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Few screen icons have provoked as much commentary, speculation and adulation as the 'she' of this plaudit, Catherine Deneuve. This book begins with a brief overview of Deneuve's career, followed by a critical survey of the field of theoretical star studies, highlighting its potential and limitations for European, and particularly French, film scholarship. It argues the need for the single-star case study as a model for understanding the multiple signifying elements of transnational stardom. Her first role, at the age of 13, was a brief appearance as a schoolgirl in André Hunebelle's Collégiennes/The Twilight Girls. It was in 1965 that Roman Polanski would cast Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, described by one critic as a 'one-woman show' in a role that would effectively create a persona which would resonate throughout her future film career. The darker shades of the Deneuve persona are in even greater evidence in Tristana. Demy's Donkey Skin is arguably an equal source of the tale's iconic status in France today, and largely because of Deneuve. The book also investigates films of the 1970s; their role in shaping her star persona and the ways in which they position Deneuve in relation to French political culture. The book considers exactly why directors gravitate towards Deneuve when trying to evoke or represent forms of female homosexual activity on film, and to consider exactly what such directors actually make Deneuve do and mean once they have her performing these particular forms of lesbian relation.
In 2002, the French party system seems to be demonstrating a fluidity, if not outright instability, equal to any period in the Fifth Republic's history. This book explores the extent to which this represents outright change and shifts within a stable structure. Portrayals of French political culture point to incivisme, individualism and a distrust of organizations. The book focuses on three fundamental political issues such as 'politics', 'power' and 'justice', which appear in almost all political discussions and conflicts. It identifies different 'types' of state in political theory and looks at the major challenges to practical state sovereignty in the modern world. Discussing the concept of the nation in the United Kingdom, the book identifies both cultural and political aspects of nationhood. These include nation and state; race and nation; language and the nation; religion and national identity; government and nation; common historical and cultural ties; and a sense of 'nationhood'. Liberal democracy, defensive democracy and citizen democracy/republican democracy are explained. The book also analyses John Stuart Mill's and Isaiah Berlin's views on 'negative' and 'positive' freedom. Conservatism is one of the major intellectual and political strains of thought in Western culture. Liberalism has become the dominant ideology in the third millennium. Socialism sprang from the industrial revolution and the experience of the class that was its product, the working class. Events have made 'fascism' a term of political abuse rather than one of serious ideological analysis. Environmentalism and ecologism constitute one of the most recent ideological movements.
This chapter investigates Catherine Deneuve's films of the 1970s; their role in shaping her star persona and the ways in which they position Deneuve in relation to French political culture. It argues that Deneuve's inconsistent approach to feminist issues during the 1970s can be seen as a metonymical of the wider contradictions inherent to France's political culture during this decade, specifically in terms of the conflict that existed between liberalism and conservatism. France and its government's contradictory approach towards the condition of women's lives during the 1970s will provide a contextual background to Deneuve's own engagement with feminist discourses during this decade. The chapter explores the diversity of Deneuve's 1970s filmography through three key films: A nous deux, Courage fuyons and Zig zig. It also considers how Deneuve's contradictory star persona manifests itself within these films, and how each text might signal varying degrees of anti-feminism.
Feudalism, venality, and revolution is about the political and social order revealed by the monarchy’s most ambitious effort to reform its institutions, the introduction of participatory assemblies at all levels of the government. It should draw the attention of anyone interested in the sort of social and political conditions that predisposed people to make the French Revolution. In particular, according to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralization had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. Feudalism, venality, and revolution challenges this theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The monarchy incorporated an administration of seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent evident in the French Revolution. These findings will alter the way scholars think about the Old Regime society and state and should therefore find a large market among graduate students and professors of European history.
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.
discipline.6 In France, the history of the stadium has been the subject of some almanac-style guides and a few specialised architectural retrospectives.7 The construction of the Stade de France, having occurred relatively recently and in conjunction with the 1998 World Cup, has also attracted a fair amount of attention from historians, sociologists and geographers.8 However, in the broader scholarly literature about mass society, politics and leisure in twentieth-century France, the stadium has only made cameo appearances. Historians of modern French political culture
1962, the press characterised his visit as the consecration of a European emperor. The chances Europe presented, and still presents for France in terms of politics, economics, and culture, are widely recognised among French elites. To use Delors's terms, Europe presents ‘a unique opportunity' (Delors 1988, 261). However, these new opportunities have not translated into dramatic changes in terms of French political culture and discourse. In this sense, there is a gap between the political significance of Europe in the practices of the French political class and the
progress possible. Rousseau’s assessment was roughly the same, and the record of reform in the 1760s and 1770s offers little reason to reconsider. Indeed, it suggests that inaction on education was symptomatic of a broader paralysis in the French polity. After 1789, however, the prospect of transformative changes in French politics, culture, and society was not an abstraction upon which to reflect, but an apparent inevitability with which people would have to reckon. The reform of education seemed suddenly like a necessary component of, and complement to, social and
-gpa-nous-preparons-la-barbarie.html , accessed 29 January 2021. 24 Scott Gunther, ‘Making Sense of the Anti-Same-Sex-Marriage Movement in France’, French Politics, Culture & Society , 37:2 (2019), 131–58. 25 Lionel Labosse, Altersexualité, éducation & censure (Paris: Publibook, 2005), pp. 114–15.
50 (1978), 289, 302–3; Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121, 127, 239–41, 243; Dale Van Kley, “From the Lessons of French MILLER 9781526148377 PRINT.indd 192 15/09/2020 16:09 CONCLUSION 193 History to Truths for all Times and all People: The Historical Origins of an Anti-Historical Declaration,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994