Studies in Modern and Contemporary France – serie

Through official maps, this book looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934). Governmental policies, such as the creation of a mandatory national uniform educational system that will eventually include geography, combined with technological advances in the printing industry, to alter the look, exposure, reception, and distribution of government maps. The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space. Rail and automobiles made moving about the city and environs easier while increased industrialization moved factories and their workers further out into the Seine Department. During this time, maps transitioned from reflecting the past to documenting the present. With the advent of French urbanism after World War I, official mapped views of greater Paris abandoned privileging past achievements and began to mirror actual residential and industrial development as it pushed further out from the city centre. Finally, the government needed to plan for the future of greater Paris and official maps begin to show how the government viewed the direction of its capital city.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a remarkable group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by delving into matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture provides cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today. These essays were assembled in honor of Lawrence D. Kritzman, whose writing and editorial work in French studies inspired the wide-ranging themes examined here.

This timely study sheds new light on debates about humour and identity in France, and is the first book about humour and identity in France to be published in either English or French that analyses both debates about Charlie Hebdo and standup comedy. It examines humour, freedom of expression, and social cohesion in France during a crucial time in France’s recent history punctuated by the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. It evaluates the state of French society and attitudes to humour in France in the aftermath of the events of January 2015. This book argues that debates surrounding Charlie Hebdo, although significant, only provide part of the picture when it comes to understanding humour and multiculturalism in France. This monograph fills significant gaps in French and international media coverage and academic writing, which has generally failed to adequately examine the broader picture that emerges when one examines career trajectories of notable contemporary French comedians. By addressing this failing, this book provides a more complete picture of humour, identity, and Republican values in France. By focusing primarily on contemporary comedians in France, this book explores competing uses of French Republican discourse in debates about humour, offensiveness, and freedom of expression. Ultimately, it argues that studying humour and identity in France often reveals a sense of national unease within the Republic at a time of considerable turmoil.

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.

In France, the fundamental intellectual debate over ecology might best be summarized by the contrasting views of Michel Serres and Luc Ferry. In The Natural Contract, Serres calls for an end to humans’ war on nature: Our world view must turn from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and our relationship to the earth must become symbiotic instead of parasitic. Luc Ferry’s response to Serres in The New Ecological Order ridicules the metaphor of a natural contract, by which humans (and humanism) would no longer reign over the earth. Ferry accuses Serres and other ecological thinkers of being “premodern” and “prehumanistic”; valuing nonhuman life as much as human life evokes the ridiculous trials of five centuries ago when beetles and rats were threatened with excommunication if they did not cease their antihuman activities.After analyzing the Serres-Ferry debate, Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics examines environmental themes in novels by Michel Tournier, Stéphane Audeguy, and Chantal Chawaf. It then considers the complex and evolving relationship between humans and animals as expressed in novels by Vercors and Olivia Rosenthal, and in philosophical works by Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay, and Peter Singer, among others. Two novels each by the humanist J.-C. Rufin and the humorist Iegor Gran provide a dose of healthy skepticism. Rufin’s stories reveal the potential dark side of extreme environmentalism—authoritarianism and terrorism—while Gran’s hilarious satires critique some environmentalists’ piousness, opportunism, humorlessness, and antihumanism. The book concludes that environmentalism and humanism are not incompatible, if we proceed beyond the traditional humanism of Ferry and other modernists. Essays by philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Rabhi, Edgar Morin, and Michel Maffesoli demonstrate that an inclusive, ecological humanism is not only possible but necessary for our survival.

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in contemporary French economy, culture and society. Engaging with work in political economy and sociology, the book sketches a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of these profound changes. It examines the challenges such changes have posed to fundamental French republican values, arguing they have opened up a rift between older notions of French republican citizenship and the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour. The book traces the symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, social classes, and ethnicities.

This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, at the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’, whereby increasing numbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to kill themselves. The book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. It aims to consider what the extreme and subjective act of self-killing, narrated in suicide letters, can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood bodies. What do rising work-related suicides reveal about conditions of human labour in the twenty-first century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire for suicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their act? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to a finance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the French workplace.

