Nimisha Barton | “A Picture Worth A Thousand Words”
For over fifteen years, Dan Starr-Tambor has painstakingly collected every detail he can find about his grandmother, Lounah, a woman with whom he shares a strong spiritual connection. He knows everything about her. She was the daughter of Turkish Jewish immigrants. She grew up in the 11th arrondissement of interwar Paris along with her parents and four siblings. Her father and brother were arrested during the first roundups in 1942. Despite their efforts to bribe Drancy staff and secure the release of their menfolk, she and her mother were ultimately unable to prevent their deportation to Auschwitz. Dan had heard stories, too, of how the death of her husband and son had driven Lounah’s mother mad, nearly destroying her and endangering the four children she had left. On a whim, Dan googled this great-grandmother of his in February 2022. Much to his surprise, a 1920s photograph of Djoya Abouaf and three of her children instantly appeared on the screen. They were on the cover of an obscure book in French history called Reproductive Citizens.
This paper follows the incredible story of the Abouaf family, starting with Moise Abouaf and Djoya Baralia who first migrated to Paris in 1923. While the Abouafs eventually had five children, I focus on their enigmatic eldest daughter Lounah and her descendants, now living in the United States. A deeply spiritual, almost mystical woman, Lounah inspires strong emotions, some viewing her as deranged, others as a visionary. When describing her experiences during and after the war to her children and grandchildren, Lounah spoke of eerie premonitions and ethereal encounters, communing with angels and reuniting with her dead father. The Abouafs never quite knew what to make of her. In her sixties, Lounah began to channel her memories into her art, depicting life in occupied Paris in paintings that hang in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and which bear the telltale signs of her otherworldly preoccupations.
Using naturalization dossiers, newspaper clippings, court cases, Lounah Abouaf’s artwork, and interviews with various members of the Abouaf Starr family, this paper picks up where Reproductive Citizens leaves off, examining how war, occupation, and extermination has rippled across four generations of a Turkish Jewish family whose forbearers first put down roots in the melting-pot neighborhood of La Roquette nearly one hundred years ago.
Alex Chase-Levenson | “An ‘Eminently Marseillaise’ Institution: The Intendance Sanitaire and its Parisian Antagonists During the July Monarchy”
This paper considers the dire relationship between Marseille’s powerful Board of Health and the ministers in Paris who oversaw it during the 1830s and 1840s. The Intendance Sanitaire was in charge of managing every ship’s arrival if it proceeded from the Middle East or North Africa and was thus subject to a mandatory, universal quarantine based on the fear of bubonic plague. Nominally, this body operated under the oversight of the Minister of Commerce and Industry, but had long been left more or less alone. A marked antagonism, however, emerged in the 1830s, with Marseille’s health bureaucrats standing as the defenders of medical contagionism, regionalism, and Mediterraneanism in contrast to the priorities of reformist national politicians, such as Laurent Cunin-Gridaine. Such figures (and their medical allies, who discounted the need for mandatory quarantine on the grounds that epidemic diseases were not contagious) cast quarantine as an anti-liberal impediment that reeked of early modernity. Yet, health board members saw themselves as participating in a modern, transnational system, and indeed, in many ways, they were the most powerful authorities within that system. Here, I examine this conflict (which led to the mass resignation, reinstatement, and eventual disbanding of the Intendance Sanitaire) as a lens into broader issues of contrasting visions of internationalism in the formative period of nineteenth-century liberalism.
Alice L. Conklin | “Resisters, Racists and Anti-Racists: The UNESCO Debate at Limoges in 1951”
In February 1951, M. Pierre Chigot, secrétaire de l’Association pour l’Europe et la Paix in the city of Limoges and an ardent supporter of the local UNESCO club, hosted a debate on the “racial question.” Fifteen hundred locals came to listen to eight eminent personalities representing the scientific, political, literary, and religious worlds. According to the official press release, the French national commission of UNESCO had organized the event as part of UNESCO’s global campaign to combat racism, launched in 1950. The eight “talking heads” invited to speak suggest both the breadth of the antiracist front that a Paris-based UNESCO hoped to construct and the specificity of the official French perspective on race on the eve of the Cold War. Paul Rivet, a physical anthropologist at the end of his career, insisted that there were no inferior races. Two younger socio-cultural anthropologists, Michel Leiris and Alfred Métraux, explained that racial prejudice had appeared with Western colonial depredations, and that its roots were economic and psychological. R.P. Dubois, a Dominican priest sensitized to Catholic anti-Semitism by the shock of the Holocaust, reminded the audience that the pope had recently condemned Nazi racism. Fily-Dabo Sissoko, a deputy in Parliament from the French Soudan [Mali], gave the lie to racial prejudice; he was living proof that in France there was no place for racism. The last three speakers, Roger Caillois, Louis François and an American Douglas Schneider – all from UNESCO – explained what the organization was doing to help all peoples participate in the collective work of civilization. My paper will contextualize the mixed messaging of this panel, from its implicit acknowledgement that anti-Semitism and colonial racism were present on French soil to its denial that France had any race problem to worry about.
