scholarly journals Imagining an Old City in Nineteenth-Century France: Urban Renovation, Civil Society, and the Making of Vieux Lyon

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Urban Forms ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Old City ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Urban Renovation

Urban histories of nineteenth-century France have tended to focus on Paris and emphasize state actions. This has obscured movements that were crucial in shaping modern cities, particularly segments of civil society that worked on preserving old neighborhoods. This article focuses on Lyon—a “second city”—and analyzes how state-driven urban renovations under the Second Empire fostered a fin-de-siècle localist reaction that sought to preserve what was seen as Lyonnais urban forms (in particular neighborhoods defined by their narrow and crooked streets). Through an antiquarian discourse, cultural elites argued that these urban forms were an essential part of Lyonnais identity—which they feared was being infringed upon by Paris. The actions of these prideful and anxious Lyonnais show that antiquarian history was, in fact, a modern phenomenon that played a key role in shaping the modern city.

Combatting Bias in the Criminal Courts of France, 1870s-1913

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-168
Author(s):  
James Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
Jury Verdicts ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
A Charge

Abstract In nineteenth-century France, liberals assumed that a conservative judiciary was frequently biased in favour of the prosecution, and socialists assumed that juries were dominated by the upper classes and too unrepresentative of the population to render justice equitably. Agitation by the left to combat these perceived biases led to the adoption of two key reforms of the fin de siècle. One was the abolition in 1881 of the résumé, or summing-up of the case by the chief justice of the cour d’assises (felony court). Liberals thought this reform was necessary because judges allegedly often used the résumé to persuade jurors in favour of conviction, a charge repeated by modern historians. The other reform, beginning at about the same time, was to make jury composition more democratic. By 1880, newly empowered liberals (at least in Paris) had begun to reduce the proportion of wealthy men on jury lists. This was followed in 1908 by the implementation of a circular issued by the Minister of Justice ordering the jury commissions to inscribe working-class men on the annual jury lists. However, a quantitative analysis of jury verdicts suggests that the reforms of the early 1880s and 1908 had only modest impacts on jury verdicts. Ideas and attitudes seem to have been more important. This has implications regarding two key controversies among modern jurists: the extent to which judges influence jurors and the extent to which the characteristics of jurors influence their verdicts.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weir
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Period 1880 ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

The Introduction first considers the etymological and historical meanings of decadence. Different interpretations of the word “decadence” point to historical decline, social decay, and aesthetic inferiority. Decadence today may be best understood as the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity, which first arose in nineteenth-century France and is best expressed by the author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Decadence then “travelled” to London, where Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) became the preeminent decadent writer. Other metropolitan centers that made up part of the urban geography of decadence during the fifty-year period (1880–1930) of decadence’s peak were fin-de-siècle Vienna and Weimar Berlin.

Origins

Mettray ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Toth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Crime ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Penal Codes ◽  
Police Forces

This chapter reiterates events that lead to the founding of the Mettray, which was instigated by concerns on increase in juvenile crime by penal reformers, philanthropists, and jurists during mid-nineteenth-century France. Mettray was founded during a period that invited experimentation in corrections, as evidenced by the allure of carceral innovations abroad. With the advent of the Second Empire, the focus of justice policy shifted to emphasize reinforcing mechanisms of repression. Louis Napoléon conceived of punishment as a retributive and intimidating force and relegated rehabilitative corrections to a secondary position. Rather than improving conditions inside prisons and adapting punishments to facilitate rehabilitation, Louis Napoléon shored up the police forces and manipulated the penal codes to assure more prompt, certain, and harsh punishments.

Tocqueville and the French

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-165
Author(s):  
Cheryl B. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Paris Commune ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Class Struggles ◽  
Marxist Tradition

For contemporary political theorists, the events of nineteenth-century France – the "bourgeois" revolution of 1830, the revolutionary eruption of 1848 with its dénouement in Bonapartism, and the "heroic" moment of the Paris Commune – have entered the domain of reflection on modern politics through Marx. Not only for Marxists, but for those who learned political theory in a Marxist tradition or whose primary acquaintance with nineteenth-century France came from Marx's trenchant dissection of its class struggles, this was a story fraught with universal significance. Indeed, French historical events have long functioned as dramatic signs or markers of the modern relationship between state and civil society, and between democracy and revolution.

scholarly journals Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris : ethnographic portraits by Jacques-Philippe Potteau

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juli Sheptytsky-Zäll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Presentation Methods ◽  
Art Gallery Of Ontario ◽  
Source Of Information