Through official maps, this book looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889-1934). Governmental policies, such as the creation of a mandatory national uniform educational system that will eventually include geography, combined with technological advances in the printing industry, to alter the look, exposure, reception, and distribution of government maps. The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space. Rail and automobiles made moving about the city and environs easier while increased industrialization moved factories and their workers further out into the Seine Department. During this time, maps transitioned from reflecting the past to documenting the present. With the advent of French urbanism after World War I, official mapped views of greater Paris abandoned privileging past achievements and began to mirror actual residential and industrial development as it pushed further out from the city centre. Finally, the government needed to plan for the future of greater Paris and official maps begin to show how the government viewed the direction of its capital city.

From Zinedine Zidane to Michael Jordan and from Marie-José Pérec to Lance Armstrong, over the last thirty years, numerous individuals have emerged through the global sports industry to capture the imagination of the French public and become touchstones for the discussion of a host of social issues. This book provides new insights into the evolution of the global sporting spectacle through a study of star athletes, emblematic organisations, key locations, and celebrated moments in French sport from the mid-1980s to the present day. It draws on a wide range of sources, from film, television, advertising, newspapers, and popular music to cover key developments in sports including football, motorsport, basketball, and cycling. Sport here emerges as a privileged site for the discussion of the nature of contemporary nationhood, as well as for the performance of France’s postcolonial heritage. Simultaneously, sport provides a platform for the playing out of concerns over globalisation, and, in a time of post-industrial uncertainty, for nostalgic reminiscences of an apocryphal bygone era of social cohesion. The exploration of these themes leads to new understandings of the ways sport influences and is implicated in broader social and cultural concerns in France today.

Should all mothers breast-feed their children? This question remains controversial in the twenty-first century. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation in 2010, feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter claimed that the pressure to breast-feed signified “a reduction of woman to the status of an animal species, as though we were all female chimpanzees.”The debate over maternal nursing held even more urgency before pasteurization provided a safe alternative in the early 1900s. While scholars of literary criticism and art history have described the abundance of breast-feeding imagery following the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1762, little has been written on its manifestations in the nineteenth century. Despite an ongoing propaganda campaign to encourage mothers to nurse, reflected in such diverse sources as medical theses, paintings, and fictional cautionary tales, French mothers continued to entrust their infants to wet nurses more often and for longer than was the norm in other European countries throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.This book examines representations of breast-feeding in French literature and culture from 1800 to 1900 and their apparent dissonance with the socio-historical realities of French mothers.

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’, to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Parisiennes: City Women in French Cinema examines French films that screen women as main characters in the city of Paris from 1957 to the present day. The book investigates how women perceive, use, and inhabit the city of Paris on-screen, showing that the strong connection between the city and its women offers a strategic site to examine gender in urban space in cinema. Close readings of key popular movies, art-house films, and films directed by women reveal that the on-screen interactions between female protagonists and city spaces are crucial to understanding women’s place(s) in Paris in different social and historical contexts. Moving beyond the mythical Parisienne and the celebrated flâneuse, the book analyzes the Parisiennes as city women to capture the interactive exchange between female protagonists and urban spaces, focusing on spatial perception, everyday urban practices, and lived experience. Most importantly, these on-screen Parisiennes show women’s lives and struggles in the city and imagine women asserting the right to be residents of Paris, as city women. The Parisiennes as city women screen women who aim to walk freely the city streets and imagine Paris on their own terms, providing a more egalitarian model to the off-screen city.

Shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2025Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.In French literature, newspapers have typically had bad press. Throughout the nineteenth century, French poets and novelists depicted the rapid growth of the press as a corrupting behemoth that was swallowing up art and culture. And yet, towards the end of the century, some writers began to take a more ambivalent approach, pivoting between antipathy and enthusiasm for what had become a massified and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. ‘No-one truly escapes from journalism,’ as Stéphane Mallarmé put it. Rather than cut themselves off from ‘universal reportage’, he and other leading modernists, including Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, came to view newspapers as an essential forum for literary experimentation.Hustlers in the Ivory Tower explores how the French modernists used newspapers and large-circulation magazines as a ‘literary laboratory’ by publishing poetry and imaginative prose in their pages. Drawing on extensive documentary research, this book looks behind the scenes at wrangling and wheeling-dealing between authors, editors, and publishers that drove the rise of modernist literature in France.These interactions with the press yielded nuanced, self-conscious portrayals of the tensions between journalism and literature in works of modernist poetry and prose that confront their own journalistic hinterland in unprecedented depth. At once a model and a foil, the newspaper emerges in Hustlers in the Ivory Tower as the locus of French literature’s broader struggle to come to terms with modernity.

