Robert Aldrich

Homosexuality and the City: An Historical Overview

Ever since the time of ancient Athens and the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, homosexuality has been associated with the city. Historians over the past decade have chronicled urban gay and lesbian groups in Renaissance Italy, Enlightenment France and Britain, and modern America and Australia, and social scientists have also identified emerging gay communities in Asia. Their researches show how homosexuals formed urban networks of sociability and solidarity, and how the presence of such minority communities impacted on urban development from Castro Street to Soho. Homosexuals often moved to cities to escape the sexual and social constraints of traditional life, and they played a major role in transforming the city and in creating a particular urban ethos. The city, in turn, is the site for the construction of much contemporary gay and lesbian culture.

The French presence in the South Pacific, 1842-1940

French images of the South Pacific the establishment of a French empire in Oceania French missionaries in Oceania the French navy in the South Pacific French economic interests in the Pacific colonies settlers, administrators and imported labourers the French and the islanders France, Australia and New Zealand the oceanic lobby in Paris France in the Pacific in the early 20th century.

Colonial Past, Post-Colonial Present History Wars French-Style

The spectre of colonialism haunts post-colonial France. From revelations about torture in colonial Algeria to disputes about the wearing of ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols by Muslim students in present-day France, from political movements by the descendants of colonial migrants to urban riots, France is being forced to re-examine its colonial past and the legacy it left. The passing of a law, in February 2005, mandating the teaching of the ‘positive role’ of colonialism provoked great controversy involving historians, politicians in France and Algeria, and members of the public. A sign of renewed concern with colonial history and with collective memories of colonialism, it also represented an episode in French-style history wars with parallels in other countries. This article has been peer-reviewed.

An economic and social history of Europe, 1890-1939

Introduction - Economic Development in Europe before the First World War - European Expansion: The Gold Standard and Imperialism - European Society in the Belle Epoque - Politics and Ideology before 1914 - The First World War - Economic Development from 1918-39 - Europe and the World between the Wars - European Society from 1918-39 - European Politics from 1918-39 - Epilogue - Maps - A Guide to Further Reading - Index

IMPERIAL MISE EN VALEUR AND MISE EN SCÈNE : RECENT WORKS ON FRENCH COLONIALISM

This review looks at English- and French-language books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonial history published since 1995. It considers issues of ideology, imperial governance, the mise en valeur (development and ‘improvement’) of colonies (for instance, in health and education policy), the representation of empire in art and architecture, and decolonization. Special attention is paid to Indochina. Recent works have stressed the evolving nature of colonial policy and its adaptability to local circumstances. The review notes a certain divide between works emphasizing the discursive aspect of empire, and more ‘materialist’ treatments, but remarks on a general renewal of interest in colonial history. Contemporary scholars have also given colonial history a more prominent position in French national history than it previously held.

The Continuing Crisis

The experience of the 1970s and 1980s contrasted sharply with that of the 1950s and 1960s, though again the suspicion that conditions might have changed spread only gradually. A recession in 1970–71 was quite widespread and long-lasting, and Swedish output actually declined, but the boom seemed to return in 1973. Then in 1974–75 total output declined in nearly all western European countries for the first time since the 1930s. Another boom year followed in 1976, but recession returned in 1977 and again from 1979 to 1982, when most countries experienced declines in output. ‘Recession’ began to sound less like an analytical concept and more like an official euphemism intended to divert attention from some unpleasant facts. In all western European countries average rates of growth of total output were lower and fluctuations in the rates greater during the 1970s and 1980s than during the late 1950s and 1960s. Some of the contrasts were striking; for instance, during the 1970s Swiss industrial output grew at less than one-tenth the rate maintained during the 1960s. Moreover, though the eastern European economies had continued to expand relatively rapidly until the mid-1970s, beginning in the late 1970s they too slowed.

