At least since the advent of the new institutionalism in the 1980s, many scholars working in the field of comparative politics have put an emphasis on the role of structures in politics, whether the organizational landscape of the political economy, the complexion of electoral rules, the structure of the state or the character of international regimes. 1 George Ross, by contrast, was a scholar of agency. And the agents in which he was most interested were those seeking to transform society from the political left, especially in France.
Je me souviens du regard à la fois rieur, éclairé, profond et toujours attentif de George. Et je me souviens encore d'un “autre regard” celui—intellectuel—qu'il portait sur la société française pour mieux la questionner. George était de ces collègues et amis venus d'ailleurs qui permettent à “l'indigène d'ici” de mieux comprendre son pays et les acteurs ou les forces qui agissent en son sein.
George Ross transformed the academic study of the French Left, encompassing both the political and industrial wings of the working class. His influence came first and foremost from his scholarship, about which I have more to say below. But it also came from George's remarkable dedication to developing a cohort of younger scholars with similar academic commitments. This was certainly true for me, and my development as a scholar, first of French labor and later of the broader comparative trajectory of Western labor movements, but it extended well beyond to George's influence as a mentor to a whole generation of scholars of France.
George Ross contributed crucially to our understanding of the transformation of the French Left and, in particular, of the French Socialist Party (Parti socialiste; PS) in the 1970s and 1980s. His numerous studies of the Union de la Gauche, the intellectuals and the new middle classes, the trade unions, and the Mitterrand administration were—and remain—intellectually strategic for a thorough understanding of this unique period of the French left. Moreover, that particular “French moment” had a considerable impact on the European Left as a whole and on the course of European integration.
George wielded a pen. When we hosted scholars, policy makers, and other dignitaries at the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at Brandeis University, George would use his pen to take indecipherable notes in which most of his words ended up underlined, circled, or struck through, full of arrows that connected thoughts and ideas and questions in seemingly (but probably anything but) random ways. When not actively writing, he would chew on his pen such that those of us working at the Center worried that he might swallow it. To us, this encapsulates much of who George was: thoughtful, curious, engaged, questioning, serious, wise—and goofy. We loved this combination, first as his students and mentees and then as his friends (with every email first asking how our dogs were doing, of course). George took us seriously, he took our ideas seriously, and he seriously giggled about a whole lot along the way.
Abstract This article examines sources related to ethnographic exhibitions at the Jardin d'Acclimatation in late nineteenth-century Paris through the lens of recent scholarship on Whiteness in France. It unearths implicit and explicit articulations of Whiteness associated with the exhibits that emerge within the context of the city's broader culture of spectatorship and entertainment. Whiteness is theorized in terms of a visual practice or gaze and is associated with the process by which commentators of the time contrasted the Parisian “self” with non-Europeans featured in exhibits. Racialized, embodied notions of Whiteness are also expressed in gendered and class-based terms. These emergent forms of Whiteness and spectatorship changed the ways that Parisians perceived themselves as well as their city's place vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
The melding of cheerful humanity and pragmatic leadership made George Ross a successful leader and wonderful supervisor. In an email from March 2001 George shared that he had learned at a meeting with representatives from the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service, our main funding agency) that they would continue to fund the Brandeis Center for German and European Studies (CGES). He ended his message, characteristically, with a wink: “Does good news always come on dreary days?”
Résumé La Fronde (1897–1905) a longtemps été considéré comme une exception dans l'histoire du journalisme féminin. Fondé par Marguerite Durand et conçu par des plumes féminines, le quotidien a paradoxalement été comparé à des publications masculines afin d'exprimer sa particularité et sa légitimité dans le champ journalistique. Alors qu'il se targue d’être “l'organe officiel du mouvement féministe”, La Fronde est moins étudié du point de vue d'autres périodiques de femmes. Et pourtant, des organes minorés comme La Femme de l'avenir (1897–1901), La Femme socialiste (1901–1902) et L'Abeille (1901), ont élaboré un discours sur l'entreprise frondeuse et sa véritable place dans l'univers de la presse féministe. Cette perspective alternative peut nous renseigner davantage sur les mécanismes qui consacrent certaines œuvres féminines et en invisibilisent d'autres. Abstract La Fronde (1897–1905), the daily newspaper launched by Marguerite Durand has long been regarded as an exception in the history of female and feminist periodicals. The newspaper was often assimilated to general-public newspapers, dominated by men, as a means of acknowledging its singularity and legitimacy. Seldom has it been considered from the perspective of other feminist periodicals, of which, it purports to be the “official representative.” Lesser-known journals contemporary to Durand's daily, like La Femme de l'avenir (1897–1901), La Femme socialiste (1901–1902) and L'Abeille (1901) elaborate a discourse on La Fronde 's exceptionalism and true role. Through analyzing the alternative perspective they provide, we can reach a better understanding of the mechanisms that lay behind the consecration of certain female writings and the marginalization of others.
