Richard Vinen

The Poisoned Madeleine: The Autobiographical Turn in Historical Writing

This article examines the recent fashion for autobiographical writing among historians. It argues that this fashion goes with a rehabilitation of contemporary history, which was sometimes regarded with disdain during the time in the mid-1960s when approaches associated with the Annales school seemed most influential. Autobiographies by historians have attracted particular attention in France and all such works are sometimes labelled with the term first coined by Pierre Nora: ego-histoire. However, this article argues that the historians brought together by Nora (all French, mostly born between 1917 and 1930 and heavily influenced by the political upheavals of the period 1940 to 1962) were rather different from those historians (mostly from a younger generation) who have been drawn to autobiographical writing in the Anglo-American world. It is finally suggested that there is now something of a reaction against autobiographical writing by a younger generation of historians who argue that, even when writing about the very recent past, absence of direct personal experience can be an advantage.

The Politics of French Business 1936-1945

Preface List of abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Sources and methodology 3. Background 4. The mobilization of French business 5. New ideologies 6. The counter-attack 7. The patronat and the war 8. The patronat and the establishment of the Vichy regime 9. Labour relations during the occupation 10. Who controlled the Vichy industrial organization? 11. An industrial new order? 12. Pro-Vichy business leaders 13. Business at the liberation 14. Comparative and theoretical perspectives 15. Conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index.

Bougeois Politics in France, 1945-1951.

1. Introduction 2. Historiographic overview 3. International comparisons 4. Notables 5. Bourgeois parties and the female electorate 6. Organized business and politics 7. Administration 8. Opposition nationale 9. The Parti Republicain de la Liberte 10. Machine a ramasser les Petainistes? 11. The Rassemblement des Gauches Republicaines 12. The Rassemblement du Peuple Francais 13. Independents and Peasants 14. The Groupement de Defense des Contribuables 15. Conclusion.

The Second Sex

In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir, a former lycee teacher who was then mainly known as the lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, published The Second Sex. In this book de Beauvoir examined the various disadvantages under which women laboured. In 1971 de Beauvoir’s name appeared at the top of a petition in favour of the legalization of abortion: all the 343 signatories claimed that they themselves had undergone abortions. It would be possible to present the period between these two events as one in which de Beauvoir’s ideas spread to influence almost all Frenchwomen. In his study of a Breton village, Edgar Morin even talked of the spread of ‘Beauvoirism’ among peasants. In reality changes in the lives of women in post-war France cannot be attributed simply to the spread of feminist ideas, or to any other single process. De Beauvoir’s own, highly mythologized, life raises interesting questions about the changing role of women in France. Her relationship with Sartre — the two lived apart and enjoyed the freedom to pursue ‘contingent’ relationships — can be seen as a liberating alternative to the constraints of bourgeois marriage. But it can also be argued that de Beauvoir lived in his shadow from the moment when, in 1929, she came second to him in the philosophy agregation, to the time when, at the end of his life, she nursed him through illness.