Near the turn of the twentieth century, traditional self-defence methods (for example, jiu-jitsu) were revamped into a more accessible and practical set of techniques and tactics for everyday use in urban public space. Framed as a "new sport" with broad public utility, early urban self-defence developed against the backdrop of heightening fears of violent crime and a burgeoning politics of security, as well as tensions provoked by the increasingly common appearance of unchaperoned, middle-class women in public. Self-defence masters pitched their innovations in an inclusive rhetoric, always with separate lessons for men and women and their respective spaces of risk. This article places modern self-defence practices in tension with historical transformations in the urban landscape, arguing that urban self-defence posited a certain subjective relation to the city that tapped simultaneously into the desire for empowerment, fantasies of criminal danger and a law-and-order tone that shaded into urban vigilantism.

This paper examines the way in which the Jewish question was handled by the Ordre des Médecins, a representative institution for the medical profession created by the Vichy government. It discusses the historiography of Vichy anti-Semitism generally and goes on to analyze the background of anti-Semitism in the French medical profession in the 1930s, comparing it with anti-Semitism in other professions such as Law. The paper then discusses the reactions of the Ordre des Médecins and its governing body, the Conseil Supérieur, to the Vichy anti-Semitic legislation which affected the profession and compares its brand of anti-Semitism with the official Vichy policy. It focuses on the unequal battle between the Conseil Supérieur, whose members were typically traditional nationalistic and protectionist anti-Semites, and the Vichy government, where quasi-racial anti-Semitism was official policy. It explains the inevitable defeat of the Conseil Supérieur.

The Cadière-Girard trial of 1730-1731 is an early example of a sensational, nationally publicized French trial in which the major parties were private individuals. Cadière, a female penitent, accused Girard, her Jesuit confessor, of bewitching and raping her; Girard claimed that Cadière was guilty of slander. It was to be the last witchcraft trial in the francophone world. Another notable feature of the trial was its publicity, in which the contesting parties almost immediately became stand-ins for the Society of Jesus and for its Jansenist adversaries. This paper argues that certain anti-Jesuits, particularly Cadière's defence team and in the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence, acted to prolong the trial with the aim of creating as much bad publicity as possible for the Society of Jesus; it also shows how Jansenist publicists took advantage of the lengthy process, creating literature that "burned Girard in spirit," and with him, the Jesuits as a whole.

This essay focuses on the anti-malarial campaigns of Edmond and Etienne Sergent in colonial Algeria during the period from 1900 to 1930. This Pasteur Institute of Algeria was part of an elaborate, global network of men and institutions that constituted the scientific empire of Third Republic France. It was deeply indebted to the methods pioneered by Pasteur and to the shared foundational myth that connected the overseas Pasteur Institutes to Paris. But the Sergent brothers' work operated within a dynamic context of international public health too. Algeria's European settlers had also worked out a creolized identity that was both dependent upon and distinct from metropolitan practices. Ultimately, the Pasteur Institute of Algeria bore the mark of the settler colonialism that had given rise to it.

At the end of the nineteenth century an upper-class Parisian hostess invited guests into her home on a fixed afternoon of her choice each week. Was this tradition, known as the jour, merely an occasion to partake of refreshments and chat? Or did it serve broader purposes for the women of High Society? This article investigates the process of invitation to a jour, the subtle nuances of etiquette at these gatherings, conversation between men and women, and what was consumed in the way of food and drink. By documenting social interaction in the space of the salon, this article analyses the way in which "power" was constituted through bodily practices. It then goes on to show what the exercise of this power reveals about gender roles, and the structure of social relationships among the Parisian upper class, in the decades before the First World War.

In 1612 the Bordeaux witchcraft inquisitor Pierre de Lancre (1556–1631), himself linked by marriage to Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), revealed that the essayist and sceptic was related on his mother’s side to a leading authority on magic and superstition, the Flemish-Spanish Jesuit Martin Delrio (1551–1608). De Lancre confounded historians' expectations by using the revelation to defend Montaigne against his cousin's criticism. This article re-evaluates the relationships of De Lancre, Delrio and Montaigne in the light of recent scholarship, which casts demonology as a form of "resistance to scepticism" that conceals deep anxiety about the existence of the supernatural. It explores De Lancre’s and Delrio’s very different attitudes towards Montaigne and towards evidence and scepticism. This, in turn, reveals the different underlying preoccupations of their witchcraft treatises. It hence argues that no monocausal explanation linking scepticism to witchcraft belief is plausible.

Under the ancien régime individual bishops decided which official religious holidays, or fêtes chômées, were observed in their dioceses. In the early seventeenth century there were on average 33 weekdays per year devoted to these holidays, but their number and choice varied widely across the country. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards French bishops began to eliminate many of these holidays, which were associated with drinking and idleness rather than with pious behaviour. These reforms initially encountered opposition from powerful interests in society, which limited their impact, but subsequently, and particularly after the mid-eighteenth century, the bishops' efforts were much more successful. By the end of the Old Regime the number of weekdays devoted to fêtes chômées had declined to fewer than 20 in most of France. The process of reform also standardized religious practice as the same days were observed throughout the kingdom. Despite the royal government's lack of interest in the matter, a more uniform set of liturgical holidays replaced the regional diversity that had previously existed. The reformed ecclesiastical calendars were more closely geared to the seasonal pattern of agricultural labour and also reflected the Christocentrism of Tridentine Catholicism.

