Joan Tumblety

Remaking the male body : masculinity and the uses of physical culture in interwar and Vichy France

Remaking the male body treats interwar physical culture as a set of popular practices and as a field of ideas. Its central subject is the imagined failure of French manhood mapped out in this realm by physical culturist ‘experts’, often physicians. Their diagnosis of intertwined crises in masculine virility and national vitality was surprisingly widely shared across popular and political culture. And the vision of physical exercise and national strength that underpinned it was a hygienist and sometimes overtly eugenicist one, suggesting the persistence of fin-de-siecle pre-occupations with biological degeneration and regeneration well beyond the First World War. Joan Tumblety traces these patterns of thinking about the male body across a seemingly disparate set of voices, all of whom argued that the physical training of men offered a salve to France’s real and imagined woes. By interrogating a range of sources, from get-fit manuals and the popular press, to the mobilising campaigns of popular politics on left and right and official debates about physical education, this book delineates the way male physical culture was imagined as an instrument of social hygiene and provided a locus for political struggle. Understanding the influence of these concerns on French culture in the interwar years ultimately illuminates the origins of Vichy’s project for masculine renewal after the military defeat of 1940.

Revenge of the fascist knights: masculine identities in Je suis partout, 1940-1944

The debâcle of 1940 permitted an attack in France both on republican institutions and on republican ideas. Indeed, sections within the radical Right, including the Parisian literary fascists involved with the collaborationist weekly Je suis partout, staged an elaborate revenge on all that the Third Republic had symbolised. The contributors to the newspaper envisaged, not always consciously, that the new European Order would be based not only on such a reinvention of politics but on a reconfiguration of manliness. In this way, they were able simultaneously to blame the swiftness of the French collapse on the inadequate nature of the French male population and to seek a discursive rehabilitation of that same body of men through their narratives. A reading of the fiction and journalism in Je suis partout suggests that such gendered ruminations allowed these authors to reconcile the defeat with their faith in the grandeur of France and its soldiers.

‘Civil Wars of the Mind’: The Commemoration of the 1789 Revolution in the Parisian Press of the Radical Right, 1939

This article explores the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1939 and the responses to it of agents on the Left, centre and radical Right of French Political culture. In particular, it is argued that French fascists, especially the ‘literary fascists’ of Action française and Je suis partout, developed throughout the sesquicentennial year a critique of revolutionary and republican forces that placed 1789 at the beginning of the French slide into a decadent modernity marked by class conflict, racial integration and the blurring of the boundaries between the sexes. Such an analysis reveals the importance of practising historians in cultural political debate and shows how the commemoration of the 1789 Revolution reflected, in part, contemporary fears of an apocalyptic war against Germany. In addition, the memory of the contested eighteenth-century past was displaced for these actors by a contemplation of a supposedly pure and pre-modern era embodied by Joan of Arc.

Histories of medical lobbying

The lobbying of government ministers by medical professionals is a live issue. Health professionals around the world have been active in the pursuit of legislative change. In the UK, the AllTrials campaign continues to exert pressure on parliamentarians to force greater transparency in the publication of clinical trial results. This year doctors in Australia refused to discharge child refugees from hospital into detention centres deemed harmful to their health. The lobbying of medical humanitarians such as Medecins sans Frontieres in France effected a change in the law there, in 1998, that allowed undocumented immigrants with life-threatening conditions to remain in the country for medical treatment.

The Soccer World Cup of 1938: Politics, Spectacles, and la Culture Physique in Interwar France

I argue that a study of the football World Cup held in stadia throughout France in June 1938 adds to our understanding of the purchase of sport and la culture physique in the late 1930s, showing how far sport had become a commodity integrated into the language and economy of the spectacular. It illuminates the mentalite of late 1930s sportifs as well as that of the intellectuals and politicians who had come to take sport and la culture physique seriously as a source of national salvation, and demonstrates how attitudes towards sport and the male sporting body had become entwined with contemporary concerns about “national decline”. Finally, the tournament reminds us how far the sports stadium functioned as contested political space in inter-war France, even if the World Cup ultimately shows the dominance of the allegedly politically neutral values of sportivite over those of engagement.

Geoff Read, The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France,ReadGeoff, The Republic of Men: Gender and the Political Parties in Interwar France, Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, LA, 2014; 304 pp., 12 illus.; 9780807155219,

follow. Still, it is his sources that are crucial to his compelling interpretation. Price’s research at the secondary and printed primary level is solid. He relies upon standard works for the campaign narratives that are written in German, French and English. His archival research appears most clearly in those chapters dedicated to domestic perceptions of the war. Price has consulted material effectively in the Archives nationales as well as diplomatic archives in France, Austria and the Czech Republic. Nevertheless, the key sources used to support Price’s thesis come from prefectural and police reports. While he uses sufficient evidence to introduce and substantiate his argument, still there is a need for more before one can fully accept this interesting interpretation. Rather than constituting a definitive account, Napoleon and the End of Glory introduces a revisionist perspective on the decline and fall of the Napoleonic regime that begs for further research. Price has achieved a clear and well-argued account of 1813–14, but his book should be considered the first new work on the subject and it should be followed by future comprehensive research into the prefectural archives. Price’s interpretation is intriguing, but leaves the critical historian wanting to see more.

