Showing papers in "French Historical Studies in 1975"

Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract: In eighteenth-century France the natural economy of the working classes was a family economy dependent upon the efforts of each individual member and one in which the role of both partners was equally crucial.1 The twelve to fourteen-year-old girl embarking upon her working life did so, consciously or not, with the vision of equipping herself to cope with a predictable set of economic circumstances which would confront her, her husband, and the children she would bear in the years to come. The girl we have in mind was the daughter of a smallholder or agricultural laborer, artisan, industrial worker, or casual odd-job man in a society where 50 to 90 per cent of holdings (according to region) were insufficient to maintain a family, where agricultural

Education and Social Status: The Jesuit College in the Early Third Republic

Abstract: In arguing for his famous "Article VII"-proposing to bar all religious orders from teaching positions in France-Jules Ferry, as minister of public instruction, spoke thus to the Chamber of Deputies on June 27, 1879: "In education it's these [Jesuits] who give the tone; it's these who furnish the example for others; these who enjoy the success . . . who serve as model for all the ecclesiastical establishments."l

The Wet-nursing Business in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: Emma Bovary put her baby out to be nursed by another woman for a wage. For the social historian Madame Bovary belonged to the rural professional class: she lived in a small bourg north of Rouen with her husband Charles, who was an officier de sante, a second-class physician. "One day Emma was suddenly seized with the desire to see her little girl." The wet nurse, a poor carpenter's wife, lived at the other end of the village. Emma found the nurse at the gate of her cottage "with a baby she was suckling on one arm." But this was not Emma's child. With her other hand the wet nurse held another child, also not Emma's, but "a poor puny little fellow, his face covered with scrofula, the son of a Rouen hosier, whom his parents, too taken up with their business, left in the country." "Go in," the nurse directed Emma, "your little one is there asleep." Inside, Emma lifted her daughter from the cradle, coddled her and sang to her, until the baby vomited on her mother's shoulder. Emma abruptly returned her daughter to the solicitous nurse, who pursued her visitor out the door and down the path, sabots clattering, begging for gifts of soap, coffee, and brandy.l Is Flaubert's account of French family life in the middle of the nineteenth century overdrawn? Could many mothers have been quite so insensitive as Emma Bovary? Could infant care and feeding have Mr. Sussman is assistant professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

Victor Duruy and the Controversy over Secondary Education for Girls

Abstract: When French legislators passed the See Law of 1880 establishing the first lycees and colleges in France for young women, they were building on a precedent established during the late years of the Second Empire. In 1867 the liberal minister of public instruction, Victor Duruy, had created public secondary courses for young women in forty towns and cities throughout France.1 The responses to these courses had been mixed. Liberals, republicans, and anticlericals generally supported them, while conservatives, legitimists, and clericals opposed them. The range of their support or opposition varied widely, from strong approval to vociferous rejection. Despite the opposition, however, the courses enjoyed a fair measure of success between 1867 and 1869. Then in 1869 Duruy was forced out of office, and the courses fell into rapid decline. By 1878 there were only ten locations in France which still offered the courses. This brief synopsis, similar to what one would find in a standard textbook on modern France, leaves many crucial questions unanswered: Why did the government of Napoleon III decide to establish the courses? How were they structured? What was the nature of the opposition to them? And how does this episode in the history of the Second Empire illuminate some of the political, social, and cultural tensions of the time? Drawing heavily on documents found in the F17 series at the National Archives in Paris, this article will explore the answers to these crucial questions.

French Public Opinion and the Algerian War: A Research Note

Abstract: Historical writing of the kind which asserts that "Most, some or few of the French believed, thought or supported X, Y, or Z" has often been based on a highly selective reading of the press, sometimes on the perceptions of a handful of well-educated contemporary observers, sometimes on guesswork. Several well-known studies of public opinion in nineteenth-century France have relied on the reports to the government in Paris of the prefects and the procureurs-generaux.l Few historians of twentieth-century France have made use of the studies of the professional opinion samplers, despite the wealth of data that they have collected. Jean Stoetzel, for many years a professor at the Sorbonne, established the Institut fransais d'Opinion publique (IFOP), the first survey research organization in France, in 1938, two years after George Gallup founded in the United States the Opinion Research Corporation. IFOP, which published in 1939 the results of its first survey, on attitudes toward the Munich crisis (of which no historian, so far as I am aware, has yet made use), remains a private organization, but in recent years it has conducted a number of studies for the French government on such diverse questions as educational reform and the liberalization of the laws on abortion. Scholars are permitted access to the raw data on which IFOP's surveys are based; inquiries may be made to the headquarters of the organization, 20, rue d'Aumale, Paris 9e. American students of France are fortunate to have in their midst the Roper Public Opinion Research Center. Established at Williams College in 1946, the Roper Center has in its collection, on

Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Rouen: The Demographic Effects of the Religious Wars

Abstract: The tendency of recent study of the historical demography of sixteenthcentury France has been to minimize the impact of the Wars of Religion on the evolution of the country's population. Citing baptismal figures for scattered villages in Sologne, the Beauvaisis, and primarily Anjou and Upper Brittany, Pierre Goubert declared in 1965 that the Wars "in no way seriously hindered the general upward movement of baptisms ... provided we disregard the ten years 1590-9."1 A more recent synthesis suggests that the buoyant population growth of the sixteenth century may have been checked by the 1560s in the Midi but still maintains that the demographic expansion in northern France continued for at least two decades after the outbreak of hostilities.2 Mols' bon mot

The French Economic Stake in Colonial Algeria

Abstract: Interpretive analyses of European decolonization following the Second World War have scarcely begun to appear. In attempting to determine, for example, why the British and French experiences were so strikingly different historians will surely be concerned to weigh the respective importance of such influences on policy as national psychology, domestic political structure, and international strategic reasoning. But since the debates over the reasons for the founding of these empires have largely centered on the economic motivations involved, the role of these interests in affecting the decolonization process will logically come up for scrutiny. To be sure, observers generally deny that economic interests made any substantial difference in the French inability to decolonize easily (just as it is widely assumed the Third Republic's empire was not acquired for primarily economic reasons), but the relevant figures have yet to be assembled.' First, one must establish some estimate of what French colonial interests were economically speaking. Henri Brunschwig's study, the most respected to date, of the different motivations behind French colonial expansion under the Third Republic has concluded both that economic impetus was far from decisive and that it is doubtful in retrospect whether colonial policy actually served the general interests of French development.2 Nonetheless, Brunschwig does not discuss in any detail the function of colonial trade within the actual structure of the French economic system. This might reveal, for instance, that key sectors of the economy-pace-setters for the rest of the industrial sector -were heavily engaged in trade with technologically backward areas of the world and prospered from an imperialist foreign policy. Instead, Brunschwig simply relies on gross comparisons of the level of imperial trade to total French trade in order to discount the significance of the empire economically. Nor does he consider the larger framework of

Science and Socialism: The Case of Jean Perrin in the Third Republic

Abstract: Throughout its history Marxism has identified itself with science. According to the French Communist biologist Marcel Prenant the method of dialectics is the scientific method,1 and the choice of materialism over idealism is the verdict of scientific investigation. The allegiance of scientists to the Marxist philosophy would seem to follow then as a matter of course. But historically this has not been the case in those countries contributing most heavily to the history of modern science. France is the major exception to this generalization. Indeed, after World War II anticommunists were expressing dismay at their estimate that 65 per cent of the personnel of the French Commissariat i l'En-rgie atomique was "communist."2 Reformist republicans and socialists had in fact dominated the French scientific elite since the turn of the century, with the two major exceptions of Louis Leprince-Ringuet and Louis de Broglie. Of the left-leaning scientists two of the most influential were the close friends Paul Langevin and Jean Perrin. The physicist Edmond Bauer remarked about them in 1948 that there was "scarcely a physicist or a

L'Embastillement de Paris: The Fortification of Paris during the July Monarchy

Abstract: In November 1830 the four-month-old government of Louis-Philippe initiated the costly and extremely controversial project of converting its capital into a fortified city. By 1844 Paris was encircled by a continuous wall approximately twenty-four miles long with seventeen detached forts spaced along the defended perimeter.2 The fortifications were built outside of the city on the site of what is now the Boulevard Peripherique, the busy expressway girding Paris. The combined system of the wall and the forts cost about 145 million francs,3 a huge expen-

The Failure of Gambetta's Grand Ministere

Abstract: Leon Gambetta's appointment to the presidency of the council of ministers early in November 1881 aroused great expectations. With his popular appeal and parliamentary following Gambetta, and only Gambetta, had enough authority to control an increasingly divided and unruly chamber. Nevertheless, the very government that was expected to endure proved to be the most ephemeral of all. After a scant two and one-half months Gambetta fell before a disparate coalition of radical republicans, monarcho-Bonapartist conservatives, and disgruntled moderates. Depending on their perspective, contemporaries blamed Gambetta's defeat either on his drive for personal power or on the recalcitrance of a Chamber hostile to executive authority.1 Either way they considered the defeat of the Gambetta ministry the casualty of a wider conflict between strong ministerial leadership and parliamentary autonomy, and with good reason. Gambetta had indeed taken power expecting to end the succession of weak cabinets directed by men without significant authority. He intended to develop a dependable majority closely bound to the cabinet. Originally most deputies understood and accepted Gambetta's political objectives, but for reasons that have remained obscure Gambetta's political reform attempts turned into a bitter struggle for power, won by the Chamber. Gambetta began with significant strikes against him, and he magnified his problems by adopting a belligerent stand that transformed his reform designs into a confrontation and a test of wills. Gambetta had been excluded from the prime ministership he deserved as leader

