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This chapter demonstrates how the ever-changing itinerary of la grande boucle has been exploited to generate diverse and often opposing views of French society, history, and identity. It evaluates past bicycle races conducted in France and how they affected France's view towards the Tour de France. The chapter shows how the psychological impact of including the lost provinces in the Tour itinerary, from 1906 through 1910 L'Auto persuaded the German authorities to allow the race to pass through Alsace-Lorraine. It explains that L'Auto's use of the Tour's itinerary to honor the sacrifices of so many French soldiers reflected a broader commemorative movement.

This essay argues for a broader conception of the ‘border’ in a contemporary, postcolonial context. French borders are increasingly diffuse geographically and conceptually. Multidirectional population flows, the effects of European border policies and the ideational borders that delineate between putative insiders and outsiders must all be taken into account. In strictly spatial terms, the contemporary borders of France and Europe are not simply physical lines (however fluid or permeable) where people cross or are compelled to stop, but zones, spaces of contact and back-and-forth, or a ‘borderland’, to use étienne Balibar’s concept. Drawing on historical studies of immigration and current border theory, the essay takes two primary approaches to borders: first as social and political concepts and then as physical spaces or zones. It then concludes examples of cinematic representations of border crossings and border experiences, taken from French, francophone and wider European film industries.

This chapter demonstrates how music signaled the end of the Moral Order and the beginning of a new political era. It describes how the republicans believed that art could influence a person's perception of the world and shape his/her behavior. It shows that music helped the French reconceive their history and led to the rise of a specifically republican narrative of French identity. It notes the changes that occurred in schools and at the opéra, which were due to the new values imposed by the republicans. The chapter also presents a reevaluation of luxury and the question of opéra, and looks at how the republicans tried to encourage national solidarity and form a sense of musical history.

This chapter examines the relevance of popular language for wider perceptions of what constitutes ‘popular culture’. It looks at a historical French centralism which, through policies that included education and military conscription, minimised regional variations in accent and vocabulary, and certainly separated these from linguistic markers of social class. The chapter also describes French Republicanism's powerful ideal of an inclusive, uplifting high-culture-for-all that resists any social levelling ‘down’ of language as of any other form of culture. It argues that linguistic standards come to be seen as a rule-system from which people deviate to the extent that they are not highly educated. Language production is central to the individual's presentation of her or his identity, and as such is intertwined, perhaps even more than choices of cultural consumption, with the complex, multiple weave of contemporary French identity.

This chapter explores how and why North African Jewish youth enrolled in government-funded Jewish day schools de-nationalized themselves, insisting that, despite their French citizenship, they were not and could not be French. The French government’s decision to publicly finance and then ignore Jewish day schools allowed for the physical and social isolation of many day school students. This isolation alienated day schools and their students from the wider French contexts in which they were embedded, thus creating a privileged space for narrating ethno-religious difference as the foundation for primordialized moral communities.

This chapter examines what is likely the increasingly prevalent ‘return to origins’ movie. A close look at the corpus of French-language road cinema of the past twenty years reveals a genre that actively reformulates the limits of national and European identity by (often literally) redrawing the map. The popularity of ‘return’ voyages is reflective of a desire to remap French and other national identities within the parameters of an enlarged European Union, within which physical and administrative frontiers have fallen. Return films demonstrate that it is now conceivable to be French, Belgian or Swiss and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity, whether Polish, Czech, Armenian, Spanish, Italian, or Maghrebi. The chapter begins with a discussion of how mobile and layered outlooks on citizenship fit into conception of French republicanism and European identity frameworks before zooming in on case studies from France and Switzerland. Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006, France), Ten’ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004, France/Morocco) and Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2005, Switzerland) furnish the examples.

This chapter explores the narrative of Catholic history in Canada, and particularly Québec. It begins with an overview of Québecois Catholicism under British rule and its adoption of many conventional stereotypes of American “ghetto Catholicism.” It then considers how, in the decades bookending World War I, French Canadians—les Canadiens—displayed a somewhat confounding self-identity in the face of Protestant British occupation. It also examines the impact of modernization, urbanization, ethnic diversity, and industrialization on French Canadian identity during the early twentieth century in Québec; how the francophone nativist rendering of history contributed to the construction of Québecois nationalism; and the perceived threat of Jews and Freemasons to the Canadien psyche. Finally, it discusses the shift in Québecois culture that paved the way for the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