This timely study sheds new light on debates about humour and identity in France, and is the first book about humour and identity in France to be published in either English or French that analyses both debates about Charlie Hebdo and standup comedy. It examines humour, freedom of expression, and social cohesion in France during a crucial time in France’s recent history punctuated by the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. It evaluates the state of French society and attitudes to humour in France in the aftermath of the events of January 2015. This book argues that debates surrounding Charlie Hebdo, although significant, only provide part of the picture when it comes to understanding humour and multiculturalism in France. This monograph fills significant gaps in French and international media coverage and academic writing, which has generally failed to adequately examine the broader picture that emerges when one examines career trajectories of notable contemporary French comedians. By addressing this failing, this book provides a more complete picture of humour, identity, and Republican values in France. By focusing primarily on contemporary comedians in France, this book explores competing uses of French Republican discourse in debates about humour, offensiveness, and freedom of expression. Ultimately, it argues that studying humour and identity in France often reveals a sense of national unease within the Republic at a time of considerable turmoil.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a remarkable group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by delving into matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture provides cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today. These essays were assembled in honor of Lawrence D. Kritzman, whose writing and editorial work in French studies inspired the wide-ranging themes examined here.

The Dreyfus Affair’s Literary Politics offers a new interpretation of writers’ political engagements in the crisis that ended the French nineteenth century, following the wrongful treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Émile Zola and three writers connected to him – Ferdinand Brunetière, Henry Céard and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier – drew on their affinities and antagonisms concerning Zola’s naturalist fiction to shape their political discourse in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola and Bouhélier were Dreyfusard, Brunetière and Céard anti-Dreyfusard, yet in each case they transformed a vision of what literature should be into arguments about French national identity, the proper relationship between literary and political thought, and the tensions between individual rights and raison d’état.Developing a method entitled ‘microhistories of ideas,’ Cooke shows that a longitudinal approach to each writer’s career yields a set of central unit-ideas that reappear in the new, emotive context of the Affair. Through close readings of material such as pamphlets, newspaper columns and aesthetic essays, the significance of often ephemeral writing to the larger questions of intellectual history – and to the outcome of the Dreyfus Affair itself - becomes clear.

Shortlisted for the R. Gapper Book Prize 2025Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.In French literature, newspapers have typically had bad press. Throughout the nineteenth century, French poets and novelists depicted the rapid growth of the press as a corrupting behemoth that was swallowing up art and culture. And yet, towards the end of the century, some writers began to take a more ambivalent approach, pivoting between antipathy and enthusiasm for what had become a massified and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon. ‘No-one truly escapes from journalism,’ as Stéphane Mallarmé put it. Rather than cut themselves off from ‘universal reportage’, he and other leading modernists, including Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, came to view newspapers as an essential forum for literary experimentation.Hustlers in the Ivory Tower explores how the French modernists used newspapers and large-circulation magazines as a ‘literary laboratory’ by publishing poetry and imaginative prose in their pages. Drawing on extensive documentary research, this book looks behind the scenes at wrangling and wheeling-dealing between authors, editors, and publishers that drove the rise of modernist literature in France.These interactions with the press yielded nuanced, self-conscious portrayals of the tensions between journalism and literature in works of modernist poetry and prose that confront their own journalistic hinterland in unprecedented depth. At once a model and a foil, the newspaper emerges in Hustlers in the Ivory Tower as the locus of French literature’s broader struggle to come to terms with modernity.

