History

A new archaeology has emerged whose contributions to our understanding of twentieth-century mass violence oscillate between history and memory. A specialist in the field provides an impressive overview that sounds very much like a plea.

Under the Ancien Régime, salaries were not enough to live on. Many people had to combine activities to make ends meet. Laurence Fontaine paints a vivid picture of this reality.

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city’s lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

In ancient Greece, religious rites were designed to produce a unique state of receptivity. This book, which focuses on the tools used in sensory encounters with the gods, contributes to the sensory turn that is currently revitalizing historical studies.

Under the French Third Republic, the gender of “citizenship” and “philosophy” was masculine. Yet women pioneers managed to obtain university degrees and rise to positions of responsibility
from which they had been excluded.

Have France’s Jews been excluded from the great national narrative? The fact is, their archives are as rich as they are significant, bearing witness to a very long history. Moreover, they provide a basis for writing the “external” as well as the “internal” history of Jewish communities.

“Fixers”, or dragomans, are vital intermediaries and interpreters for both journalists and soldiers in hostile terrain, and play a central role in a network of relationships and transfers. In the Middle Ages they embodied the need for otherness, and continue to do so today.

For over a century, the left has owed its political identity and major political victories to a critical adherance to the Enlightenment. This is why, Stéphanie Roza argues, abandoning this legacy is dangerous.

A history of masculinity and a history of men, this collective volume shows that while “ideal” Nazi masculinity was opposed to that of Jews and homosexuals, it was also contested and fragmented, both in the private sphere and on the battlefield.

Religious dialogue, trade, slave mobility, knowledge circulation, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange, colonization, resistance, creolization: Africans have been connected to the rest of the world in every possible way.

Both as a religion and as a civilisation, Islam is currently beset by a cacophony and a worrying erosion of plurality by its apologists as well as its detractors. The “clash of ignorances” is much more real than the so-called “clash of civilisations”.

A recent book traces the rich history of Assyriology, from pioneers such as Oppert and Grotefend, through the major institutions that have contributed to its development, to today’s research projects. This is a portrait of a surprisingly contemporary science.

Secularisation is often presented as a Western model that was exported during decolonisation; but according to M. A. Meziane, it was in fact spread by colonialism itself as an instrument of domination.

Delphine Dulong analyses the role of the French Prime Minister, who does not so much embody a clearly-defined institution as a relational structure: a diarchy with the President, incessant interministerial work, parliamentary obligations. Is the job a powerful position, or that of an underling?

Jean Vioulac is one of a number of authors who have written a historical-philosophical saga of humanity as a way of reflecting on the coming catastrophe. It is not certain, however, that his saga will lead to anything other than a new catastrophic discourse with no prospect of a solution.

At the beginning of the eleventh century, the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate coincided with political fragmentation. It was in this unusual context, soon to be exacerbated by Christian incursions from the north and Berber incursions from the south, that this part of the Muslim world experienced a flourishing culture.

Jérémie Foa has written a history of the “other side” of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Nameless people, thrown into the Seine or buried in mass graves, succumbed to the blows of killers as well as to collective forgetting, which the historian seeks to remedy. This is an important book on mass violence.

How did the ordinary population experience the year 1962, when power was transferred from the colonial authorities to the representatives of the Algerian people? In the absence of archive material, Malika Rahal offers us a history rooted in emotions.

In her memoir, the renowned French researcher Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch looks back on her Jewish childhood, her first experience of Africa in the 1960s, the neo-colonialist stance of some academics, and her intellectual and political career, in which anti-racism has played a pivotal role.

How can one explain the longevity of the Moroccan monarchy? In their long-term study of the imaginary of the Moroccan state, Béatrice Hibou and Mohamed Tozy argue that it is due to the regime’s ability to adapt its dual—imperial and national—logic to the realities of the neoliberal age.

What if the eighteenth century in France was an age of Catholic fervor? Through a study of religious processions, Gaël Rideau presents a tableau of urban life that, in the very midst of theEnlightenment, was marked and organized by public expressions of faith.

While agribusiness is the object of ever more criticism, Matthieu Calame claims that no real agricultural transition will be possible as long as political and cultural leaders do not change too.

Coal is not just a raw material: it is also a symbol and a commodity whose history Charles-François Mathis has retraced over a period spanning two centuries.

From the very beginning of the modern era, Western societies have been debating over and worrying about the climate, its evolution and the responsibility of humans. On this topic, as on many others, the idea of a long prevailing great division between nature and culture is undermined.

Alessandro Stanziani recounts the long story of how agriculture embraced capitalism and productivism, from the transformation of seeds and species to producers’ farms, by way of peasant expropriation and the chemistry of fertilizers and pesticides.

Rising salaries and greater recourse to selling on credit, along with the First World War, transformed working-class consumption habits between 1880 and 1920. While covering topics ranging from deprivation to appropriation, a new book proposes to trace the “social lives of objects.”

In Athens, choral performance was much more than a dramatic method: it was a civic and collective experience, a kind of democratic embodiment of plurality. V. Azoulay and P. Ismard see in it the profound identity of a society overcoming its divisions.

Inequality has a history that is always complex and often contradictory. The story needs to be told, because it is this story, enriched by the contributions of all the social sciences, that can help to shape realistic proposals for greater social justice.

The Association of Algerian Ulema played an important role in the process of decolonisation. Its goal: making Algeria into a Muslim society.

The emergence of environmental protection policies in the second half of the twentieth century is the result of compromises between protest movements and economic and urban development—change by bits and pieces, rather than a genuine urban ecological transition.

We thought they were mute and asleep; now they are waking up and starting to talk. In the torpid summer of 2020, dozens of statues of great men around the world had paint splashed on them, were sprayed with graffiti, had limbs amputated or were destroyed. The historian Jacqueline Lalouette investigates.

Anna Grzymala-Busse, a political scientist, argues that the medieval church played an important role in the foundation of the modern state. Yet this revival of an old argument runs into a number of obstacles.

A new book uses an ethnological approach to shed light on the spaces of freedom and solidarity created by citizens in rural Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship. But these spaces, in some cases, also accommodate the regime.

What motivated French colonisers to found schools in the Maghreb and Subsaharan Africa? Carole Reynaud-Paligot shows how their superiority complex ended up overcoming their meritocratic ideals and dreams of diversity.

During the Second World War, 48,000 Bulgarian Jews avoided being deported. By analyzing a wide-range of previously unavailable sources, Ragaru shows how a collective narrative was constructed around this fact—one that has been used for political purposes down to the present.

The Nazi regime encouraged Germans to indulge in playful heterosexual activity. Many “Aryan” women were given an opportunity to develop professionally and emotionally. Was there a contradiction between promoting people’s sexual freedom while depriving them of political freedom?

In her study of the fate of the 100,000 or so airmen who fell during the Second World War, Claire Andrieu challenges the separation between civilians and soldiers, regular and irregular combatants, wait-and-see attitudes and active resistance, frontline and rear, through an empirical investigation that is destined to become a landmark work.