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira | “Aristocratic Associational Life: Gender, Distinction, and the Aéro-Club de France in Turn-of-the-Century France”
Philip Nord is an unavoidable name for research of post-revolutionary French civil society. The Republican Moment has become a classic, and Nord stands alongside the late Maurice Agulhon as one of the major scholars of French associational life. But these two scholars brought into sharp relief the importance of associational life in the construction of French republican culture, they also left the aristocracy to the side, thus somewhat reproducing the old narrative that the nineteenth century was defined by the aristocracy’s decline and the bourgeoisie’s ascendency. Just because something is old does not mean that it is wrong, and there is much that is convincing in that narrative. However, recent work has also shown that the picture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France was more complex, for it also featured a thriving aristocratic associational life that coexisted alongside republican circles of sociability. Building on this work, I focus on the birth of the Aéro-Club de France, exploring how this elite circle of sociability became a space for the aristocracy to cultivate distinction and cope with the crisis of masculinity that plagued France after its catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
Elizabeth A. Foster | “Catholic Intellectual Connections between Metropole and Colony:
The Example of Africa”
Taking inspiration from Phil’s interest in interwar Catholicism, I propose to trace some connections between nonconformist French Catholic thinkers who emerged in that period, and leading black African intellectuals who would animate the negritude movement and become major actors in the decolonization of the French Empire. I intend to focus chiefly on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas about the “universal” were particularly important for Léopold Senghor, and Emmanuel Mounier, whose Catholic personalism was an inspiration for Alioune Diop and many other African activists. I plan to show, however, that African Catholic intellectuals at mid-century did not just internalize and parrot the ideas of French thinkers, but received those ideas critically, and revised and refined them in ways that emphasized the importance and value of African cultures and political autonomy. Their stances redefined Africa’s relationship to France, but also Africa’s relationship to and position within the Catholic Church.
David Allen Harvey | “Montesquieu on the Plantation: Enlightened Reform and Political Theory in the Pre-Revolutionary French Caribbean”
The eighteenth century was at once the age of Enlightenment and the apex of both the plantation complex of the Caribbean and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that sustained it. While some Enlightenment figures, notably Condorcet and Diderot, condemned slavery and called for its abolition, a number of colonial reformers influenced by Enlightenment thought, such as Pierre-Victor Malouet, considered slavery a necessary evil and sought ways to mitigate the condition of African laborers in the French Caribbean. Debates over the institution of slavery and the possibility of reforming it during the final years of the Old Regime reflected the political theory of Montesquieu in striking ways. Critics of slavery, including many French travelers to the tropics, explicitly likened plantation society to Oriental despotism, a world ruled by fear and caprice in which the master held the power of life and death over his unfortunate slaves. Much as Montesquieu, in the Esprit des lois, drew a sharp analytical distinction between legitimate monarchy (ruled by law, tradition, and honor) and despotism, Malouet argued in favor of legal reform that would extend the power of the colonial state and its laws to prevent and punish abuses of power, rationalize and codify systems of work discipline, and provide redress for the complaints of slaves against brutal masters. Opponents of reform, by contrast, argued that the power of masters over their slaves must be absolute, and that any efforts by the state to mediate the master-slave relationship would weaken the foundations of colonial society and lead to violent rebellion. While a royal ordinance incorporating some of Malouet’s ideas was issued in the final years of the Old Regime, its provisions were routinely flouted in the colonies, while despotism continued to define the authority of the planters until the collapse of the plantation system during the revolutionary decade of the 1790s.
Carla Hesse | “The ‘First Republican Moment’: Constitutional Law and Social Norms of Citizenship in the Year II”
My proposed paper will take up a central theme of Nord’s Republican Moment, the book he was writing when I studied with him at Princeton in the 1980s: the problem of republican foundation and political legitimation in France. I will do so from the perspective of a historian of the Revolution of 1789-99 by examining the relationship between norms and law (civil society and public law) in the first instance of the Republic: The Year II. The paper will draw upon research from a book I am completing on the Paris revolutionary tribunal as a mechanism of political legitimation and republican pedagogy. In the Republican Moment Nord brilliantly argued that the ultimate success of the Third Republic depended upon the development of a robust associational life and network of civil society institutions during the liberal phase of the second Empire. My paper will be an effort to deepen our understanding of how important civil society and the construction of civic norms, as opposed to formal constitutional architecture, is to both the theory and practice of French republicanism, and why this has been so since the first moment of the Republic.
