Month: November 2017

The army medical service is at the heart of the fighting experience. Its members are unparalleled witnesses of the many physical and psychological wounds suffered by combatants. This service occupies a unique place in the logic of war, as it attempts to provide treatment in a context of extreme violence. With the urgency of its care and the repetitiveness of its treatments, war represents a formidable laboratory of medical innovation for saving lives.

Le Paragone – comparaison des mérites respectifs de la peinture et de la sculpture – est un exercice théorique qui connaît une certaine vogue dans l’Europe renaissante et moderne. Loin d’être l’expression d’un antagonisme stérile, il découle de la place que la Renaissance a donnée à ces deux disciplines en les invitant à tenir sur elles-mêmes un discours théorique. Entre métier et théorie, le Paragone donne aux artistes une occasion de penser la finalité de leur pratique, et témoigne en ce sens de leur émancipation intellectuelle et sociale dans l’Europe moderne. Il serait abusif de ne voir dans cette dispute qu’un prétexte, mais la recherche d’un « vainqueur » apparaît finalement moins fondamentale que l’effort d’investigation qui la motive et explique la longévité du Paragone. C’est la question plus générale du rapport de l’art au monde qui s’y reflète, de l’Italie de la Renaissance à l’Europe des Lumières.

En essor depuis le xix^e siècle, les jouets guerriers sont à la fois des objets culturels et des produits commerciaux. En temps de guerre, ils contribuent à la mobilisation des civils, en particulier des enfants et des jeunes. Longtemps produits de luxe, les jouets, tout comme les jeux, plus libres, façonnent l’imaginaire et constituent un exutoire symbolique. En temps de paix, ils sont les vecteurs d’un discours historique dont le potentiel pédagogique, surtout depuis l’émergence des jeux vidéo, est encore largement inexploité. Vecteurs d’une interprétation du passé guerrier, ils suscitent des critiques et des polémiques, soulèvent des enjeux mémoriels et représentent, de fait, un champ d’étude en friche.

Nazi Germany’s repression in occupied territories during World War Two bears the traces of experiences from previous wars, while relying on a strategy of dissuasion. The year 1941 marked the definitive abandonment of international regulations and the beginning of systematized large-scale violence against civilians, starting with the Jews. Despite situations which were often very different, strong links and exchanges existed between occupied regions, as experiences circulated, and methods and strategies were observed, transferred, and experimented from one territory to another.

Beginning in 1830, a Comparative Satistics of Ciminality in France, Belgium, England and Germany established the gendered dimension of criminality, which is an expression of how the two genders are differently integrated into society, along with their relation to violence and weapons. In fact, the majority of highly serious crimes are the deeds of men, while feminine offences relate more to the domestic sphere or the prostitutional use of their bodies. Moreover, the victims of a majority of violent crimes are women. These differences long gave rise to naturalist interpretations, and also led to the construction of archetypes that have been called into question during the twenty-first century. There has been a concurrent denunciation of gendered violence, which the Italians designated in 2013 by the term femicide.

The slave economy shifted at the end of the Middle Ages from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic. Sugar plantations first appeared on the islands off the coast of Africa, and then on the islands of the Caribbean (where they would reach their peak during the eighteenth century, notably in Santo Domingo), as well as in Brazil. Other slave economies developed at the same time in the Americas, in accordance with successive cycles (coffee in Brazil, cotton in the United States, etc.). The plantation gave rise to an unequal and compartmentalized society, in which hierarchies linked to the race barrier did not prevent a certain malleability. The slave economy was a striking mix of early modern and archaic characteristics.

The Cold War (1947-1991) was a structuring framework for transatlantic relations for over four decades. On the one hand it prompted the United States to pursue massive political, economic, and military commitment in Europe, and on the other it made NATO the core of its members’ defence strategy in the face of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. The end of the East-West conflict consequently raised questions regarding the future of transatlantic relations. In reaffirming the US strategy of engagement in Europe, George Bush and later Bill Clinton silenced isolationist voices in the United States, and moreover opened new possibilities for transatlantic relations: beyond NATO and the security of the Atlantic space, these relations would impose themselves as a motor for the political and economic integration of all European states. Diverging economic interests have nevertheless prevented the conclusion of a genuine agreement in this area. The emergence of new competing powers could lead to the conclusion of these negotiations in the coming years.

There are close and widely-noted links between colonial expansion and the development of the social sciences. Geography in particular appears as the science of European imperialism, with the creation of categories—“geography of exploration,” “colonial geography,” and “tropical geography”—which reflected a patriotic science, applied to colonized territories. Although this was made possible by the colonial context—maps are needed to conquer a territory, information is needed for the administration of populations—the development of geography reflects more complex realities. While the discipline gradually became institutionalized in metropolitan France, geographers in the field were in constant tension, with the colonial administration and its sometimes diverging interests on the one hand and with the sciences in metropolitan France on the other.

Printing was born in Germany with the production of the Gutenberg Bible, although printers set up shop across all of Europe beginning in the first decades of the century. They specialized, organized, and collaborated with merchants and bookshops. This new industry was particularly concentrated in merchant cities and university towns. Their editorial strategies sought to reach an increasingly broader audience which was not limited to persons of letters, although important printers worked with the Humanists for the diffusion of high quality revised editions. Their collaboration involved ancient texts, such as the Greek editions of Aldus Manutius, as well as religious texts, the Bible in particular. Printing was thus a driver of religious and intellectual renewal, but was also suspected of conveying harmful and heretical ideas; with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, printers were increasingly controlled by political and religious authorities, a control that some of them were able to circumvent.