Jacques-Philippe Potteau, a lesser known photographer and naturalist in nineteenth-century France, produced a series of ethnographic portraits under the title "Collection Anthropologique du Museum de Paris" for the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, between 1860-1869. This paper investigates a representative set of the series, found at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has been used as a source of information for looking at the photographer's mode and scope of production. These ethnographic portraits, made according to conventions of commercial studio portraiture in Second Empire France, were used for the study and classification of man and displayed as specimens in the Anthropology Collection at the Muséum. By looking at the variation between the most formal and the most sterile compositions, the various presentation methods and the labels as a new source of information, Potteau is identified as a photographer who produced work more independently than previously thought.

scholarly journals Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris : ethnographic portraits by Jacques-Philippe Potteau

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juli Sheptytsky-Zäll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Presentation Methods ◽  
Art Gallery Of Ontario ◽  
Source Of Information

Jacques-Philippe Potteau, a lesser known photographer and naturalist in nineteenth-century France, produced a series of ethnographic portraits under the title "Collection Anthropologique du Museum de Paris" for the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, between 1860-1869. This paper investigates a representative set of the series, found at the Art Gallery of Ontario, which has been used as a source of information for looking at the photographer's mode and scope of production. These ethnographic portraits, made according to conventions of commercial studio portraiture in Second Empire France, were used for the study and classification of man and displayed as specimens in the Anthropology Collection at the Muséum. By looking at the variation between the most formal and the most sterile compositions, the various presentation methods and the labels as a new source of information, Potteau is identified as a photographer who produced work more independently than previously thought.

scholarly journals ‘A portion of truth’: Demarcating the boundaries of scientific hypnotism in late nineteenth-century France

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-139
Author(s):  
Kim M. Hajek
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Boundary Work ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Science ◽  
Scientific Legitimacy ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In fin-de-siècle France, hypnotism enjoyed an unprecedented level of medico-scientific legitimacy. Researchers studying hypnotism had nonetheless to manage relations between their new ‘science’ and its widely denigrated precursor, magnétisme animal , because too great a resemblance between the two could damage the reputation of ‘scientific’ hypnotism. They did so by engaging in the rhetorical activity of boundary-work. This paper analyses such demarcation strategies in major texts from the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools – the rival groupings that dominated enquiry into hypnotism in the 1880s. Researchers from both Schools depicted magnétisme as ‘unscientific’ by emphasizing the magnetizers’ tendency to interpret phenomena in wondrous or supernatural terms. At the same time, they acknowledged and recuperated the ‘portions of truth’ hidden within the phantasmagoria of magnétisme ; these ‘portions’ function as positive facts in the texts on hypnotism, immutable markers of an underlying natural order that accounts for similarities between phenomena of magnétisme and hypnotism. If this strategy allows for both continuities and discontinuities between the two fields, it also constrains the scope for theoretical speculation about hypnotism, as signalled, finally, by a reading of one fictional study of the question, Anatole France's ‘Monsieur Pigeonneau’.

CULTURAL CHANGE AND THE ACTING CONSERVATORY IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-597
Author(s):  
LENARD R. BERLANSTEIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Women's Autonomy ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Prominent French men of letters began to claim that the student body at the acting Conservatory, which bore a morally dubious reputation, was becoming more bourgeois than ever before as the nineteenth century ended. They interpreted the entry of the bourgeoisie as one more manifestation of national decay. In fact, the major shift in recruitment was the growing number of women from respectable, bourgeois backgrounds. The new pattern signalled an expansion in women's autonomy as individuals. Thus, the writers' pessimism obscured the fact that the early Third Republic was keeping some of its democratic promises. The findings indicate that a reassessment of France's capacity for progressive cultural change in the fin de siècle is in order.

Sea and structure in fin-de-siècle France: Mallarmé and Debussy

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Malcolm Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Sea Literature ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The One ◽  
Aesthetic Structure

A copious sea literature exists in nineteenth-century France, and the works of such figures as Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet and Rimbaud contain a recurrent tension between two divergent views of maritime experience. On the one hand, the sea offers the encouraging spectacle of endless possibility and plurality, but on the other hand it is an emblem of intellectual defeat and of humankind at the mercy of an inhospitable natural world. In major works by Mallarmé (1842–98) and Debussy (1862–1918) this contradiction is placed centre stage. The poet and the musician have found ingenious ways of maintaining intellectual and artistic control while constructing ‘open’ textures designed to recreate the sensations of chaos and contingency. In both works – Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) and La Mer (1905) – the remorseless action of the sea is associated with the periodic achievement and loss of aesthetic structure.

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