This article considers the exceptional fate of the orphan survivors of the great Algerian demographic crisis of the late 1860s who subsequently converted to Catholicism. Using a prosopographical approach, this study seeks to highlight the complexities of national identity in France and to explore some of the racial tensions emerging in Algeria in the late nineteenth century.

Since the end of the First World War the Rockefeller Foundation has spearheaded a large-scale programme in the field of education for the health professions (doctors and nurses). In several countries throughout the world, but with its efforts concentrated on Europe, it has financed schools, constructed information networks, granted research scholarships and awarded training bursaries. In so doing it has not, however, been in the business of propagating an irresistible "American model," nor has it pursued a huge undertaking in disinterested aid. Through an attempt to contextualize these programmes, to bring to light the existence of common reference points, to retrace the work with local participants and to appraise cleavages within the philanthropic apparatus, this article proposes a fine-grained reading of the role of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Faculté de Médecine (Faculty of Medicine) and the Ecole d'Infirmières et d'assistantes sociales (Training School for Nurses and Social Workers) in Lyon between 1917- and 1940. It analyses these institutions in terms of the transactions, negotiations and appropriations that highlight their joint-venture character and it identifies their varied impact.

The notion of "resource management" has inspired some historians to rethink the nature of the state authority in early modern Europe. Like recent work on parts of Italy and Germany, this article investigates the development and implementation of legislation that sought to regulate the management and exploitation of forests. This was self-interested policymaking: as ancien régime France strove to match Britain's naval, colonial and maritime strength, the monarchy's priority was ship timbers. Yet the most sought-after pieces of wood were large, heavy and difficult to transport. According to standard accounts, such resources became rare during the eighteenth century, and the French navy turned increasingly to timber supplies from abroad. This article offers a wider view, by finding ways to analyse bureaucratic records created by the royal forestry officials (Eaux et Forêts), which have been largely neglected by historians. A regional case study suggests that, besides extending the authority of royal agents to acquire timbers for the naval dockyards, the application of Louis XIV's Ordinance on Waterways and Forests (1669) generated huge amounts of information about the extent, nature and location of mature timber reserves across France.

French food rationing was more stringent than that of any other Occupied country in Western Europe in the Second World War, and the nation's resulting aversion to a regime that controlled rations and prices would increase the difficulties of post-war governments. This article investigates the role of French state management in wartime food shortages, assessing the parts played by French policy and German interference in the food shortages, the diversion of supplies to the black market and the inequities in distribution. It finds the French rationing administration to have been poorly organized, but attributes significant responsibility to the German Occupation authorities, whose interference increased the rationing system's dysfunction. French consumers blamed the French state for the problems and relied increasingly on alternate means to supplement inadequate rations. The result was a rationing system that delivered malnourishment, social division and hostility to state management of the food supply.

Why did the production of rum in the French West Indies not achieve the same success within the French Atlantic as it did in the British Atlantic world? Surveying the history of rum production in the French Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article contends that the reason why no regional trade in rum developed in French North America resulted from fierce industrial and institutional competition from brandy producers in metropolitan France. Rum, nevertheless, remained significant within the culture and economy of Native Americans and African Americans. This article seeks to add nuance to the wider debate of the ability of the trans-border diffusion of new ideas to stimulate and institutionalize industrial and economic growth in the Atlantic world. French entrepreneurs were no less ‘entrepreneurial’ than their British counterparts, but real constraints on consumption on both sides of the Atlantic created insufficient demand.

Using evidence from cases recorded in the registers of the consistories of southern France, the author investigates the way in which Languedocian women policed each other's behaviour, enforcing a collective morality through gossip, sexual insult and physical confrontation. In contrast to case studies by other historians, it is argued here that gossip does appear to have been a peculiarly female activity, but far more than simply being an outlet for malice or prurience, it gave women a distinctive social role in the town. No less evident is the involvement of women in physical violence both against each other and against men, violence which, though less extreme than its male counterpart, nonetheless occupies a significant role in the proceedings of the consistories.

Nineteenth-century France underwent a process of individuation, or self-affirmation, that was at once political (elections), socio-economic (market forces and social promotion), and cultural (autobiographical writings). While some contemporaries embraced this evolution and others rejected it, numerous individuals sought to enjoy its benefits while shielding French society from the threat of ambition and dissolution. Many male elites, this article argues, did so through a prescriptive and self-referential language of modesty. Indebted to ancient Christian and secular vocabularies, modesty acquired a new resonance as compensation for aspirations and lifestyles that could prove both seductive and distressing. This article focuses on provincial learned societies, speeches given at school awards ceremonies, and the career of celebrated doctor Jean-Louis Alibert. At every juncture, it finds individuals who employed an idiom of modesty when speaking of themselves, fellow elites, or workers and peasants. Vis-à-vis themselves, they sought less to erase individuation than to make it socially innocuous and conceptually pleasing. Their twin aspirations to self-affirmation and self-effacement capture a broader effort to resolve contradictions between, on the one hand, individual merit, initiative and opportunity and, on the other, equality, duty and community.

