SSFH Society News

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 announce the winners of the French History Article Prize, and present 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.

FRENCH HISTORY ARTICLE PRIZE

The winner of the 2023 French History Article Prize is Andrew W. M. Smith, ‘Ovine invasion: sheep as protest objects and animal agents in the Larzac campaign’, French History, 37 (2023), 401–420. The prize judges, drawn from the journal’s editorial board, praised the article as follows:

Andrew Smith’s elegantly written article focuses on the multifaceted ways sheep were deployed by rural inhabitants of the Larzac, during their 1970s campaign against the French Army’s attempts to expropriate them from their land. Much like the Larzac protestors he writes about, Smith uses his ovine agents in attention-grabbing and thought-provoking ways. Yet the sheep are not merely a striking anecdote or curiosity. Instead, they are integral to this theoretically sophisticated and highly engaging history. Never overreaching in terms of its handling of the ovine subjects at its heart, Smith confidently and ably situates his study within the literature and theoretical perspectives on objects and non-human agency, making a clear and effective case for the importance of the Larzac flocks as objects in and agents of protest. Combining creativity with critical and empirical rigour, this article will be of interest and value to colleagues across a range of disciplines and fields, including material culture, environmental history, animal history, as well as histories of protest and landscape.

The prize judges also highly commended Elisabeth Salje’s article ‘Venality in town: the civic participation of venal forestry officers in Villemur (1671–1776)’, French History, 37 (2023), 237–253, as follows:

Elisabeth Salje’s article focuses on the social status and professional activities of forestry and municipal officers in Villemur, Languedoc, and deploys rigorous archival research to make a significant intervention in the social history of the Old Regime in France. It counters common stereotypes about corrupt and venal officers with a careful appreciation of the role of local and regional institutions in forest management. And it relates forestry officers and municipal representatives in an original manner, which shows how families tended to prioritise municipal status over forestry administration, which created new groups of winners and losers over the course of the eighteenth century. Overall, this article is a superb demonstration of the capacity of focused archival research to challenge received wisdom and open new perspectives on significant historical issues.

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:

Time and Radical Politics in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War

Alexandra Paulin-Booth   ISBN: 978-1-5261-4964-0

Republican Passions: Family, Friendship and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France

Susan K. Foley   ISBN: 978-1-5261-6153-6

Confiscating the Common Good: Small Towns and Religious Politics in the French Revolution

Edward Woell   ISBN: 978-1-5261-5913-7

Sport and Physical Culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, Agency, and Everyday Life

Keith Rathbone   ISBN: 978-1-5261-5328-9

Psychoanalysis and the Family in Twentieth-Century France: Françoise Dolto and Her Legacy

Richard Bates   ISBN: 978-1-5261-5962-5

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

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

Series editors

Professor Jennifer Sessions (University of Virginia): [email protected]

Professor Julie Kalman (Monash University): [email protected]

Dr Jessica Wardhaugh (University of Warwick): [email protected]