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 present reports from recipients of Postgraduate Research Grants and Conference Grants. 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 GRANT

Archives of the Parti communiste français, Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis

Emma Flanagan (University of Edinburgh)

My research focusses on women’s mobilisation into communist spaces across French North Africa between the end of the Second World War and the start of the Algerian War of Independence. I look at three organisations—the Union des femmes d’Algérie (UFA), the Union des femmes du Maroc (UFM) and the Union des femmes de Tunisie (UFT)—exploring their engagement with national and international communism, and the practices they deployed to engage Muslim women in communist politics. Broadly, the project examines the circulation of communist ideas across French North Africa, with a particular view on how such ideas were spread amongst and responded to by colonised women.

Building upon previous archival trips to the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence) and the Archives diplomatiques (Nantes), the purpose of this trip was to consult documents beyond those produced by the French colonial state in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Supplementing the extensive array of police surveillance reports on communist activity in existence elsewhere, the varied and extensive archives of the French Communist Party allowed me to explore internal documents of the French and Algerian Partis (alongside a small scattering of documents from the Parti communiste marocain and Parti communiste tunisien) and a considerable sample of their publications. Moving beyond colonial constructions of the Muslim communist woman, these materials offer insight into how the French and respective North African Partis envisioned women’s mobilisation.

My foremost objective, however, was to consult documents of the metropolitan counterpart to the UFA, UFM and UFT, the Union des femmes françaises (UFF), in the hope of finding evidence of the forging of cross-border, transnational relationships. In searching for correspondence between these four organisations, I found a handful of letters exchanged between representatives of the UFF and UFA as they mobilised under the leftist, transnationalist umbrella of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).

I am currently in the early stages of analysing the primary materials collected at the PCF Archives. The gracious funding offered by the SSFH helped facilitate a trip to this archive at a crucial juncture in my PhD research. Overall, this trip helped enhance, bolster and further nuance the research already undertaken for this project. It has furthered my research into communism across the post-war French colonial space, its simultaneously conciliatory and contentious relationship with the competing nationalist movements, and revealed something of the transnational networks between both colony and metropole and colony and colony, through the unique lens of women’s engagement with the Partis.

CONFERENCE BURSARY

Society for French Studies Annual Conference (University of Stirling)

Sophie Horrocks (Durham University)

Thanks to the support from the Society for the Study of French History (SSFH), I was able to participate in the Society for French Studies annual conference held at the University of Stirling and presented a paper in the panel ‘Decentring Opera Studies’.

The panel brought together scholars from Australia, the UK and France to share their research on regional French operatic culture, c. 1830–1980. As well as delivering individual papers, members of the panel shared thoughts on the methodologies, common approaches and issues faced when studying opera in France from a decentred perspective. This closing round table opportunity for discussion was particularly welcome because I was able to share work written for my thesis within a music department in an interdisciplinary space, speaking alongside theatre scholars in my panel and to an audience of academics largely based within French departments.

In addition, I took great enjoyment from participating in the wider conference programme, learning about diverse topics in French history, ranging from nineteenth-century caricatures to medieval language learning, and hearing keynotes centred around two of the conference’s themes of death and post colonialism. The generous support from SSFH allowed me to network and share research with a global community of scholars at this conference, resulting in the discussion of possible future collaborations with colleagues based in France.

RALPH GIBSON BURSARY

Text and Object: Fleury and the Relics of St Benedict, c. 750–c. 1140

James Drysdale Miller (University of Oxford)

My doctorate (‘Text and Object: Fleury and the Relics of St Benedict, c. 750–c. 1140’) examined the cult of relics in France between the late eighth and early twelfth centuries. Through an exploration of the veneration of the body of St Benedict of Nursia, author of the Rule of Benedict, at the monastery of Fleury over these four centuries, I considered how medieval monks thought about the role of relics within their community and how the treatment and materiality of relics affected the development of saints’ cults. Using the abbey’s exceptionally rich sources, I demonstrated the connective power of relics and how they served to join disparate places, times and individuals in medieval imaginations of their pasts and presents.

The thesis focussed on both the textual and embodied traditions which defined medieval relics. From these, I argued that the monks developed a literary tradition which used relics as physical markers of continuity and enabled them to discuss their connection to past iterations of the community, even after traumatic events such as the monastery’s sack by Vikings. Moreover, I identified physical interaction, not textual authority, as the factor which determined why some cults flourished at Fleury while others rapidly dwindled and I analysed the complex ways in which monastic communities ‘got to know’ their saints. From this research, I argued that relic cults remained dynamic and varied in the post-Carolingian world as each generation of Fleury monks reinvented and rewrote what Benedict’s body meant to them.

I am grateful to the Society for the Study of French History for the support which they offered during the final stages of completing my thesis. The receipt of a Ralph Gibson Bursary provided the time and mental space needed during my fourth year to let the thesis’s arguments coalesce and the end result was considerably stronger as a result. It also facilitated a trip to France to consult manuscripts in the Orléans Médiathèque and to visit Fleury Abbey itself. As my thesis was started in the autumn of 2020, much of the research was carried out through the digital facsimiles produced by the Orléans Médiathèque and the Bibliothèque nationale; it was, therefore, productive (as well as moving) to handle finally the objects on which much of the doctoral research rested.

STUDIES IN MODERN FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE HISTORY

This series is published in collaboration with the Society for the Study of French History 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 welcomes a wide variety of approaches, including, but not limited to local and regional case studies; microhistories; studies of specific individuals and families; and broader treatments of major themes or periods. It is particularly receptive to studies that break down traditional boundaries and conventional disciplinary divisions and that consider the French and Francophone worlds in imperial and global perspective.

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:

Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish women in nineteenth-century France

Helen M. Davies ISBN: 978-1-5261-7765-0

Inventing the modern region: Basque identity and the French nation-state

Talitha Ilacqua ISBN: 978-1-5261-6925-9

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]