Queer Kinships explores how queer individuals and communities in France resist erasure and reimagine belonging through inventive practices of kinship. Moving beyond the limited binaries of communitarianism and universalism, the book traces how French queers cultivate relational solidarities across linguistic, digital, and activist spaces. Through detailed analyses of conferences, podcasts, digital activism, and the Collages Féminicides movement, CJ Gomolka introduces the concepts of nomenclatural, techno, and interpellative kinships as frameworks for understanding new forms of affiliation that emerge under conditions of censorship, discrimination, violence, and death. The book demonstrates how queers forge bonds across difference that challenge Republican assimilationist models while also resisting Anglo-American universalizing notions of queer identity. By situating these practices within France’s longer histories of colonialism, universalism, and state-managed erasure, Queer Kinships illuminates the radical potential of kinship as both a reparative practice and a speculative horizon. It will be essential reading for scholars of queer theory, French and Francophone studies, gender studies, and anyone interested in how kinship offers tools for survival, resistance, and coalition-building in precarious times.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Parisiennes: City Women in French Cinema examines French films that screen women as main characters in the city of Paris from 1957 to the present day. The book investigates how women perceive, use, and inhabit the city of Paris on-screen, showing that the strong connection between the city and its women offers a strategic site to examine gender in urban space in cinema. Close readings of key popular movies, art-house films, and films directed by women reveal that the on-screen interactions between female protagonists and city spaces are crucial to understanding women’s place(s) in Paris in different social and historical contexts. Moving beyond the mythical Parisienne and the celebrated flâneuse, the book analyzes the Parisiennes as city women to capture the interactive exchange between female protagonists and urban spaces, focusing on spatial perception, everyday urban practices, and lived experience. Most importantly, these on-screen Parisiennes show women’s lives and struggles in the city and imagine women asserting the right to be residents of Paris, as city women. The Parisiennes as city women screen women who aim to walk freely the city streets and imagine Paris on their own terms, providing a more egalitarian model to the off-screen city.

Should all mothers breast-feed their children? This question remains controversial in the twenty-first century. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation in 2010, feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter claimed that the pressure to breast-feed signified “a reduction of woman to the status of an animal species, as though we were all female chimpanzees.”The debate over maternal nursing held even more urgency before pasteurization provided a safe alternative in the early 1900s. While scholars of literary criticism and art history have described the abundance of breast-feeding imagery following the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1762, little has been written on its manifestations in the nineteenth century. Despite an ongoing propaganda campaign to encourage mothers to nurse, reflected in such diverse sources as medical theses, paintings, and fictional cautionary tales, French mothers continued to entrust their infants to wet nurses more often and for longer than was the norm in other European countries throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.This book examines representations of breast-feeding in French literature and culture from 1800 to 1900 and their apparent dissonance with the socio-historical realities of French mothers.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.How to creatively portray the nineteenth-century prison? Presenting original research findings and proposing novel connections between penal and visual history, this book investigates how artists and other inmates attempted to communicate their captivity by pictorial means. The prisons of Paris were characterized by distinctive scopic regimes from 1793 until 1894, especially the ascendant cellular jail, in which visibility was a central element of punitive practices. As authorities imposed increasing invisibility on detainees, artists such as Hubert Robert, Jacques-Louis David, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Courbet, Armand Désiré Gautier, Maximilien Luce, and Théophile Steinlen, among others, spent time behind bars grappling with representational strategies that almost always required conjoining words and images. The artists’ prison was an ekphrastic site par excellence, a topography whose space could be depicted only when its words—graffiti, inscriptions, regulations—were bestowed legibility as signs. Penitentiary bureaucrats and criminologists analogously seized on the words and images through which inmates contested their invisibility to develop theories on recidivism, graffiti, and the “aesthetics of criminality,” an ersatz study of inmate representations. The visual output scrutinized here is not mere illustration; these creations help fuse an integrated narrative showing how prison, art, and politics shaped each other.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.The First World War generated a climate of exacerbated nationalism, deep-running anxieties over gender, and heightened masculinisation of suffering. In France, this volatile combination provided meaning to multiple ways of obscuring and trivialising diverse forms of gender-based violence and aggression towards women. The book retraces this cultural pattern by uncovering shifts and continuities in discourses on sexual consent and gender violence in French culture and literature of the First World War. This research provides historical insight and critical depth to contemporary debates on sexual consent by arguing that the notion of cultural exception in gender relations is better accounted for through the country’s history of violence and militarization. Moreover, the research frames amour à la francaise, or the so-called French exception in gender relations, as a response to the brutalization in the war and postwar period. It highlights the fact that indifference to gender violence was a shared denominator of the ‘French exception’ both now and then. It draws on a broad range of sources – including visual materials, literary works, judicial records, media sources, and testimonials – and tools from literary criticism, cultural history and critical discourse analysis to uncover a silenced past dominated for too long by a male gaze, revising in the process the historiographic outlook on gender relations and politics in the area covered.

