The Society for the Study of French History (SSFH) supports postgraduate research by funding students to carry out archival research as well as helping them to attend and/or present work at conferences. These awards are open to all postgraduate students registered at a UK university who are carrying out research on an aspect of French history, and reports from successful applicants clearly indicate the tremendous range of research interests supported by the Society. The Society also supports conferences on French history as well as Visiting Scholars to UK and Irish Universities. In this edition we present two reports from postgraduate research grants and two from postgraduate conference bursaries, as well as our report on the tenth Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture in January 2020. The edition further includes details on recent and forthcoming books in the Studies in Modern French and Francophone History series with MUP, for which members of the SSFH are entitled to a 35% discount. More information on the postgraduate awards (and on the full range of bursaries and prizes offered by the SSFH) is available from the Society’s website: www.frenchhistorysociety.ac.uk.
POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH GRANTS
Colonial Logistics and Defence in the French Atlantic, 1713–63
Sridar Shyam (University of Oxford)
My doctoral thesis examines military logistics and infrastructure in eighteenth-century French North America and the Caribbean. With a ground-up perspective, its goal is to understand the inner workings of military provisioning, housing and transport across the French Atlantic world. In order to develop a more complete picture of military logistics in this geographical context, it is essential to study material from the Archives nationales alongside under-explored sources from other French and North American archives. The SSFH research grant, for which I am extremely grateful, made this first foray into the archives possible.
The archival trip was primarily spent in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence. My initial focus was on royal and colonial edicts, which allowed me to reveal some of the regulations imposed by metropolitan and colonial authorities concerning military and defence matters. The Dépôt de fortifications des colonies also proved of great interest for its collection of maps, diagrams, charts and memoirs on the creation of military infrastructure in the French empire. Finally I was able to gain useful insights into the administrative life of the French colonies of Louisiana and Martinique, not least into the attitudes of its military and civilian colonial administrators, by examining colonial correspondence.
My next visit was to Rochefort, a former naval base in the Poitou-Charentes region that served as the arsenal in charge of colonial supply and communications between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Having unearthed important details about the operations of this colonial port, I will now be able to compare military contracting in the colonial world with the standard procedures in place in metropolitan France — a central concern in my doctoral project.
This was a positive and successful archival trip, and has provided me with valuable material to analyse as I enter the second year of my thesis. I look forward to complementing these findings with material from North American archives next year.
L’Armée et l’Atome: The French Fourth Republic and the Armed Forces’ Negotiations of a Nuclear Future
J. Sutcliffe William (University of Leeds)
My research highlights a pivotal chapter in modern French history: the genesis of France’s nuclear weapons programme under the Fourth Republic. Examining the country’s mid-century nuclear development through the dual lenses of civil-military relations and nuclear proliferation theory, the thesis aims to consider the process by which the armed forces negotiated their adoption of the most powerful weapons ever fielded. The generous support of the Society allowed me to make considerable progress towards this goal through an archival trip to Paris, where I consulted material at the Service historique de la défense and at the Archives nationales.
The unique holdings of the Service historique include staffing papers from ‘Plan Orange,’ France’s 1955–6 effort at modernizing and reorganizing the armed forces during a period of budgetary austerity. Collectively, these files demonstrate the inherent trade-offs between combat operations in North Africa and investments in military nuclear technology. More significantly, they reveal a degree of inter-service rivalry not widely reflected in the historiography. The airforce, for example, explicitly sought to privilege its own interest in atomic weapons at the expense of the navy’s atomic propulsion programme.
In my research at the Archives nationales I focused on reports and transcripts produced by France’s National Defence Committee. These illuminate the preferences of military officers and members of government, who sometimes differed as to whether to imbue France’s military nuclear policy with a European, Atlantic or national orientation. Most serendipitously, I discovered a 1955 report from the committee proposing that funds allocated to development of the atom bomb should be ‘camouflaged’ as being spent on atomic submarine propulsion and related infrastructure. Clearly there was an important contrast between military interest in the bomb and legislators’ willingness to sustain it financially.
I would like to thank the Society for its generosity in supporting this research, which seeks to re-evaluate a crucial period in modern French history with lasting and contemporary consequences.
POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE BURSARIES
‘Enchantment and Disenchantment’
Nineteenth-Century French Studies: 45th Annual Colloquium
Florida State University, 31 October–2 November 2019
Report by Short Jemima (Newcastle University)
In November 2019 Jemima Short, Lindsay Macnaughton, Sarah Budasz and Emmanuela Wroth presented their work at a postgraduate panel at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium in Sarasota, Florida. This conference highlighted the confrontation between the age-old enchantment of faith, magic and tradition, and the modern lure of rationalization, science and innovation during the nineteenth century, and the postgraduate panel focused on ‘The Near and the Far: Negotiating Distance and Desire’. First Jemima Short discussed the rules followed by a group of Catholic sisters — the Auxiliatrices des Âmes du Purgatoire — who worked as domestic nurses in the mid nineteenth century. Seeking to maintain emotional and physical distance from their patients and the world, these women nevertheless administered forms of care that necessitated proximity and intimacy. Lindsay Macnaughton then presented on the collectors John and Joséphine Bowes, exploring the furnishings of their homes on both sides of the Channel with a particular focus on revivalist furniture and the use of portraits as a means of understanding French history. Sarah Budasz offered an analysis of the dialectic of absence and desire by looking at the representation of ancient ruins in the travel writing of Eugène de Voguë and Pierre Loti. Finally, Emmanuela Wroth examined the genre of nineteenth-century Parisian theatrical biography, mapping notions of consent and the ways in which actresses managed the competing demands of distance and access, enchantment and disenchantment. There were interesting links between the different forms of distance and intimacy explored in these papers, and the panel was well received by its audience, with a question on agency offering a particularly effective means of drawing the four papers together.
The conference itself was an enjoyable and beneficial experience. The four panellists were able to network with a wide variety of attendees, from fellow postgraduates and early-career scholars to eminent researchers, and received excellent feedback and encouragement. Particularly valuable were the opportunities to make connections with colleagues based in the US and France. In addition to relevant panels on themes such as fashion, furniture, visual and material culture, the Commune and sensory experience, there was also a keynote lecture by Elisabeth Fraser on Orientalism. The conference reception was held at the John and Mable Ringling Museum, and included access to their eighteenth-century art galleries, the circus museum, and an exhibition of selected archival material. The three-day conference ended with an enchanting banquet and masked ball, and the following day attendees were given a tour of the Selby botanical gardens. The four postgraduate panellists would like to thank the Society for its generous funding, which allowed them to access this invaluable opportunity for professional experience and personal development.
France: Musiques, Cultures (Boston, 30–31 October 2019)
American Musicological Society, 85th Annual Meeting
(Boston, 31 October–3 November 2019)
Report by Kavanagh Emma (University of Oxford)
A musicologist and cultural historian of opera and performance in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I am currently exploring questions of race, gender and identity in my doctoral thesis ‘Masculinity and the Other in French Belle Époque Opera’.
With a travel grant from the Society for the Study of French History, I travelled to Boston, MA, in the autumn of 2019 for two major conferences in my field.
First I attended a meeting for the international research network France: Musiques, Cultures. This networks promotes research on music in France during the long nineteenth century, and I hope to collaborate with them on a variety of Open Access resources in due course. At their conference I presented a paper entitled ‘Pederasts and Pelléastres: The Reception of Pelléas et Mélisande and Fin-de-Siècle Anxious Masculinity’. This work was based on my MA thesis, completed at the University of Nottingham, and was my first opportunity to present my findings since completing this degree. It proved an invaluable opportunity, as the audience of specialists in nineteenth-century French music were able to provide detailed and constructive feedback. It was also a real pleasure to meet and spend time with others working on this period in French musical history.
I then attended the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. With over a thousand participants, this is by far the largest gathering of musicologists in the field, and it provided excellent opportunities to meet new people (both fellow graduate students and also more established scholars) and to discover the latest research in musicology. My own contribution was entitled ‘A Paradis Rêvé: The Imagined Orient in Saint-Saëns’s La Princesse Jaune’, and once again I received useful feedback, which will significantly shape the analysis of my thesis.
