their films is located within a history of the Franco-German relationship as a whole. By drawing widely upon supporting documentation in critical and trade journals of the time, the thesis provides a new history of a crucial transitional point in the development of European film culture.

This thesis explores Vercors's writings, with particular reference to his moral and political attitudes, from 1942 to the present. It includes his clandestine wartime publications, the subsequent development of his theory of human 'rebellion', with its strong ethical connotations, and the various polemical and fictional texts in which, in the post-war period, he expresses support for communist aims and for progressive causes such as anticolonialism. Vercors's chairmanship of the CNE in the mid-1950's is examined through his memoirs as well as through his articles and speeches of the time. After the author's overt withdrawal from fellow-travelling in 1957, his more selective political commitment is traced through the remaining years of the Algerian conflict, while the memoirs and other works of reflection that have appeared in the latter part of his career recapitulate the overall development of his political attitudes and reveal certain changes of view. Vercors's more general theory of human value has, on the other hand, remained constant, and he offers it as a starting- point for better understanding between men of all nations and ideologies. The analysis follows this broad chronological pattern, first in relation to the moral elements, then the political; but there is frequent cross- reference between the two aspects, in keeping with the author's own emphasis on their close interconnection in his outlook. The extent of his combined fictional and non-fictional output is such that three successive chapters are devoted to the exploration of his moral attitudes, then three, similarly, to the political responses. There is also reference, where appropriate, to critical commentary on Vercors's work and to other background sources; and the appendices contain Vercors's direct response to specific questions put to him during the preparation of the present study. This thesis is intended to contribute to the field of modern French studies through its comprehensive coverage of Vercors's writing in two major areas of commitment.

This thesis examines interactions between science and the supernatural in Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy. The protagonist, whose aesthetic and philosophical starting point is naturalism, converts to Catholicism. This unusual conversion reflects social upheavals contemporary with Huysmans’s cycle of novels. In the late nineteenth century, science, emerging as symbol of new hope and salvation for humanity, has in a sense replaced religion. The Durtal cycle catalogues the disorders generated by this replacement, and represents the creation of a new order more suited to Durtal’s persona, through deconstruction of existing codes and beliefs. Thus is shaped the intellectual and aesthetic matrix of the four novels. Pathology is at the intersection of the interactions between science and the supernatural, the various components of which constitute the subject of the three substantive chapters of the thesis. Figuring social degeneration and the creation of imaginary medical worlds founded on contamination, Huysmans’s text explores the boundaries between science and religion, thus offering a new cosmogony constructed around a concept of mystic substitution associated with Catholicism. Analysis of these textual explorations is followed by a study of the body and the soul as the two primary principles contributing to the conflicts articulated in Huysmans’s work. The conversion processes to which the body and the soul are subjected help to build renewed relationships between the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible. Writing thus appears as the result of an alchemical quest in which opposites can ultimately be reunited. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the development of the novel form, subject to so many contradictory influences. The pharmaceutical quality – in Derridean terms – of writing ends this crisis and restores the author’s authority, making of the Durtal tetralogy a work that is characterised at one and the same time by its naturalism and by its mysticism.

Auguste Blanqui (1805-81) is arguably at once the most important and most overlooked revolutionary of the nineteenth century. This thesis aims to shed new light on Blanqui’s thought by examining his unpublished manuscripts and recent anthologies of his writings that have yet to receive sustained critical engagement. I contend that politics is the central category through which to read and interpret Blanqui’s entire project. To this end, I reconstruct what I take to be the fundamental elements of Blanqui’s politics, arguing that it remains rooted at every moment in his concept of ‘pensée-volonté’, or conscious volition. This groundwork provides a platform from which I advance my own readings as well as engaging with previous interpretations that, though stimulating and useful, nonetheless often remain limited because of their incomplete view of Blanqui’s overall body of work. More than previous studies, I seek to resituate Blanqui within the wider revolutionary tradition from which he has hitherto been largely excluded that begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and continues through Karl Marx to Che Guevara, showing the extent to which Blanqui advanced and developed the political assumptions of those who preceded him on the one hand, and anticipated the politics of those who succeeded him on the other. Unlike all previous studies, I read Blanqui with and through more recent political thought as a means to both better critically assess Blanqui and to explore in turn how he can contribute to contemporary theoretical discussions. I suggest that despite his limitations with regard to questions of popular consciousness and the contexts and conditions of political struggles, in many crucial respects Blanqui lucidly outlines some of the basic elements of collective political action in his time and our own, from the subjective requirements of political actors to the rejection of historical necessity.

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No description available.

Count Geoffrey V of Anjou (1129-51) features in Anglo-French historiography as a peripheral figure in the Anglo-Norman succession crisis which followed the death of his father-in-law, Henry I of England and Normandy (1100-35). The few studies which examine him directly do so primarily in this context, dealing briefly with his conquest and short reign as duke of Normandy (1144-50), with reference to a limited range of evidence, primarily Anglo-Norman chronicles. There has never been a comprehensive analysis of Geoffrey’s comital reign, nor a narrative of his entire career, despite an awareness of his importance as a powerful territorial prince and important political player. This thesis establishes a complete narrative framework for Geoffrey’s life and career, and examines the key aspects of his comital and ducal reigns. It compiles and employs a body of 180 acta relating to his Angevin and Norman administrations to do so, alongside narrative evidence from Greater Anjou, Normandy, England and elsewhere. It argues that rule of Greater Anjou prior to 1150 had more in common with neighbouring principalities such as Brittany, whose rulers had emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries as primus inter pares, than with Normandy, where ducal powers over the native aristocracy were more wide-ranging, or royal government in England. It explores the count’s territories, the personnel of government, the dispensation of justice, revenue collection, the comital army, and Geoffrey’s ability to carry out ‘traditional’ princely duties such as religious patronage in the context of Angevin elite landed society’s virtual autonomy and tendency to rebel in the first half of the twelfth century. The character of Geoffrey’s power and authority was fundamentally shaped by the region’s tenurial and seigneurial history, and could only be conducted within that framework. This study also addresses Geoffrey’s activities as first conqueror then ruler of Normandy. The process by which the duchy was conquered is shown to be more intricate than the chroniclers’ accounts of Angevin siege warfare suggest, and the ducal reign more complex than merely a regency until Geoffrey’s son, the future Henry II (1150-89), came of age. Through use of a much wider body of evidence than previously considered in connection with Geoffrey’s career, and a charter-based methodology, this thesis provides a new and appropriate treatment of an important non-royal ruler. It situates Geoffrey in his proper context and provides an account of not only how he was presented by commentators who were sometimes geographically and temporally remote, but by his own administration and those over whom he ruled. It provides an in-depth analysis of the explicit and implicit characteristics of princely rulership, and how they were won, maintained and exploited in two different contexts.

France and Britain are European neighbors and have distinct policing styles and traditions which are evident in their approaches to public order policing. Using an updated version of David Waddington's 'Flashpoints' model this thesis examines and compares the policing of public order in these two countries. It focuses on the institutional and operational dimensions within their historical, social and political contexts indicating the main areas of convergence and divergence. This research argues that a further review and adaptation of the 'flashpoints' model could effectively operationalise it as a tool for police community threat assessment. It also identifies a number of policy implications for both countries that should be accepted as further good practice guidance. There is a strong case for modification and convergence of approach on both sides of the channel. Neither country has achieved the necessary balance between state responsibility and civic rights required by the social contract. Police community relations in France need to be addressed at a fundamental level and public order policing in Britain requires additional research and review of its operational capability, for it is on the ground that disorder situations are dealt with and it is here that public confidence is won and lost.