New Books in French Studies

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the flurry around the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century (Le Capital au XXIe siecle) knows how a la mode the economy is at the moment. Contemporary ideas and debates about capital, debt, and austerity are only part of what makes Clare Crowston‘s Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke Univ...

In Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Harvard University Press, 2012), historian Miranda Spieler tells of the transformation of a slave plantation colony into a destination for metropolitan convicts in the eight decades following the French Revolution. Unlike the better-known case of British Australia, French Guiana failed to turn... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

Believe it or not, the origins of this podcast and the entire New Books Network can be traced to a conversation I had in a cafein Ann Arbor, Michigan (Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, as it happens) in 2004. I was sitting there minding my own business when I overheard Ed Vielmetti and Lou Rosenfeldtalking about something called “del.icio.us” [sic]. It sounded interesting, so I asked them–complete strange...

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013). In this pioneering, interdisciplinary study, Professor Amster explores the French campaign to colonize Morocco through medicine. It is through medic...

From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of t...

Only in a place like France do the texts and theories of towering intellectual figures like Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan come up in public and political discussions of family policy and law. Camille Robcis‘s new book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell University Press, 2013) was in part inspired by contemporary French references to structu...

Queens and royal mistresses of the Renaissance were the Hollywood celebrities of their time, which explains their enduring magnetism for writers, artists, and the public. Historians and scholars, however, have long ignored them. Enlightenment philosophers used descriptions of powerful women in the French court to mock the monarchy. Nineteenth-century historians propagated myths about these histori...

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics...

Early modern European imperialism is really pretty easy to understand. Spain, Portugal, England, France, Russia and the rest were ruled by people whose business was war. They were conquerors, and conquering was what they did. So, when they attacked and subdued vast stretches of the world, they did so without regret or second-thought. All that changed after French Revolution. France was not, ostens...

The "primitivist idea" has played an important role in art and culture from at least the late nineteenth century. From Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, to the more recent Musée du Quai Branly (opened in 2006), a variety of individuals and institutions have engaged with so-called "primitive" peoples; collected their artifacts; displayed, represented, and mimicked their cultural forms and practices. ...

In 1967, an official of the French basketball federation lamented the team’s poor finish at that year’s European Championships in Finland. The French team finished sixth in their group of eight, and then lost in the first game of the knockout stage. The official noted that Europe’s top teams, such as the first-place Soviet Union, all had players over two meters tall (6’6″). The official summed up...

There is a city in the Southern hills of Vietnam where honeymooners travel each year to affirm their love at high altitude, breathing in the alpine air and soaking in the legacies of French colonialism. Developed by the French in the nineteenth century, Dalat remains a contemporary tourist destination fully equipped with a “Valley of Love”, an artificial lake with paddleboats, and cowboys. It is a...

Brumaire. Germinal. Thermidor. There is nothing more evocative of the French Revolutionary imaginary than the names of the months of the republican calendar that became official in 1793 (the calendar was back-dated to 1792, or Year I). In The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Sanja Perovic explores the history...

The stories of individual lives are endlessly complex, weaving together the contemporary events, the surrounding culture, and incorporating random factual odds and ends. This is one of the challenges of writing biography- one must become expert on so many things- and also one of the pleasures of reading it: the fact that a biography can reveal something not simply about another person, but also pr...

Brian Sandberg‘s Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) significantly revises our understanding of early modern military culture and absolutism. By examining the frequent civil wars of the early seventeenth century in France, Sandberg demonstrates that the French nobility were neither merely resisting the spread of the absol...

How did French colonial administrators, missionaries, and different groups of Africans interact with one another in colonial Senegal? In her new book, Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2013), historian Elizabeth Foster draws on a wealth of archival material to reveal the interests and negotiations of key powerbrokers in...

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American...

Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the f...

As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. Towards the end of Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life(Penguin, 2011) biographer Lisa Chaney allows her subject to speak for herself. Chanel writes: ‘Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, w...

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and...

There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup. Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply of Zidane trotting away from the Italian defender, turning back, and driving his head into Materazzi’s chest....

It seems safe to say that the guillotine occupies a macabre place in the popular imagination among the icons of France’s transition to modernity–perhaps stashed somewhere in between idealized barricades or lurking on one chronological flank of the Eiffel Tower. The guillotine’s mechanization of official killing was instrumental in carrying out the thousands of executions that made the Terror what...

When it comes to writers and artists, biography plays a provocative role–yielding insight into both artistic influences and origins. This is especially true with the modernists, in particular T.S. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard University in 1910, the young Eliot spent a year in Paris, a year that had a lasting and profound effect upon his work that has gone largely unexamined until now. In...

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned,...

Edith Piaf’s story is rife with drama. The daughter of an acrobat and a singer, she was the first French superstar and sang with wild abandon in a voice that rivaled Judy Garland’s. And yet, so often Piaf’s high-spirits are used against her and her life is made to fit the standard template of the tortured artist: early ambition, a meteoric rise to fame, a string of meaningless love affairs and sub...