Ends of Empire: Decolonizing the Nation in British and French Historiography

This chapter offers a comparison of the impact of decolonization on national historiography in Britain and France. It is concerned, first, to map out the broader interpretative trends within the subdiscipline of imperial history in the decades since the 1960s. Here we will suggest that British and French historiographies have followed remarkably similar trajectories, where an initial period of ‘empire neglect’ gave way, in the 1980s, to a renewed interest in the relationship between empire and metropolitan culture that continues to this day. Further, we will explore the extent to which decolonization might have influenced the very conception of ‘national’ history in the two countries. It has been a common axiom among generations of British scholars that the end of empire brought greater political and social upheaval in France than in the United Kingdom. Yet in the longer term, it can be argued that ‘France’ has proven more stable and resilient as the core ontological subject of historical enquiry.

Putting the Colonies on the Map: Colonial Names in Paris Streets

Over the last decade the study of ‘realms of memory’ has been a growing field, pioneered by Pierre Nora’s magisterial Les Lieux de memoire.1 Statues, hotels de ville and monuments aux morts the church and the cafe, as well as famous edifices such as the Bastille and the Eiffel Tower, have attracted attention as sites in which the French preserve and continuously reinterpret their memory of the past.2 But what about colonial memories? Nora’s collection includes only one piece on the empire, Charles-Robert Ageron’s essay on the Exposition Coloniale of 1931. Is France’s colonial memory so slight? Edward Said, among others, argues that colonial references are omnipresent in British and French art and literature, politics and daily life.3 However, Antoine Raybaud answers negatively to the question: ‘Does France have a colonial memory?’ Raybaud speaks about a collective ‘forgetting’ of the colonial past, even an ‘amnesia’ regarding the empire, a ‘disinheritance’ apparent in ‘artistic and monumental memory’.4

Homosexuality in the French Colonies

The links between sexuality and European overseas expansion have attracted increasing attention from historians and other scholars in recent years. They have explored the European encounter with diverse sexual practices in other parts of the world, the sexual opportunities presented by the colonies, the gendered nature of imperialism, the incidence of prostitution, the eroticized images of indigenous people in art and literature, interracial liaisons, and métissage.1 Work has concentrated on heterosexuality in colonial contexts, but homosexuality is no less interesting. European explorers and adventurers came into contact with cultures in which sexual relations between men or between women (but this essay does not discuss lesbianism) were not subject to the same kind of legal, medical, and religious condemnation as in the West, or where formal disapproval had less effect on actual behavior. In some societies, those who contravened Western notions of sexual propriety (the berdaches of North America, the maheus of Polynesia, or those who participated in homosexual initiation rituals in Melanesia) enjoyed recognized and accepted status in their communities.2 The “new imperialism” (1880s to 1914) occurred at the same time as the emergence of new forms of same-sex identification: the invention of the word “homosexuality,” the first movements of homosexual emancipation, and the establishment of modern patterns of homosexual sociability. Europeans overseas in this period sometimes engaged in “situational” homosexuality, particularly in all-male military battalions, in penal colonies, or on the frontier, which was often marked by a dramatic imbalance in the sex ratio between men and women. European homosexuals often met willing indigenous partners in societies with non-Western mores, while others found the male environments of

The Great Boom

Western Europe slipped from the period of reconstruction into an unprecedented boom, but observers adjusted to the new situation rather slowly. By 1948 or 1949 industrial output in all countries already exceeded its prewar level, but growth rates were expected to drop once the ‘recovery phase’ ended. In 1950 and 1951 the Korean War created a sudden worldwide increase in demand for raw materials and machinery, but this was regarded as a temporary phenomenon. American pressure for rearmament further stimulated demand, but in the absence of cuts in consumption the continued boom was generally seen merely as dangerously inflationary. By the late 1950s the boom showed no sign of ending, and economists began to turn to their shelves for copies of works offering explanations of long periods of economic growth. The boom persisted through the 1960s. It was interrupted on four occasions, in 1952, 1956–58, 1963 and 1967. However, these interruptions were not traditional ‘depressions’, but ‘recessions’, years in which output continued to grow, but at rates somewhat lower than those which Europeans came to see as ‘normal’. In 1958 total output declined in Belgium, Eire and Norway; these were the only three cases in which output declined in any western European country during any of the four recessions.