Abstract This article examines the role of Cistercian nunneries in the creation and management of the hydraulic systems that dominated the landscape of the Low Countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Such systems, comprised of a complex network of drainage ditches, canals, dams, embankments, and sluices, facilitated the reclamation and exploitation of lands and expanded the settlement of populations along the coasts. Acting primarily as agents of the counts of Flanders and Hainaut, Cistercian nunneries played a key role in this process as it evolved into the thirteenth century. By examining the full range of their involvement in this process, this article illuminates the interaction of Cistercian nunneries with the natural environment, their contribution to the local economy, and the extent to which they were integrated into the social and religious landscape of the region.
Abstract In April 1927, nine years after the Armistice Agreement of September 29, 1918, between the Allied Powers and Bulgaria, the city of Marseille solemnly inaugurated an imposing memorial, celebrating the first victory of France and its Allies in the Great War. Originally conceived as a monument of national recognition, the Monument aux morts de l'Armée d'Orient et des Terres lointaines underwent a double transformation of meaning: It has become both a symbol of Marseille's history of the Great War, evoking the city's contribution to the war effort, and a diplomatic tool for the promotion of French foreign policy in the Balkans.
Abstract This article examines how climate volatility affected urban governance in late medieval Paris (1364–1422), a period that coincided with the transition into the Little Ice Age. Drawing on narrative and administrative sources, the article argues that contemporaries experienced climatic instability primarily through material consequences: disrupted circulation, provisioning failures, and epidemic disease. These shocks destabilized the infrastructural foundations of urban life. The article shows that royal and municipal authorities responded through environmental governance, targeting all three infrastructural domains. These urban “healthscaping practices” treated infrastructure, water, markets, and public space as primary intervention sites under climatic stress. By integrating climate history with urban and political history, this study demonstrates that climate volatility shaped the timing, form, and priority of urban regulations in medieval Paris.
Abstract This article demonstrates how the late medieval French royal state and its subjects shaped and were shaped by the forest around the time of the Black Death, a turning point in both environmental and political history, when the impact of the plague collided with the growth of the late medieval state. The bulk of the essay traces the development of royal forest regulations from the early Middle Ages through the fourteenth century to demonstrate that increasing royal control over the forest was driven as much by fiscal, military, and ideological concerns as it was by demographic and ecological factors. As a case study of a town in the Languedoc shows, people could contest royal control by taking advantage of demographic and environmental change for their own purposes. However, the growth of the royal state may have circumscribed their agency as much as the regrowth of the forest enabled their activities.
Abstract In 1777, two engineers, the brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer, announced the creation of their company, La Compagnie des eaux de Paris, a revolutionary initiative meant to transform the city's water supply. For a subscription, high-quality water would now flow abundantly, promising to satisfy the needs and desires of Parisians. This article examines this new water market as an institutional and normative paradigm shift. By the late 1770s, water provisioning attracted project-makers seeking new economic opportunities to reshape society through market mechanisms. The Périers promoted a novel conception of social and economic relations grounded in an egalitarian vision of society—a vision widely disseminated through prospectuses published in contemporary newspapers. In this discourse, water was reimagined as a commodity like any other: no longer a mere necessity, but a marker of comfort and refinement, consumed beyond physiological needs. The article interrogates the categories—equality, market, luxury, necessity—mobilized by the Périer brothers to legitimize and promote their new service. It also seeks to question the effects of capitalism in eighteenth-century Paris. The history of this company highlights the tension between actors seeking to create a new economic doctrine and the tenacity of older habits and socioeconomic structures.
Abstract The existing historiography on the death penalty in France has focused on aspects related to the execution itself and debates around abolition, leaving aside the question of the incarceration of death row inmates. This article examines the gradual, and to a large extent customary, formation of a specific penitentiary regime for prisoners sentenced to death, and the development of specialized prison structures for them in twentieth-century France. The emergence of this distinct regime reflects the increasingly controversial nature of the application of the death penalty. It is also the result of anomalies observed during periods of sharp increase in capital punishment, such as world and colonial conflicts and post-war periods. There was a dual tendency toward concentration of inmates and a relative improvement in their conditions of detention. Until abolition, however, the establishment of death row as a separate structure of detention remained incomplete, both for budgetary reasons and because of the general trend toward the disappearance of this punishment during the second half of the twentieth century.
Abstract This article is a case study of a lawyer, Jean-Charles Le Prévôt, who was imprisoned from 1768 until the French Revolution. He was arrested for defaming and accusing several prominent individuals of being involved in a “famine plot,” a scheme to hoard grain in times of famine in order to sell it at exorbitant prices. As a Jansenist, he interpreted his social and political milieu through a biblical language of light and darkness, including a strong preoccupation with transparency, which translated to an obsession with conspiracies and government transparency. While in prison, he continued to accuse authorities of myriad conspiracies, accusations that were fueled both by his religious vision and the particular conditions of state prisons. The cultural influences that informed his worldview illuminate some of the origins of the political culture of the French Revolution.
