A New Biography of Blanche of Castile From Lindy Grant @yalepress

Lindy Grant, University of Reading, has published Blanche of Castile, Queen of France (Yale University Press, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents.

This is the first modern scholarly biography of Blanche of Castile, whose identity has until now been subsumed in that of her son, the saintly Louis IX. A central figure in the politics of medieval Europe, Blanche was a sophisticated patron of religion and culture. Through Lindy Grant’s engaging account, based on a close analysis of Blanche’s household accounts and of the social and religious networks on which her power and agency depended, Blanche is revealed as a vibrant and intellectually questioning personality.

 

Curran on a Slice of Life in Vichy France

Vivian Grosswald Curren, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, is publishing Law and Human Suffering: A Slice of Life in Vichy France in the Journal of Law and Literature. Here is the abstract.

This essay discusses three diaries from the Vichy era, the period of the Nazi Occupation of France: Jean Guéhenno’s Journal des années noires 1940-1944, Hélène Berr’s Journal, and Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar’s Ceux qui ne dormaient pas. Guéhenno was an educator and writer who entered the Resistance in 1940. His diary offers deep moral reflection as well as accounts of the dishonorable peace Vichy imposed and the ignoble servitude to which the new collaborationist French State and the Nazi occupier subjected France. In the final pages, as Leclerc’s army marches into Paris, with a victory he understands to be thanks to the help of the Allied forces, Guéhenno dares to rekindle his former faith in humankind. Berr was a young university student born into a wealthy old French Jewish family, the daughter of a famous scientist. Sensitive and generous-spirited, she lived an unusual life inasmuch as her family seemed to suffer no material hardship throughout the years that culminated in their deportation in the spring of 1944. Among the memorable events of her diary is her experience of the first day she was forced to wear the yellow star. Finally, Mesnil-Amar’s diary spans just one month at the end of the war in France, the month in which her husband has been detained and is about to be deported on the last train to leave Paris. The diary evokes her embracing of Jewish identity as a result of being identified as Jewish by anti-Semites. The lyricism of her writing approaches poetry in a work that is both a retrospective and a love letter to her husband. These diaries show us a slice of life of the times, but they also spur us to reflection on law and humanity, their limitations, potentials and fluctuations.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

François Hollande On the Holocaust

From Richard Weisberg

The following Israeli editorial aptly summarizes both the excellent recent statement about Vichy by France's new President and some of the debate that, predictably, has followed. The clarity of Pres. Hollande's statement reiterates, at some distance, the findings of scholars such as myself, about France's responsibility for the wrongdoing against Jews. The Commission in Paris that now administers individual restitution for Vichy's victims has also been mentioned in news stories, eg the NYT on 7/16. I have been over-seeing that Commission's work for over a decade.It is much to France's credit that they are, in different ways and after many decades of self-congratulatory denial, coming to grips with this sad history.However, there are voices of revisionism, some from surprising quarters.I look forward to hearing from you if you have views on these developments.Regards, Richard Weisberg 

Subject: today editorial, 7/31 "Haaretz"

 Whose crime is it?

Schoolteachers have long complained about the difficulties of teaching this chapter in French history. 'The Holocaust is not the history of the Jewish people; it is history, our history,' said Hollande.