This chapter addresses the question of where French Studies should go in the current era of financial constraints and cut-backs. It argues that twenty-first-century French Studies must foreground their interdisciplinary nature and remain open to examining and questioning their own inclusiveness. One suggestion is for French departments to turn their attention back to the origins of French identity and the French state, and simultaneously look at how those definitions have both limited and expanded that sense of identity and inclusiveness. In other words, they should look at the evolution of the notion of ‘Frenchness’ and how it has developed over the past 1000 years before turning to the contemporary, postcolonial period in which notions of Frenchness sometimes depend more on language use than on nationalism and on places far beyond the reach of Paris and the French state.

In chapter 1, Nancy resituates this debate on identity by recalling the economic and social factors playing in the question of identity and national identity. H argues that the current questions on identity are motivated by the socio-economic misery. In such a context, one is tempted to return to a micro-identity, itself the product of an exclusion from a national identity. Nancy makes the point that it is not the French identity that is threatened (as the Sarkozy government implied by that project of a debate on “national identity”); rather, one witnesses a disintegration of identity, a “de-identification of what is called ‘civilization’.” It is globalization that puts all identities into question, remixing them and recasting them. Traditional identities are thus exposed to a transformation, because they are caught in a global economic system that disrupts them.

This chapter compares the background, attitudes, values, and practices of French Jewish families who send their children to Jewish day schools with those of other such families who send their children to public (state) schools or non-Jewish private schools. Choice of school plays a pivotal role in the formation and expression of French Jewish identity. The issue of school choice and the struggle of French Jews to preserve their identity must be understood in the context of the long and rich history of the Jews in France. Throughout their many centuries in the country, the Jewish community waxed and waned as its members were subjected to periodic legal restrictions, punitive taxation, violent attacks, attempts at forced conversion, ‘blood libel’ trials, and expulsion orders. Despite all this, the Jewish communities in the region persevered; indeed, some of the most famous Torah scholars of all time came from France.

This chapter discusses two recent, and very different, films about illegal immigration to and through France: Le Havre (2011) by Aki Kaurismäki and Samba (2014) by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. This comparison between examples of alternative cinema (Le Havre) and mainstream cinema (Samba) is facilitated by the concept of cinéma-monde, which acts as a levelling field allowing all ‘accents’ as defined by Hamid Naficy – be they dominant or alternative – to be connected. Each of the two films selected for this analysis offer valuable mappings of France’s global situation. These mappings are revealed by an analysis of issues of language, accents, working practices, and mobility, and offer new ways of framing French identity.

This chapter returns to Paris at the end of the 1970s when punk arrived. French culture influenced the aesthetics of punk, and the French were a critical early audience for many punk groups. Despite Paris’s importance within the punk axis of New York–London–Paris, French punk never developed into a cohesive scene in comparison with the other cities. This was not due to the lack of groups that populated French clubs. Rather, for French punks, the notion of authenticity was rooted in the punk of Britain and the United States, and they could not agree on what defined the authentic, leading to a schism among them. This failure of French punk reveals how not only aesthetic forms but also conventions move through cultural globalization. This chapter chronicles that schism between 1975 and 1980 by examining fanzines, punk recordings, mainstream magazines, and cultural criticism written during the period.

In a change of pace from the previous two, chapter 3 focuses on one performer, Josephine Baker, and primarily on one show, her unlikely 1934 revival of Offenbach’s La Créole. Wrapping original and revised texts, reception and biography together in the operetta’s plot, it considers how the same tensions as characterized French reactions to “others” and their music in chapters 1 and 2 played themselves out on the level of theatrical narrative. La Créole, it argues, at once completed the construction, and tested the limits, of a complex redefinition of Baker as French. If most observers saw Baker’s transformation as an affirmation of France’s “civilizing mission,” the few dissenters paradoxically risked insisting on her difference in terms of an essentialized blackness. A comparison with other musical treatments of a similar story (Carmen, Madama Butterfly) and contemporary Baker films (Princesse Tam-Tam, Zouzou) reveal the unhappy logic of their argument. Recognizing both “savage” and “civilized” personas as witty performances relocates Baker’s agency. It may even help to move beyond fixed racial categories to dynamic cultural processes: “creolization.” While Baker was highly skilled at mediating audience expectations, however, this chapter concludes that she was never wholly able to escape them.