It is not easy to write about the work of a departed friend. It is also not easy to write about a book that was already reviewed in these pages by none other than Stanley Hoffmann. In the Spring 1995 issue of French Politics and Society , the famed Harvard professor wrote about Jacques Delors and European Integration , George Ross's account of his participant observation in the European Commission, that it was the “most acute and intelligent ‘inside’ story ever published about the functioning of the European Commission,” as well as a “splendid account of one of [Europe's] major turning points.” 1 Thirty years later, the verdict still holds. George Ross's book has become a classic in European studies that is often the starting point for anyone trying to understand how EU institutions work, how to study them as an ethnographer, and what made the tenure of President Jacques Delors (1985–1995) uniquely successful in the history of European integration.
During the colonial period in Indochina, tens of thousands of mixed-race children were born of relations between foreign men and local women. Between 1947 and 1975, the Fédération des oeuvres de l'enfance française en Indochine (the Federation for the Welfare of French Children in Indochina), acting on behalf of the French government, directed the move of five thousand of these children to France. The memories of the transplant experience vary widely among the people involved, ranging from gratitude to criticism of the conditions they experienced, with differences along generational and gender lines. While the memory of migration is vivid among the now-grown children, its history is beginning to be written thanks to archives and personal accounts. The aim here is to see how the narrative between history and memory is constructed, what conflicts of loyalty and legitimacy are posed by historical inquiry, and how the historian should assume their social role.
This article examines how Emmanuel Macron has reinvested the presidential role through a vertical, solitary, and symbolically charged (i.e., Jupiterian) conception of power. Relying on the institutional specificities of the French Fifth Republic—further reinforced by the quinquennat reform and the inversion of the electoral calendar—Macron has consolidated the centralization of executive power, sidelining intermediary bodies and weakening parliamentary logic through the recurrent use of ordinances and Article 49.3 of the Constitution. The article also explores the impact of this intensified presidentialization on French representative democracy in a context marked by a growing distrust of political parties, the depoliticization of public debate, and the rise of citizen mobilizations outside traditional partisan structures. Using Colin Crouch's concept of post-democracy , it interrogates the dialectical relationship between Macronism and the erosion of classical democratic mechanisms. It concludes that Macron's style of governance is both a product and a catalyst of a post-democratic transformation.
This article examines how Guadeloupe's two main trade unions, the UGTG and the CGTG, mobilize race in their discourse and activist practices. Drawing on fieldwork and biographical interviews, it shows that race is not merely a contextual factor but a strategic axis of political differentiation in a postcolonial setting marked by social and racial inequalities. The analysis highlights contrasting and intersectional uses of race and class, revealing how these organizations articulate competing visions of trade unionism, subalternity, and emancipation within a broader context of French domination.
In 2024, France garnered international attention as it became the first country in the world to include the liberty to access abortion in its Constitution. This comes after a long French history of tension between pronatalism and advocacy for reproductive rights. Abortion, or in French interruption volontaire de grossesse or IVG, however, is infrequently considered as an object of study. This review identifies scholarly works that document incremental changes in legislation on reproductive health and cultural attitudes on abortion from the early modern period to the present, pinpointing continuities and ruptures in the history of the French family and French Republican ideology. I suggest that, in this emerging subfield of abortion studies, examining abortion as both a political concept as well as a lived experience is essential to understanding a lingering taboo around women's experiences with abortion.
The communitarian experiences of the first socialists condense a singular relationship to science. This article analyzes the place of practical knowledge—the knowledge of ordinary and daily experiences—in the socialist attempts to live together. During the nineteenth century academic sciences became more strongly structured while practical knowledge was considered less important or delegitimized. Four themes concerning the place of knowledge in community experiences are reviewed: everyday knowledge, hygiene, education and machines. In these four broad areas, early socialists made a subtle division between the use of academic science and the mobilization of practical knowledge. In everyday experiences, legitimate knowledge was required, but it did not. Practical knowledge thus did not disappear from the socio-epistemic horizon of the emancipatory current at the dawn of the nineteenth. Les expériences communautaires des premiers socialistes condensent un rapport singulier à la science. Cet article analyse la place des savoirs pratiques - les savoirs de l'expérience ordinaire et quotidienne - dans les tentatives socialistes de vivre ensemble. Au cours du XIXe siècle, les sciences académiques se sont structurées de manière plus forte tandis que les savoirs pratiques ont été considérés comme moins importants ou délégitimés. Quatre thèmes concernant la place du savoir dans les expériences communautaires sont passés en revue : le savoir quotidien, l'hygiène, l’éducation et les machines. Dans ces quatre grands domaines, les premiers socialistes ont établi une distinction subtile entre l'utilisation des sciences académiques et la mobilisation des connaissances pratiques. Dans les expériences quotidiennes, le savoir légitime était nécessaire, mais il ne l’était pas. Le savoir pratique n'a donc pas disparu de l'horizon socio-épistémique du courant émancipateur à l'aube du XIXe siècle.