Adar Primor | Jul.31, 2012

"The truth is that the crime was committed in France, by France." One sentence, a few simple, clear words, but how loaded. And how, it turns out, controversial. Still.
President Francois Hollande, under 100 days in the Elysees and has already notched up one of the most historic, powerful, and resonant speeches ever heard in the French Fifth Republic.
That sentence became the focus of the speech he gave last week at a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv roundup. It was the largest Aktion carried out on French soil. In July 1942, more than 13,000 Jews from Paris and its environs were arrested. The Jews were concentrated in the Winter Velodrome and from there, most were sent to their annihilation in Auschwitz.
"The crime was committed in France"? Clearly. "By France"? Absolutely not. So it was claimed, once again, following Hollande's speech. For decades the French looked in the mirror and saw reflected in it a nation of a great revolution, a nation of enlightenment and human rights, a land of refuge and emancipation. When they skipped forward, historically, to World War II, the reflection in the mirror was that of General Charles de Gaulle and Free France, of the Resistance and Righteous Gentiles.
For decades the history of France was blurred, concealed, or even denied, until it was forgotten. But in 1995 President Jacques Chirac decided to shatter the deceitful mirror and put an end to the amnesia. He accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. He did it in France's name. Chirac sought "to kill" the old myth.
Hollande, 17 years later, came to verify the kill: France is a country of "anonymous heroes," who are responsible for saving 75 percent of France's Jews, Hollande noted, justly. But France, he added, also initiated the Vel d'Hiv hunt, organized it, and sent its citizens to their deaths.
One cannot, therefore, accept any longer the claim which holds that the Vichy government was nothing but an executive branch of the Nazis that was imposed on France. The horrific crimes were perpetrated by French individuals, in the name of the French people and France. This collective must take responsibility.
Again and again Hollande repeated in his speech the words that in his view comprise historic justice: "truth" (which there is an obligation to state ), "oblivion" (which he vowed to combat ), and "memory" (which he undertook to nurture ). His words take on special meaning in view of a new poll that has found that 42 percent of the French (and 60 percent of young people ) are unaware of the Vel d'Hiv raid.
Schoolteachers have long complained about the difficulties of teaching this chapter in French history. Hollande addressed them in his speech: "The Holocaust is not the history of the Jewish people; it is history, our history. There must not be a single institution in which it is not learned in full."
Hollande vowed to fight "with the greatest determination" against anti-Semitism and "all manner of historical distortion, relativization of the Holocaust and attempts to mar its singularity."
The importance of Hollande's speech is likewise inherent in its message, namely that morality has no political borders. Hollande created an affinity between himself and the right-wing president Chirac, and dissociated himself from the legacy of his mentor, Francois Mitterrand, who in his youth had joined the Vichy regime.
"The truth never has the power to divide, only to unite," Hollande said in his speech and thereby revealed his naivete. The far right lashed out at him for "besmirching France's image" and demanded that he "stop blaming the French." Similar tunes have also been heard in circles that are considered moderate. Bruno Le Maire, the former agriculture minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for his party's leadership, attacked "the grave mistake of the president, who confused the French state (Vichy ) with France." Henri Guaino, Sarkozy's senior adviser, announced that he is "shocked" by Hollande's declaration. "His" France, after all, resided in London during the war, not in Vichy.
Hollande's speech is an historic milestone. But as it turns out collective French responsibility still has its work cut out for it.

Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Concept of Liberty

Andrew Norris, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Political Science, has published The Disappearance of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

    

The French Revolution of 1789 is one of the central developments in the history of the concept and practice of political rights. Hegel recognized this, and so valued the Revolution that he claimed always to drink a toast to the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. Nonetheless, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right Hegel advances an enduring and influential attack upon the Revolution, one that, like that of Edmund Burke, links the Revolution’s accomplishments inextricably with the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794. In each Hegelian text, the Revolutionary conception of liberty is presented as being so one-sided and extreme as to be incompatible with a stable polity, and to produce, of necessity, only “a fury of destruction” (P 436/359 and PR §5A). The central line of thought here is relatively clear. The French Revolutionaries enacted a reductive, “abstract” conception of freedom as grasped by the Understanding or Verstand; this “negative freedom” (PR §5A) or “absolute freedom” (P 431/355ff) entails the absence of restriction. When made into a social policy, this can never produce a stable set of institutions, but instead only the destruction of any potential restriction - including, ultimately, those presented by the citizenry themselves. The Revolutionary government was thus destined to descend into the fury of the Terror. In the essay that follows, I do not wish to fundamentally challenge this picture of Hegel’s view. Instead, I will argue that Hegel’s elaboration of it in the Phenomenology in particular is more complicated and nuanced than it initially appears to be, and that attending to the textual details of the Phenomenology’s account allows one to see that Hegel is advancing a particular political diagnosis according which the first “victim” of the Revolution is the apparent agent of the Terror, the volonté générale or general will, a will that only “vanishes” in its own attempt to express itself in action, a vanishing that makes possible the factions, suspicion, guilt, and death of the Jacobins. In connection with this I will also propose that Hegel’s account of the Terror there needs to be read as a response to the immediately preceding account of Utility (die Nützlichkeit), and that when it is so read it shows one of its sides to be a critique of the attempt to “master” a world in which everything is considered as an object of use, a critique that bears comparison with Heidegger’s more famous reflections on the dangers of die Technik.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Joan of Arc As Political Actor

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Suny University at Buffalo Law School, has published Joan’s Two Bodies: A Study in Political Anthropology as Buffalo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2011-017. Here is the abstract. The article is forthcoming in Social Research.

From all of the evidence, Joan of Arc was a conventionally pious Catholic and a patriotic Frenchman. Yet she was tried as a heretic and executed as a traitor. She unnerved both her friends and her enemies in the church and the state with her zeal. And she continues to fascinate. Almost six centuries after she was burned at the stake, her body still has life. This essay uses Kantorowicz’s reading of the historical development of the legal fiction of the king’s two bodies to re-focus our attention on what Joan of Arc accomplished as a political actor.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.