I am incredibly grateful to the Society for its contribution towards this trip. This was my first opportunity to present at large-scale international conferences, and without this generous grant I would have been unable to attend. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Santander Universities and Linacre College, Oxford, for their additional financial support.
SSFH DOUGLAS JOHNSON MEMORIAL LECTURE
Free French Food: Dining Out with the Free French in Wartime London
(Institut Français, London, 13 January 2020)
Professor Debra Kelly (University of Westminster)
Summary by Eldridge Claire (University of Leeds)
For the 10th Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture, Professor Debra Kelly provided the audience with a culinary tour of London, focusing on the role of French food and French restaurants in the social, cultural and political landscape of the city during the Second World War. Historically fascinating as well as literally mouth-watering, Professor Kelly’s hearty yet sophisticated and varied ‘menu’ of topics situated the Second World War within a larger trajectory. She highlighted the specificities of the moment, such as the co-existence of plenty and privation as French chefs sought to maintain their culinary standards and flair while working within the limits imposed by the 1941 Food Act and the ‘5 shilling meal’. Continuities from previous eras were also stressed, including the centrality of political exiles to the French food scene in London and the significance of French restaurants as spaces where these men and women could maintain both a sense of community and an emotional connection to home. The audience were introduced to key wartime figures such as Marcel Boulestin and Madame Prunier, alongside an array of landmark establishments, some of which, like the iconic Free French meeting place the York Minster (now known as the French House), are still trading. Describing the Second World War as a ‘pivotal moment’, Professor Kelly showed how the conflict produced a shift from French restaurants in London to London French restaurants. Bringing the story up to the present day, she noted that the food scene changed considerably in the second half of the twentieth century as London grew into a ‘global food capital’, causing French restaurants to lose their monopoly. Nonetheless, these establishments and their proprietors were able to renew themselves and even to continue to thrive — not least by maintaining their authenticity and their connection to the rich history that Professor Kelly had outlined so engagingly for the audience.
STUDIES IN MODERN FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE HISTORY
This series with Manchester University Press is published in collaboration with the SSFH and the French Colonial Historical Society. It aims to showcase innovative monographs and edited collections on the history of France, its colonies and imperial undertakings, and the francophone world more generally since c. 1750. Authors demonstrate how sources and interpretations are being opened to historical investigation in new and interesting ways, and how unfamiliar subjects have the capacity to tell us more about France and the French colonial empire, their relationships in the world, and their legacies in the present. The series is particularly receptive to studies that break down traditional boundaries and conventional disciplinary divisions.
Members of the Society for the Study of French History are entitled to a 35% discount on orders for personal use on all Studies in Modern French and Francophone History series titles.
Recent and forthcoming titles include:
Catholicism and Children’s Literature in France: The Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1874)
Sophie Heywood ISBN 9780719084669
Aristocratic Families in Republican France, 1870–1940
Elizabeth C. MacKnight ISBN 9780719085017
The Routes to Exile: France and the Spanish Civil War Refugees, 1939–2009
Scott Soo ISBN 9780719086915
Émile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in Nineteenth-Century France
Helen M. Davies ISBN 9780719089237
The Republican Line: Caricature and French Republican Identity, 1830–52
Laura O’Brien ISBN 9780719089350
From Empire to Exile: History and Memory within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012(Winner of the 2017 RHS Gladstone Prize)
Claire Eldridge ISBN 9780719087233
Robespierre and the Festival of the Supreme Being: The Search for a Republican Morality
Jonathan Smyth ISBN 9781526103789
Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France
Andrew W. M. Smith ISBN 9781784994358
The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern France
Robert W. Lewis ISBN 9781526106261
In Pursuit of Politics: Education and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France
Adrian O’Connor ISBN 9781526120564
Nobility and Patrimony in Modern France
Elizabeth C. Macknight ISBN 9781526120519
Mutinous Memories: A Subjective History of French Military Protest in 1919
Matt Perry ISBN 9781526114105
Death and the Crown. Ritual and Politics in France before the Revolution
Anne Byrne ISBN 9781526143303
Series editors:
Professor Máire Cross (University of Newcastle): [email protected]
Dr David Hopkin (University of Oxford): [email protected]
Professor Jennifer Sessions (University of Virginia): [email protected]