45.00 (hbk)

a further chapter by Martin Evans examines the role of historical records and historical interpretations in fuelling the seemingly intractable Casamance conflict. Simon Massey analyses the complexity of French neo-colonial strategy through a case study of the Comoros islands. He charts the history of statesponsored assassinations and corruption that mark this history and points to underlying continuities in French policy throughout the contemporary period. Claire Griffiths’ chapter uncovers the continuities in gender and development policy in late colonial and postcolonial Africa and concludes that social policymaking in the former French colonies of West Africa has changed in only two relatively insignificant respects: the language in which policy is formulated has changed, and the international community has become an increasingly important actor in the social policy field as the centre of development policymaking has shifted from Paris to international institutions situated largely in the US. Brenda Garvey examines the move to increase the use of local languages in pre-school education in Senegal, the role of the UN in promoting this initiative and the problems it raises. The final two chapters, by Alice Burgin and Sarah Burnautzki, examine aspects of cultural production in Francophone Africa, the former focusing on the film Ndeysaan and the latter on postcoloniality in Francophone literature.

Au Naturel. Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France

This article explores two features of cultural life in France during the era of the Popular Front, with a special focus on the Paris world’s fair of 1937 – mass gymnastics and large stadium projects designed to host both sporting and political spectacles. These developments are considered in the light of both transnational exchange, and the widespread unease expressed in interwar France towards spectator sport on the one hand and ‘totalitarian’ political mobilization on the other hand. It is argued that a ‘double attitude’ towards spectacle emerged, where disdain for commercial spectator sport sat alongside an often grudging admiration for large-scale political spectacle. The article examines the reception in France both of the Bohemian Sokol physical culture movement and the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, showing how French commentators across the political spectrum negotiated their sense of the value of spectacles – normally by reclaiming them for identifiably ‘French’ democratic traditions and by blurring the distinction between spectatorship and participation. In doing so, the article takes issue with the reductionist nature of the notion of a ‘fascist aesthetic’, stressing that the wide purchase of both mass gymnastics and monumental neo-classical stadium design suggests that the political meaning of such things lies in their use and not their form.

Rethinking the Fascist Aesthetic: Mass Gymnastics, Political Spectacle and the Stadium in 1930s France

Across a varied career spent largely at the universities of Sussex and Stirling, Siân Reynolds has made a profound impact on French studies in the UK. Her scholarly interests have found expression in books on Scottish as well as French history. She has tackled subjects as diverse as Franco-Scottish cultural exchange, the late nineteenthcentury French labour movement that was the subject of her doctoral work, and women aviatrixes of the 1930s. Perhaps most of all Siân set the agenda for the development of French gender history in Britain, an accolade entirely in keeping with her decision to study for a doctorate in History (awarded in 1981) under the pioneering French women’s historian Michelle Perrot, and best represented by her 1996 book France Between the Wars: Gender and Politics. Alongside these endeavours, Siân forged a remarkable career as a translator of both academic history and popular fiction. Most notably, she brought a masterpiece of mid-century annaliste scholarship to an Anglophone audience in the early 1970s with her two-volume translation of Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. More recently, she has found acclaim as the translator of several of French crime novelist Fred Vargas’ works, being rewarded with the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger for best translated book three times. Siân’s contribution to the field goes well beyond this impressive list of scholarly achievements. Through her work as president of the Association for the Study of Modern & Contemporary France, and chair of the Scottish Working People’s History Trust, among other examples, she has offered academic leadership in a range of fields, as well as generous moral support as peer and mentor. Siân’s work has always been marked by a deep historiographical sensitivity to the ways in which historians themselves (sometimes inadvertently) shape the meaning of knowledge, sometimes obscuring truth by the blind spots in their interpretation. In the mid-1980s, her reflections on the gendered assumptions of French republicanism

Gender, Politics and the Social in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honour of Siân Reynolds

Perhaps the only acquaintance that a popular audience is likely to have with the women of wartime France is provided by Charlotte Gray, the eponymous fictional creation of novelist Sebastian Faulks, who, in the service of British intelligence, is parachuted into Occupied France during the Second World War to aid local resisters. Describing the film version of the novel as both ‘cinema-sucre’ and a ‘preposterous fable’ for its romantic and simplified view of the lives of such agents, one critic has been keen to emphasise that the reality of wartime resistance for women, and indeed for men, was very different, demanding highly developed skills of communication and evasion deployed in a state of constant fear. (1) Historians now know much more about the role of women in the resistance and about their lives under the Occupation in general than was the case two decades ago, when histories of Occupied France were, for the most part, gender blind.