Piotr Kosicki | “Sainthood, the Cold War, and the Weaponization of French Catholicism: The Case of Maria Winowska”
NYU historian Larry Wolff once offered the provocative thesis that French Enlightenment thinkers had “invented” Eastern Europe by Orientalizing large swathes of their fellow Europeans in the service of their own projects of cultural hegemony. In the next century, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Marquis de Lafayette, the leaders of Paris’s February Revolution (1848), and the Communards of 1871 all enacted similar tropes of seeking to export revolution to Europe’s east, as defined by their own “mental mappings” (Wolff). This paper will consider the longue durée story of France’s cultural and intellectual imperialism for Europe’s east (and its role in the conceptualization thereof), with a particular emphasis on Eastern Europe’s re-invention since the Second World War. Even after the imposition of Soviet-backed communist rule, in Budapest as in Warsaw, Prague as in Bucharest, Paris, Marseille, and Lyon continued to loom large, for communists and dissidents alike, as a more influential force of cultural mediation and identity co-creation than Moscow. This paper will argue, in particular, that the French imperial nation-state (Wilder) both facilitated the rise of Stalinism in Europe’s east and sped its dismantling over the course of the 1950s and 1960s.
David Moak | “The Avigdors of Nice: Négociating Social, Ethnic, and National Identity on the Margins”
Drawing inspiration from Philip Nord’s The Republican Moment, this paper will investigate the Avigdors, a prominent Niçois Jewish family, whose ascendance coincided with the revolutionary decades that saw Nice passed back and forth between France and the Kingdom of Sardinia (1793-1860). Starting with Napoleonic institutions like the Assembly of Notables and Grand Sanhedrin, the Avigdors established themselves at the center of religious, diplomatic, political, and social networks that cemented their position as leaders of the Niçois Jewish community. More interesting, though, they used this leadership and the institutional networks on which it relied to negotiate competing identities not only on behalf of themselves and their coreligionists but on behalf of the Niçois as whole, becoming leaders of the pro-Republican and pro-French faction in the years preceding permanent annexation by the Second Empire in 1860. Thus, the Avigdors provide a fascinating case study of how an ethno-religious minority actively participated in the construction of a majority identity on the geographical margins of the French “nation-state.”
Miranda Sachs | “‘When the Homeland is in Danger’: Child Labor during World War I”
During the four decades prior to World War I, the Third Republic had constructed a legal regime to protect the children of the laboring classes. As a result of the passage of two child labor laws in 1874 and 1892 and the creation of a corps of labor inspectors to enforce these laws, strict regulations governed how and when children could enter the workforce. World War I threw this regime into chaos. Conscription depleted the industrial and agricultural workforce. In the occupied areas, German officials forced children to labor. Refugees from the warzones did not have requisite documentation to prove they were of age. In this context, local officials, parents, and factory owners pressured the government to soften its regulations. This paper considers the way the war challenged the version of childhood that had developed in the decades prior to the war. It examines the instances where children entered the workforce to understand how the needs of the mobilized nation-state trumped the need to protect young bodies. It pays particular attention to the variation in wartime experience, as gender, proximity to the front, and whether a child was rural or urban determined how and when he or she could participate in the workforce.
Daniel Sherman | “Beginnings: Archaeology in/as Archive”
My paper explores multiple connections between archaeology, history, and the archive in twentieth century France. I first consider the role of archives, conceptual as well as practical, in the professionalization of both fields in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, then examine the way archives figure into recent calls for a more critical approach to archaeology’s past. Archaeologists’ renewed interest in the multi-dimensional archive, comprising objects as well as documents, they have assembled offers a useful point of convergence with historians’ practice. The central focus of the paper is two self-archiving projects from early twentieth-century France, one the assemblage of family papers related to excavations in Tunisia, the second the amassing of clippings collections around a faked Neolithic site in central France that aroused enormous interest in the 1920s. Inspired by Philip Nord’s recent work on post-war Jewish archives, I argue for a flexible approach to archives that casts their making as the product of multiple cultural practices themselves worthy of historical inquiry, empathy, and understanding.
Leonard Smith | “Problematizing the Nation-State: France at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919”
Few historians have done more than Philip Nord to refine our understanding of France as a republic and as a national community in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. I seek here to extrapolate from Nord’s work, and to look at France outward. Just as France has a long history of meanings and identities internally, so does it externally, as part of an international system. My contribution would be a spinoff from my book, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (2018). It would situate France as an agent in the international system after the Great War according to three broad schools of international relations theory (IR). A realist France lends itself to tragic narratives of decline and fall. A France rooted in liberal IR would emphasize the tension between French particularism and French universalism. A constructivist France would situate France in the mutual constitution of agents and structures in the international system. In other words, “France” as a character in the story of peacemaking after the Great War and the possible outcomes of that story constituted each other. Problematizing France at the Paris Peace Conference can help us interrogate and thus rethink just how to write the history of international relations.