Abstract During the upheaval of the French Revolution, the place of prisons in French society fluctuated. After the 1791 Penal Code, they were spaces where judicial sentences were carried out. Yet as growing numbers of “suspects” were arrested, prisons also became spaces of political repression. The prison concierge (the primary jailer) oversaw these spaces and was responsible for the daily running and guarding of potentially hundreds of prisoners. This meant concierges were integral to revolutionary justice systems. However, the concierge was a complex position to hold. Many continued in their roles from the ancien régime, but as more prisons were opened in Paris, new jailers increasingly became political hires. Studying prison concierges illuminates to what degree, and through what methods, incarceration was systematized during the Year II, while still attending to the individuals tasked with administering and guarding these spaces. Through the figure of the concierge, one can begin to see how authorities used carceral institutions to produce social and political order in a time of revolution.
Abstract In the aftermath of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of Protestant women and girls were dragged from their homes and confined in monastic communities in order to facilitate their conversion to Catholicism. This article traces the rise of religious incarceration at one prominent Parisian convent, the Nouvelles Catholiques, which collaborated with monarchical officials and quickly became the preeminent site for the imprisonment of Protestant women within the city. The use of monastic incarceration to procure conversion and secure Catholic hegemony in France, as this study demonstrates, marks an important turning point in longer histories of European confinement. Alliance with the monarchy transformed the Nouvelles Catholiques into a utilitarian political site, one in which incarceration was expected to operate as a gendered strategy of social control. The partnership generated significant transformations within the convent and ultimately eroded its institutional autonomy, especially as the sisters ceded oversight of their admissions procedures to monarchical officials and began to receive disinterested, defiant, or duplicitous prisoners who were determined to make their own uses of the cloister.
Abstract During the Malagasy Insurrection (1947–48), French authorities launched a repressive campaign that killed tens of thousands. A small network of Free French administrators—imperial reformers committed to overturning the prewar status quo—unwittingly set Madagascar on the path to insurrection and repression. By the time of their departure in late 1945, the leaders of the Gaullist regime had ushered in vast changes; they had prepared the Malagasy to vote in unprecedented numbers and established one of France's earliest experiments in colonial federalism to encourage participation in local politics. Yet these reforms were far from universal in their scope. Colonial administrators elevated an ideology of “ethnic conflict” that shaped the trajectory of counterinsurgent violence in the years that followed. This article traces the imperial administration's shift from reformism to mass violence in Madagascar in three parts: first as a series of federalist institutional reforms starting in 1943, then as an electoral strategy from 1945–46, and finally as a catalyst for state repression in 1947. With particular focus on the evolution of “traditional” village councils (fokon'olona) and the federal Gouvernement du Sud, it reveals that race-making and racial violence were integral to France's postwar project of reform in Madagascar.
In 1858, Ferdinand Leli & egrave;vre, a sixty-year-old former court scribe interned in Algeria for his political activism, began to write what he envisioned as the definitive account of the experiences of republicans transported to Algeria by Napoleon III. The manuscript- called "La transportation d'Afrique"-came to more than seven hundred pages and included transcribed government proclamations, military orders, private letters, and other transport & eacute;s' oral testimony. This article uses that manuscript as a window into how Leli & egrave;vre and other transport & eacute;s sought to contest their status as political criminals or colonial subjects and instead claim membership in Algeria's settler community. Its analysis shows that while French metropolitan and colonial officials imagined transportation as a solution to what they saw as the problem of political radicalism, transportation's actual political effects- on both transport & eacute;s and colonial politics-proved more complicated. Carceral systems built around transportation did not crush political dissidence but instead redirected and transformed it, as transport & eacute;s like Leli & egrave;vre succeeded in weaving together republican principles, frustrations with Algeria's administration, and racist thinking to build new solidarities with a settler community that also felt oppressed by the government of the Second Empire.
During the upheaval of the French Revolution, the place of prisons in French society fluctuated. After the 1791 Penal Code, they were spaces where judicial sentences were carried out. Yet as growing numbers of "suspects" were arrested, prisons also became spaces of political repression. The prison concierge (the primary jailer) oversaw these spaces and was responsible for the daily running and guarding of potentially hundreds of prisoners. This meant concierges were integral to revolutionary justice systems. However, the concierge was a complex position to hold. Many continued in their roles from the ancien r & eacute;gime, but as more prisons were opened in Paris, new jailers increasingly became political hires. Studying prison concierges illuminates to what degree, and through what methods, incarceration was systematized during the Year II, while still attending to the individuals tasked with administering and guarding these spaces. Through the figure of the concierge, one can begin to see how authorities used carceral institutions to produce social and political order in a time of revolution.