The Dreyfus Affair’s Literary Politics offers a new interpretation of writers’ political engagements in the crisis that ended the French nineteenth century, following the wrongful treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Émile Zola and three writers connected to him – Ferdinand Brunetière, Henry Céard and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier – drew on their affinities and antagonisms concerning Zola’s naturalist fiction to shape their political discourse in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola and Bouhélier were Dreyfusard, Brunetière and Céard anti-Dreyfusard, yet in each case they transformed a vision of what literature should be into arguments about French national identity, the proper relationship between literary and political thought, and the tensions between individual rights and raison d’état.Developing a method entitled ‘microhistories of ideas,’ Cooke shows that a longitudinal approach to each writer’s career yields a set of central unit-ideas that reappear in the new, emotive context of the Affair. Through close readings of material such as pamphlets, newspaper columns and aesthetic essays, the significance of often ephemeral writing to the larger questions of intellectual history – and to the outcome of the Dreyfus Affair itself - becomes clear.

The Mediterranean island of Corsica, a French territory, experiences mobility in the form of locals’ mass exodus to the Continent, the arrival of immigrants at rates similar to Paris, and a booming tourist industry with millions of visitors each year. What, then, are the multilingual dynamics on the island—languages emerging from above (French), a middle ground (Corsican), and sideways (languages of immigrants and tourists)? What multilingual subjectivities are articulated? Mendes analyzes competing conceptualizations of linguistic multiplicity, what he calls countervocalities, in which languages are constantly rearranging in variously imagined hierarchies.Countervocalities explores different dimensions of institutional multilingualism, namely those related to policies, practices, and ideologies within and extending from education settings. The chapters address reclamation, imposition, and erasure of different languages on Corsica, moving from inside the school, to artefacts from the schoolscape, to discourses about language teaching. The study fruitfully analyzes an array of interactional and artefactual data types. This productive alternation offers a cross-section of attitudes toward and representations of multilingual dynamics while foregrounding the role of mobility and language in understandings of place and what counts as local.

In France, the fundamental intellectual debate over ecology might best be summarized by the contrasting views of Michel Serres and Luc Ferry. In The Natural Contract, Serres calls for an end to humans’ war on nature: Our world view must turn from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and our relationship to the earth must become symbiotic instead of parasitic. Luc Ferry’s response to Serres in The New Ecological Order ridicules the metaphor of a natural contract, by which humans (and humanism) would no longer reign over the earth. Ferry accuses Serres and other ecological thinkers of being “premodern” and “prehumanistic”; valuing nonhuman life as much as human life evokes the ridiculous trials of five centuries ago when beetles and rats were threatened with excommunication if they did not cease their antihuman activities.After analyzing the Serres-Ferry debate, Ecocritics and Ecoskeptics examines environmental themes in novels by Michel Tournier, Stéphane Audeguy, and Chantal Chawaf. It then considers the complex and evolving relationship between humans and animals as expressed in novels by Vercors and Olivia Rosenthal, and in philosophical works by Jacques Derrida, Élisabeth de Fontenay, and Peter Singer, among others. Two novels each by the humanist J.-C. Rufin and the humorist Iegor Gran provide a dose of healthy skepticism. Rufin’s stories reveal the potential dark side of extreme environmentalism—authoritarianism and terrorism—while Gran’s hilarious satires critique some environmentalists’ piousness, opportunism, humorlessness, and antihumanism. The book concludes that environmentalism and humanism are not incompatible, if we proceed beyond the traditional humanism of Ferry and other modernists. Essays by philosophers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Rabhi, Edgar Morin, and Michel Maffesoli demonstrate that an inclusive, ecological humanism is not only possible but necessary for our survival.

This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, at the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a ‘suicide epidemic’, whereby increasing numbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to kill themselves. The book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. It aims to consider what the extreme and subjective act of self-killing, narrated in suicide letters, can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood bodies. What do rising work-related suicides reveal about conditions of human labour in the twenty-first century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire for suicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their act? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to a finance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the French workplace.

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in contemporary French economy, culture and society. Engaging with work in political economy and sociology, the book sketches a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of these profound changes. It examines the challenges such changes have posed to fundamental French republican values, arguing they have opened up a rift between older notions of French republican citizenship and the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour. The book traces the symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, social classes, and ethnicities.

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.