Month: September 2017

War reporters are intimately linked—in social, cultural and military, as well as in technological and economic terms—­to the history both of the modern media and of modern war.

Whether they are anonymous or famous figures like Albert Londres, they offer the wider public their personal experience of the wars that they experience up close on a daily basis. Though controlled, censored or even used as propaganda mouthpieces, they nevertheless fulfill a ‘mission’: to inform.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the major European colonial powers founded research institutions in their Asian colonies. In Batavia in 1778, the Dutch inaugurated the Society of Arts and Sciences, which promoted the study of the history and archeology of the Dutch East Indies. In 1784, the British created the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, which according to its founder, William Jones, was to take an interest in all of the societies and countries in Asia. The French founded the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi in 1900, in order to develop philological and archeological research on Indochina, and more generally on all Asian civilizations. From the start these learned institutions relied on the work of native scholars, and advised the colonial administrations by helping craft certain public policies.

Feminism and neo-Malthusianism took form as movements in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Only a few radical feminists shared the views of neo-Malthusians, while reformists emphasized the value of maternity, and used it to legitimize their demands in the face of populationist governments. The second half of the twentieth century marked a turning point, as the positions of these two branches grew closer together, fostered by scientific advances in contraception.

War featured strongly in European art during the Renaissance, especially in painting. At that time, depicting war meant painting battles: it was a question of illustrating in order to tell a story. Already, however, artists began to be drawn to the suffering of civilians and to denounce the violence of war. This tendency increased in the late eighteenth century with the advent of mass war. Increasingly politically committed, artists became the heralds of pacifism in the twentieth century.

War is at the heart of European literature regardless of genre, the author’s origin, or artistic movements. Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s autobiographical novel, while following traditional codes, offers an original vision of war considered in the long view, and analyzed from every angle. The reader is then placed in an uncomfortable situation, for although war, which is reported on widely and in differing ways, seems familiar, the issues raised by the work place the reader before a reality that escapes him.

Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and until the French Revolution, numerous talents born in Northern or Central Italy were driven to leave their country to pursue their professions in other European states. This phenomenon, indicative of the economic and cultural decline of these ultramontane regions, was particularly notable for France around 1650 thanks to Mazarin, who had become Prime Minister, but also during the Regency thanks to Anne of Austria. The young Louis XIV soon took over, before even the start of his reign. It was during this period that painters, architects, stage designers, composers and singers came to Paris from Bologna, Modena, Venice, Florence or Rome. They enjoyed remarkable success beginning in 1645 in Paris and in other locations where the court resided; the influence exerted by some would sometimes prove to be lasting, and would extend to other European countries.

The tight if not exclusive link between the army and masculinity resulted in the implementation of a military-virile model, which was based on the achievement of virtues that seemingly justify male domination. This military “gender” was part of a series of power relations aiming to exclude certain categories from the body politic (women, the colonized), as well as to legitimize the burden placed on society, especially in the form of conscription. The reception of this model depended essentially on the degree of militarization of European societies, and therefore on the type of government and the value it placed on the figure of the soldier. In the twenty-first century, this model seems to involve solely military institutions, and has been called into question by their feminization.