E. P. Thompson developed the notion of "cultural hegemony" to analyse the power of the ruling class over the working class in eighteenth-century England. This article examines the aristocracy's endeavour to maintain its cultural hegemony in the France of the Third Republic. Drawing on the private archives of noble families, it documents servants' roles in supporting the "conspicuous consumption" of their employers, the hierarchy and wages of male and female servants and the language and gestures used in employer-servant interaction. It then looks at working-class responses to nobles' hegemonic ritual of hunting and concludes with discussion of the post-war socio-economic climate in which the distinctive features of domestic service in aristocratic households were gradually abandoned.

This essay explores what we can learn about the household limitation behaviour and strategies of those members of sixteenth-century French society who numbered among the mass of the poor. In particular, it focuses on the evidence produced by urban poor relief councils and hospitals, as they recorded the circumstances of the poverty-stricken clientele for their administrative records, and presents some preliminary findings. Although contraceptive methods do not feature explicitly in petitions and supporting documents, it is possible to build up a modest picture from these sources of the kinds of household limitation techniques available to the urban poor. As this essay demonstrates, in some cases, these involved reproductive strategies, yet in other cases it may be more appropriate to speak of household limitation methods.

In late nineteenth-century France, several criminologists maintained that the perpetrators of the contemporary wave of anarchist terrorism were victims of mental disorders who deserved judicial leniency. French courts did not accept this theory, but instead declared the principal terrorists sane and fully responsible for their crimes and, based on this view, handed down severe sentences. Many criminologists accused the jurists of deliberately ignoring the mental illness of the anarchists because of government and public pressures to impose the death penalty, but evidence from the anarchist trials fails to support this charge. The controversy highlights the conflicts between the judicial establishment and the emerging discipline of criminology, whose pathological explanations of anarchist terrorism reflected a positivist attack on the traditional concepts of free will and moral responsibility, concepts the jurists viewed as fundamental to the legal system.

Was the countryside of early modern France marked fundamentally by mobility or sedentarity? Tax rolls suggest the former, high endogamy rates the latter. For the period 1660-1720, a rarely used source, the registers of translation de domicile (change of tax domicile), provide a more comprehensive answer than civil or tax records. They suggest that, first, 60,000-70,000 better-off families moved each year; second, poor migrants, such as day labourers, rarely made declarations; third, those who owned land, moved far less often; fourth, laboureurs typically moved between 10 and 40 kilometres to take on farms of greater importance; fifth, cottagers and day labourers moved to a nearby village, rarely more than 5 kilometres away and finally, men and their families moved for economic gain, whereas women moved because of economic loss, after the death of their husband. Because the laboureurs dominated the villages-for example, paying most of the taxes-their movement shook the village in fundamental ways. The translation de domicile registers indicate villages open to the outside, full of in-migrants, whose economic status often bore a close correlation to the distance of their move (high-long, low-short).

Prying into the sex lives of young people in the past has always proved a challenging exercise. Historians have often ended up relying on the testimony from adult observers or on the quantitative evidence provided by illegitimacy rates. This article adopts a more direct route by drawing on first-hand accounts of early sexual experiences written by French people in diaries, childhood reminiscences and autobiographies. As a preliminary, it analyses the way various authorities depicted young people as sexual (or non-sexual) beings, and the state of sex education in France before the mid-twentieth century. It then considers the way people depicted their first stirrings of sexuality during childhood and adolescence. Finally, it examines evidence from the "ego documents" on sexual relations in the run-up to marriage.

The légende noire of the French Revolution has been the underlying paradigm of much modern French environmental history. This legend contends that peasants were reckless land clearers and tree cutters who disregarded the environment and unleashed an unmitigated natural disaster in the countryside. But the legend is misconceived in many ways. The purpose of this article is to investigate Ancien Régime land-clearance legislation in a non-forested region of France: Lower Languedoc. The results of this land-clearance demonstrate that far from being culpable, the rural masses were officially encouraged to clear and cultivate land on the eve of the Revolution. The French peasantry were not as destructive as the légende noire suggests; the crops they chose to plant on their newly cleared plots reflected a sensitivity towards the environment. Vines were planted on much of the new land-viticulture was not only a sound ecological choice, well-suited to the landscape, but was also attuned to the economic realities of the day.

The borderland of the val de Lièpvre, with lands in Alsace and in the Duchy of Lorraine, and divided by religion and language, offers a rich collection of sources for the history of witchcraft persecution. The territory sharply reveals what was undoubtedly characteristic of witchcraft trials more widely. The crime of witchcraft was considered abominable before the Christian community and God, and its prosecution justified abandoning many of the safeguards and constraints in legal procedure, whether restrictions on the use of torture, the reliance on dubious testimony or even denial of advocacy to the witches. The action of the judges was nonetheless, as they understood it, the rendering of true justice, by punishing the culprits with a harshness that would expiate their crimes before the community and preserve them from damnation in the face of God's judgment.