The Rosieres Movement, 1766-1789: A Clerical Precursor of the Revolutionary Cults

Abstract: The religious question during the French Revolution eventually engages the attention of all historians of the Revolution, lay and clerical, liberal and Marxist. Among the longest-running and most interesting debates in this historiography is the one which pitted Alphonse Aulard against Albert Mathiez at the time of the separation of Church and state in 1905. This was, of course, the first round in a heated and often personal intellectual struggle between the two historians; but its pretext remains a subject for research by students who are younger and less heated. What is the reason for the invented liturgies of the Great Revolution? Why these bizarre and often ridiculous cults of Reason, of the Supreme Being, of Theophilanthropy? Was Aulard right when he proposed in 1892 that the first two cults were fabricated to respond to the patriotic passions of a people at war?' Or do we prefer Mathiez, who concluded in 1904 that they were only elementary forms of the religious life which Frenchmen adopted out of nostalgia for the old?2 Recently John McManners has suggested we adopt both opinions as complementary.3 Are they? And is there perhaps another explanation to which the ideas of Aulard and Mathiez are simply first approximations?

Municipal Imperialism in Decline: The Lyon Chamber of Commerce, 1925-1938

Abstract: Important segments of the Lyonnais population embraced the cause of formal and informal empire during the nineteenth century when two motives, the religious and the economic, lent impetus to overseas endeavor.1 The sometimes overlapping attractions of winning converts to Catholicism and increasing profits continued to exercise their spells well into the twentieth century. As late as 1943 the Propagation de la Foi estimated that the diocese of Lyon, encompassing 3.85 per cent of the French population, supplied France with 6.25 per cent of her missionary priests, 4.27 per cent of her missionary brothers, and nearly 6 per cent of her missionary nuns.2 But however deeply rooted the religious convictions of many of the magnates of the local silk industry, France's leading export industry until the advent of the Depression in 1929, there can be little doubt that they expected more from expansion than the salvation of souls. Working through the Lyon Chamber of Commerce, the local institution which most effectively represented their interests and hence the focus of concern here, they continued throughout the last forty years of the Third Republic to pursue economic goals of an essentially imperialist nature. Before the outbreak of World War I they attempted to extend and defend the positions acquired in the Far East during the previous century, interested themselves in developments in most of the French colonies, agitated for the acquisition of Morocco, and kept close watch

The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France Reconsidered

Abstract: France."' In it I pointed out that American scholars had yet to produce a book on modern French history recognized by our French peers, the academic historians, as a major contribution to French historical literature comparable to the great French works such as Georges Lefebvre's Les Paysans de Nord pendant la Revolution franfaise or Ernest Labrousse's La Crise de l'egcononzie frangaise a la fin de l'ancien regime et au debut de la Revolution franfaise, books that almost completely renewed their subjects and altered the ways in which the histories of these subjects had been conceived. I reported further that between 1920 and 1957 the Revue historique had noted in reviews, bibliographical notices, or bibliographical articles 120 books on modern French history by Americans. Only twenty of these received separate, fulllength reviews, and but seven of the latter were judged to make original and significant contributions to modern French history. Eight others mentioned more briefly were also accorded favorable recognition. Nearly half of these fifteen blessed by the Revue historique's approval were doctoral dissertations, the products of the year or so of archival research in France that has been part of the training for most American doctoral students in our field. Considering the books of mature American scholars the French gave their approval particularly to books on diplomatic history, not strictly on French history alone, such as William L. Langer's European Alliances and Align-

The Bourbon Restoration's Commissaires-Extraordinaires du roi in 1814

Abstract: From April to June 1814 the First Bourbon Restoration settled onto its precarious foundations. Between April 15 and Louis XVIII's return on May 3 the comte d'Artois acted as Lieutenant-General of the Realm. On April 22 he appointed twenty-two Commissaires-extraordinaires du Roi for emergency missions, with delegated sovereign powers, in as many military divisions throughout mainland France and in Corsica.1 These envoys' brief missions-from April 22 until late Junehave not received serious attention from historians or memorialists of