This article is a case study of a lawyer, Jean-Charles Le Pr & eacute;v & ocirc;t, who was imprisoned from 1768 until the French Revolution. He was arrested for defaming and accusing several prominent individuals of being involved in a "famine plot," a scheme to hoard grain in times of famine in order to sell it at exorbitant prices. As a Jansenist, he interpreted his social and political milieu through a biblical language of light and darkness, including a strong preoccupation with transparency, which translated to an obsession with conspiracies and government transparency. While in prison, he continued to accuse authorities of myriad conspiracies, accusations that were fueled both by his religious vision and the particular conditions of state prisons. The cultural influences that informed his worldview illuminate some of the origins of the political culture of the French Revolution.
In the aftermath of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of Protestant women and girls were dragged from their homes and confined in monastic communities in order to facilitate their conversion to Catholicism. This article traces the rise of religious incarceration at one prominent Parisian convent, the Nouvelles Catholiques, which collaborated with monarchical officials and quickly became the preeminent site for the imprisonment of Protestant women within the city. The use of monastic incarceration to procure conversion and secure Catholic hegemony in France, as this study demonstrates, marks an important turning point in longer histories of European confinement. Alliance with the monarchy transformed the Nouvelles Catholiques into a utilitarian political site, one in which incarceration was expected to operate as a gendered strategy of social control. The partnership generated significant transformations within the convent and ultimately eroded its institutional autonomy, especially as the sisters ceded oversight of their admissions procedures to monarchical officials and began to receive disinterested, defiant, or duplicitous prisoners who were determined to make their own uses of the cloister.
The existing historiography on the death penalty in France has focused on aspects related to the execution itself and debates around abolition, leaving aside the question of the incarceration of death row inmates. This article examines the gradual, and to a large extent customary, formation of a specific penitentiary regime for prisoners sentenced to death, and the development of specialized prison structures for them in twentieth-century France. The emergence of this distinct regime reflects the increasingly controversial nature of the application of the death penalty. It is also the result of anomalies observed during periods of sharp increase in capital punishment, such as world and colonial conflicts and post-war periods. There was a dual tendency toward concentration of inmates and a relative improvement in their conditions of detention. Until abolition, however, the establishment of death row as a separate structure of detention remained incomplete, both for budgetary reasons and because of the general trend toward the disappearance of this punishment during the second half of the twentieth century.
Slavery-not simply as an analogy for gendered domination, but as a concrete institution of racial exploitation-shaped how renowned socialist feminist Flora Tristan envisioned freedom for white women. This article focuses on P & eacute;r & eacute;grinations d'une paria, Tristan's monumental memoir of her 1833-1834 journey from Paris to Peru via Bordeaux, Cape Verde, and Chile. This voyage brought Tristan into sustained contact with the slave trade and chattel slavery, primarily in locales outside the purview of formal French colonial rule. P & eacute;r & eacute;- grinations thus offers an opportunity to examine how not only imperial but also global forms of racial violence influenced French feminist understandings of sexed and gendered freedom in the 1800s. Despite Tristan's formal commitment to abolitionism, in Peru she not only utilized the enslaved labor of Black and Indigenous people but also elaborated a vision of white female liberation that was directly dependent on that labor. Her articulation in P & eacute;r & eacute;grinations of what it would mean for white women like herself to be truly free-an articulation focused on mobility, corporeal autonomy, and circulation in urban space-presupposed their dominion over the bodies of men and, especially, women of color.
During the Malagasy Insurrection (1 947-48), French authorities launched a repressive campaign that killed tens of thousands. A small network of Free French administrators-imperial reformers committed to overturning the prewar status quo- unwittingly set Madagascar on the path to insurrection and repression. By the time of their departure in late 1945, the leaders of the Gaullist regime had ushered in vast changes; they had prepared the Malagasy to vote in unprecedented numbers and established one of France's earliest experiments in colonial federalism to encourage participation in local politics. Yet these reforms were far from universal in their scope. Colonial administrators elevated an ideology of "ethnic conflict" that shaped the trajectory of counterinsurgent violence in the years that followed. This article traces the imperial administration's shift from reformism to mass violence in Madagascar in three parts: first as a series of federalist institutional reforms starting in 1943, then as an electoral strategy from 1945-46, and finally as a catalyst for state repression in 1947. With particular focus on the evolution of "traditional" village councils (fokon'olona) and the federal Gouvernement du Sud, it reveals that race-making and racial violence were integral to France's postwar project of reform in Madagascar.
