The Return of N’Guyen Van Binh

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Geoff Read
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
The Third ◽  
Original Sentence ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
One Year

This article explores the case of N’Guyen Van Binh, a South Vietnamese political prisoner exiled for his alleged role in “Poukhombo’s Rebellion” in Cambodia in 1866. Although Van Binh’s original sentence of exile was reduced to one year in prison he was nonetheless deported and disappeared into the maw of the colonial systems of indentured servitude and forced labor; he likely did not survive the experience. He was thus the victim of injustice and his case reveals the at best haphazard workings of the French colonial bureaucracy during the period of transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. While the documentary record is entirely from the perspective of the colonizers, reading between the lines we can also learn something about Van Binh himself including his fierce will to resist his colonial oppressors.

‘Mission Civilisatrice’: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860–1914

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew Burrows
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
French Colonialism ◽  
French Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Cultural Components

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.

The old regime of hygiene: Life in the nineteenth-century French countryside

Rural History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zdatny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Lesson ◽  
Material Conditions

AbstractThis article provides an object lesson in the history of thelongue durée, reflected in the comprehensive filthiness of rural life in the nineteenth century. Political upheaval had not changed the material conditions of peasant existence or sensibilities relating to hygiene. Economic revolution had as yet made no practical difference to the dirtiness of daily life. Peasants under the Second Empire lived much as they had under the Old Regime – in dark, damp houses with no conveniences, cheek by jowl with the livestock. Their largely unwashed bodies were wrapped in largely unchanged clothes. Babies were delivered with germ-covered hands, drank spoilt milk from dirty bottles, and spent their young days swaddled like mummies and marinating like teriyaki. The Third Republic set out to ‘civilize’ the rural masses, but this snapshot of material life in the nineteenth-century French countryside illustrates just how much work lay in front of it.

Piety and Politics in Nineteenth Century Poitiers: The Cult of St Radegund

1996 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81
Author(s):  
Brian Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
French Society ◽  
The Third ◽  
Pius Ix ◽  
The Middle Ages

St Radegund, a sixth-century royal ascetic who relinquished her position as the wife of a Frankish king and established a convent in Poitiers, is today a rather obscure French local saint. Yet in the nineteenth century, as a result of the tireless promotion of her cult by Édouard Pie, bishop of Poitiers from 1849 to 1880, St Radegund was widely invoked in France as ‘la sainte reine de la France’ and ‘la mère de la patrie’. Her wonder-working tomb, a popular devotional site in the Middle Ages, offered cures and Pie saw to it that the pilgrim trains to Lourdes made an obligatory prayer-stop at Poitiers. This article analyses devotion to St Radegund during the Second Empire and the Third Republic and explores some of the religious and political connotations of the cult of this royal saint. The development of the cult is particularly significant for it allows us to see, reflected on the local level, something of the larger struggle for national self-definition that was taking place in nineteenth-century French society as royalists contended with Bonapartists and republicans, clericals waged war against secularists and the ultramontanes sought to rouse their fellow countrymen in support of Pius IX.

Renouvier: the Man and His Work (i)

Philosophy ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 42-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Alexander Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Active Life ◽  
Commune Of 1871 ◽  
The Revolution

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

FranceThe Vicissitudes of a Tradition

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Mestre
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

This chapter considers the history of French administrative law. Three main periods may be discerned. The first of these ran from the Restauration, immediately after the first Napoleonic Empire, until the end of the Second Empire in 1870. This period of political instability is characterized by the great diversity of the first expressions of interest in foreign administrative law: educational prospects, journal articles, as well as political and nationalistic controversies. Knowledge of these laws increased considerably with the creation of the Société de Législation comparée. During the Third Republic, many of the comparisons carried out repeatedly sparked debates with political and nationalistic overtones. After the Second World War, the teaching of comparative administrative law made significant headway. The development of research and the increase in publications stimulated reflections on the methods and the ‘scientific field’ of comparative administrative law.

scholarly journals THE MEXICAN EXPEDITION OF 1862–1867 AND THE END OF THE FRENCH SECOND EMPIRE

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 660-685
Author(s):  
JEROME GREENFIELD
Keyword(s):  
Third Republic ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
French Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Constitutional Reforms ◽  
French People ◽  
Legitimacy Crisis

AbstractThe French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.

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