A Guide to Research in Archives of Active French Women's Orders

Abstract: The archives of French Catholic secular women's orders have been known to historical scholars, if at all, as an inaccessible treasure or as a forbidding labyrinth. Now a guide to them has become availableCharles Molette's Guide des sources de l'histoire des congregations feminines franraises de vie active (Paris: editions de Paris, 1974), and it will be an indispensable tool to scholars interested in the history of French education, social work, Catholic proselytism, and delivery of health care. The French diocesan archives were inventoried in the 1960s, and a guide published in 1971 (Jacques Gadille, Guide des archives diocesaines frangaises [Paris, 1971]), but work on secular archival material lagged. The holdings of secular women's orders, the Abbe Molette believed, were most urgently in need of a survey, for the lack of qualified personnel-the lack of a scholarly appreciation of their holdings, in fact-threatened the loss of these treasures to the fireplace, the dustbin, the mice. Some 400 secular women's orders, with about 100,000 members, now hold the keys to this historic source material. In the preface to Molette's volume Guy Dubosq, director general of French Archives, appeals to religious houses and persons to preserve their documents, considered as private property since the separation of Church and state, to inventory them, and to render them accessible to scholars. He promises the government's "perfectly objective collaboration" to ensure the preservation of this segment of the "historic French patrimony." In Molette's Guide an "Historical Introduction" of 100 pages precedes the 270-page "Sources and Bibliography." This learned introduction explains the astounding multiplicity and variety of active women's orders in France. In 1860, for example, "there were 4,932 communities attached to 922 authorized congregations, . . . and 2,870 unauthorized communities attached to some 250 unauthorized congregations." Local initiative in founding orders was encouraged throughout the centuries by men of the regular clergy, members of

Robe against Sword: The Parlement of Paris and the French Aristocracy, 1774-1789

Abstract: When in March 1771 the leaders of the Paris Cour des Aides were summoned to Versailles to watch Louis XV annul their decree protesting the judicial reforms of Maupeou, one of their embattled number marveled at the deference shown him and his fellows by the "quantite de Seigneurs, de militaires et de courtisans de tout etat" who were likewise present. Such respect, according to President de Boisgibault,"frappa d'autant plus que les gens de Robe sont ordinairement regardes d'un tout autre oeil a la cour et que quelquefois ils ont assez de peine a entrer lorsque le Roi les fait demander."1 De Boisgibault was not alone in marking the persistence of tensions between the magisterial and military nobility in late eighteenthcentury France. Yet some historians have assured us that a solidarity of interests of robe and sword characterized this period in France and that in fact the magisterial nobility, having "succumbed to the standards of the older status group,"2 surpassed the military noblesse in practicing "les differentes formes de 'reaction nobiliaire.' "3 The most recent scholarship has criticized this notion of an "aristocratic reaction" in the twilight of the Old Regime.4 Certainly there is evidence

The Colbert-Seignelay Naval Reforms and the Beginnings of the War of the League of Augsburg

Abstract: Although no enterprise undertaken by the government of Louis XIV in the generation after 1661 surpassed in magnitude the creation of a first-power navy by Colbert, the first Secretary of State for the Navy (1669-83), and his son and successor, Seignelay (1683-90), this achievement has yet to be systematically and comprehensively assessed. It is the primary purpose of this paper to attempt such an appraisal in the context of the general mobilization which occurred at the beginning of the War of the League of Augsburg. The massive naval preparations which coincided with France's entry into the war toward the end of 1688 represented the first major test of the Colbert-Seignelay reforms. The performance of the navy, particularly in its logistical aspects, will be measured in terms of contemporary assumptions and expectations as summarized in the Ordinance of 1689, an enormous document which, in effect, reviewed the policies which the two Colberts had pursued over the preceding two decades. Such an examination should also permit us to reconsider the widely held hypothesis that the navy's tribulations during the last two decades of the reign came almost exclusively as a consequence of the war. The bipartite interpretation of the reign with its imagery of rise and fall has had its attractions for naval historians as it has for students of domestic politics and foreign affairs. But there is good reason to believe that the sharp contrast which has been drawn between the Colbert-Seignelay administrations and those of the Pontchartrains,

A Fishing Company of Louisbourg, Les Sables d'Olonne, and Paris: La Societe du Baron d'Huart, 1750-1775

Abstract: When the War of Austrian Succession came to an end in 1748 and the French and British paused briefly in their struggle for overseas empire, new men in France who had not been in trade before began to form companies and build ships to sail the Atlantic in search of profit. Shipping increased between France and its colonies: the North American colonies came in for a share of this business. Many ships on their way to or from the West Indies stopped at Quebec and Louisbourg, and the Cape Breton port had the advantage over Quebec of being closer to France, easier to reach, open in winter, and close to the fishing banks. Louisbourg and Gaspe served as excellent bases for the age-old French fishing fleets to sell fish oil and dried cod to merchant ships which took their fishy cargoes to the West Indies or the French Atlantic ports. The fishing business aroused great expectations among many French businessmen after 1748; even Parisians invested in it. One