L'enquête exploratoire proposée s'appuie sur une approche anthropo-historique de la croche, un style de lutte de l’île de La Réunion. L'analyse discursive, principalement fondée sur des sources documentaires, des entretiens et quelques observations, étudie la trajectoire contemporaine de cette activité physique au regard de globalisation sportive. Ainsi, du fait d'une recréation avant tout exogène plutôt qu'endogène, la croche reste une activité en sursis patrimonial. Aujourd'hui, seule subsiste la réussite d'une normalisation sportive.
Using articles published during the 1960s in the frozen-food trade journal La Surgélation, this study examines how French frozen-food professionals viewed American innovation and growth and, in the process, analyzed their own economy and society. Two principal conclusions are drawn. First, these articles challenge conventional narratives about Americanization. While acknowledging American innovation, France's frozen-food entrepreneurs did not view the United States as the sole source of modernity. Rather, they emphasized France's own contributions to industrial refrigeration, asserting that their country could be both traditional and modern. This finding in turn highlights the constructed and contested nature of national identity. French identity is neither monolithic nor fixed but rather in constant evolution as various groups assert their own definitions.
Robert Linhart was a leader of the French Maoists and an analyst of Lenin's theory and practice during the 1968 years. He is best known for his account of working in a French automobile factory in 1968–1969, L’Établi, published in 1978. This essay analyzes what he brought to this experience and what he took from it. Mathias Gokalp adapted L’Établi for a new audience in a film released in 2023. Linhart's story belongs to a particular political and economic world past but continues to challenge those who engage with it today.
Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was best known for his pathbreaking forays in literary criticism: dense meditations on the abyss of literary meaning, culminating in his radical insight concerning the ontological impossibility of writing or écriture. Accordingly, Blanchot was justly canonized by luminaries of French Theory such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as an indispensable precursor of their influential prognostications concerning la mort de l'auteur and le degré zéro l’écriture. At the same time, circa 1980, rumors began to circulate concerning what Michel Surya has denominated l'autre Blanchot: the right-wing political journalist of the 1930s, who enthusiastically embraced the neo-Maurrassian adage, Plutôt Hitler que Blum. Could it be that one of the reasons that, later in life, Blanchot was attracted to such hermetic theories of textuality and signification—écriture blanche—was to escape the trammels of his ignominious political past?
For left-wing revolutionary groups in 1970s France, to have a publication was to exist. In the face of a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, however, militant editors often struggled for survival as they attempted to build a base of reliable readers. In this context, economic viability and ideological influence were intertwined. This article examines the production and consumption of French leftist media in the 1970s to understand how revolutionary publications co-opted capitalist sales techniques in service of radical social and political goals. In couching the practices of capitalist media in the language of socialism, editors and readers built strong revolutionary communities while also, unintentionally, softening popular perceptions of certain market behaviors that breathed new life into French capitalism.
One of Herrick Chapman's considerable achievements was to build upon his excellent work as editor of French Politics, Culture & Society to spearhead our pathbreaking volume, Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, a project whose relevance continues today. When Herrick and I published our volume of essays in 2004, both of us were struck by the contradictions between the appearance of race in printed historical sources and the official denial of racial difference. Race appeared as a broad category in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of nationality and in “scientific” studies of difference on the one hand alongside official refusals to classify individuals according to race or ethnicity on the other hand. At the same time, the obvious presence of racial discrimination and conflict in France both historically and in the present was impossible to ignore. Yet relatively few scholars of French society and politics had paid attention to how race shaped the republic and its politics and policies. To us, as US-based historians of France aware of the large body of scholarship on slavery and the persistence of racism in our own country, this absence was disturbing. It was even more puzzling given what we knew about the French context and especially given the presence of racial discrimination and racial violence in France. There seemed to be (at least) three reasons for this. One had to do with difficulties historians and social scientists faced in attempting to study how race and racial discrimination figured in French politics, law, culture, and society. Official sources tended to be silent on race as a category. The census, for instance, omitted race from its enumeration of population, and French law did not typically use the category “race,” despite how race entered official French notions of difference and practices of inclusion and exclusion. Published historical sources that mentioned race struck American scholars as odd. What did commentators mean when they identified as “races” groups that contemporary American scholars and very likely French scholars would identify as national or ethnic or religious groups? Were Italians really a “race?” Were Jews? For American scholars all too familiar with the “metalanguage” of race and racial thinking in our own history and particularly the multiple ways race permeated the society, economics, and politics of the United States, the issue demanded attention.
