French Culture

Thirty Years War

(1618-48) A series of European wars that were partially a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict. It was primarily a batlte between France and their rivals the Hapsburg's, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire.

Seven Years War

(1756-1763 CE) Known also as the French and Indian war. It was the war between the French and their Indian allies and the English that proved the English to be the more dominant force of what was to be the United States both commercially and in terms of controlled regions.

Albert Camus

(1913-1960) -French existentialist who stated that in spite of the general absurdity of human life, individuals could make rational sense out of their own existence through meaningful personal decision making. The Plague, The Stranger

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

- The part of the sign Saussure calls the 'concept' or 'meaning' (mental impression/association of the 'thing') he named, 'signified.' The idea of what 'Google' is, for example, is signified. The part he calls the 'sound-image' (the mental 'linguistic sign' given to the 'thing') he named the 'signifier' - this is the sound Google's logo creates in our minds. - As Saussure explains, the connection between all 'signifiers' which are 'sound images' or 'linguistic signs' and what they are signifying - their signified object or concept - is arbitrary. In other words, there is not necessarily any logical connection between the two. Again, the word 'Google' exemplifies this well. Ferdinand de Saussure, became the inspiration for a new intellectual approach to the study of culture and society. His key insight displaced the study of language from the meaning of individual words to studying relations between words and their connection to the overall structure of the language.

French Avant-Garde Theatre (since 1880s)

-Nature of reality is the prime subject -Directly affected by the new scientific discoveries and advanced technologies of urbanization -Break from realism (Attracted to Cubism, futurism, expressionism, and other ways of rejecting realism) (Ideals that human beings should abandon the weaknesses and sentiments of the past) (Use of performing objects, such as puppets and other visual arts--playful drama with artifice, search for truth is meaningless) French theater first experienced a big dose of unconventionally with the emergence of cabaret in the cafés of Montmartre in the 1880s that had combined poetry, music, song and even early forms of animation in offbeat shows.

Voltaire (1694-1778)

1. French philosophe and voluminous author of essays and letters 2. Championed the enlightened principles of reason, progress, toleration, and individual liberty 3. Opposed superstition, intolerance, and ignorance 4. Criticized organized religion for perpetuating superstition and intolerance Voltaire (1694-1778), the original and archetypal "philosophe," was a combination of writer and agitator deter- mined to change the climate of opinion of his age from religion to science. His short novels, such as Candide, proved potent weapons against what he saw as the source of so much evil, the Catholic Church.

René Descartes (1596-1650)

1. French philosopher and mathematician 2. Used deductive reasoning from self-evident principles to reach scientific laws. Considered the founder of modern philosophy. His radical questioning of all previous philosophical assumptions is based on his method of systematic doubt.

French rap

1. borrow from A-A musical 2. Rappers and hip-hop artists adoped most attitudes, repertoires and musical performance practices from US model 3. adapted ideals and techniques of their models One of the most innovative and unique products of the new musical fer- ment has been French rap and hip-hop. First aired on French TV and radio, these creations of marginalized African Americans quickly resonated in the impoverished suburbs of France. Between 1990 and 1992, two compilations of French rap appeared, including Rapattitude, which was the spring board for most of the major artists of the last fifteen years. Today France is the second-largest market for rap and hip-hop in the world, with rappers such as MC Solar and groups such as IAM, both of whom have gold albums. Hard- core rap is represented by such groups as Suprême NTM, the last letters standing for a French translation of a well-known epithet. French rap and hip-hop have also produced the biggest sensation in the English-speaking world for French music in decades: Les Nubians. Known as an "Afropean hip-hop/R&B duo," these multiracial sisters come from the southwestern port of Bordeaux. With a French father who is an accountant and a mother from the African nation of Cameron, they have lived both in Bordeaux and amidst the civil war of Chad (where they went when their father donated his expertise for the Red Cross). In 1999 Americans bought almost 400,000 copies of their first album Princesses Nubiennes, and worldwide they sold just about one million. Indeed, their overseas success made their reputation in France.19 As French rap has developed and evolved, it has been synthesized with a wide variety of regional musics. Thus in southwestern France an Occitan rap has emerged, with such artists or groups as Claude Sicre, Ange B, from Toulouse, the Massilia Sound System, from Marseilles, and the Beur rap group Alliance Ethnik from the suburbs north of Paris. Finally, another Toulousian group, Zebda, has combined rap, rai, and reggae.

Conspiracy of the Equals

1796 plot led by Gracchus Babeuf which called for a return to many ideals of the Revolution and an overthrow of the Directory

Dreyfus Affair

1894 Falsely charged for supplying French secrets to the Germans. Coincidentally a jew. Found guilty and sent to Devil's Island. After 10 years there he was given a full pardon by President Loubet

François Mauriac (1885-1970)

1952, a Catholic writer who wrote a foreword to Night; therese desqueyroux; The Desert of Love. From the 1910s through the 1950s, French Catholics realized that much of the urban working-class population had so completely deserted the faith, the Church sent apostles into working-class districts to live the life of the poor. A literary renaissance among believing Catholics in France with philosophers, writers like Charles Peguy, Georges Bernanos, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Monier, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. These authors confronted all the major historical, philosophic, and cultural events and forces of the century: the modernization of French agriculture, the prevention of juvenile delinquency, existentialism, literary and artistic modernism, and war and the Holocaust.

Le baby-boom

1960s, became infatuated by US rock n roll and then later the arrival of the British Invasion, but also dedicated themselves to producing their own generation of rock stars (the yéyés). First generation raised more by media than by school. One result would be that cultural forms such as rock n roll would create new bonds among youths that would complicate, if not supplant, the bonds of social class. The arrival of the new era of dance was dramati- cally announced by the French baby boomers themselves in June 1963 (on what has become known at "the night of the nation") when a concert that was expected to draw 20,000, according to the popular radio show on Europe 1, Salut les copains, instead brought 100,000 to see the new teen idols Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, and Richard Anthony. On vivid display that night were the new dances of rock 'n' roll such as the twist. Later in the decade came the jerk, the mashed potato, the hully gully, and a French rock 'n' roll dance called le Madison.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

1960s; French philosopher who explained in broad philosophical terms that work of critic was said to be as much as a creative enterprise as literary or artistic creation itself. Deconstruction is generally presented via an analysis of specific texts. It seeks to expose, and then to subvert, the various binary oppositions that undergird our dominant ways of thinking—presence/absence, speech/writing, and so forth. Deconstruction has at least two aspects: literary and philosophical.

Realism

A 19th century artistic movement in which writers and painters sought to show life as it is rather than life as it should be. Flaubert

Book of Hours

A Christian religious book for private devotion containing prayers to be read at specified times of the day.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

A French man who believed that Human beings are naturally good & free & can rely on their instincts. Government should exist to protect common good, and be a democracy. As a believer in the plasticity of human nature, Rousseau holds that good laws make for good citizens. However, he also believes both that good laws can only be willed by good citizens and that, in order to be legitimate, they must be agreed upon by the assembly. Rousseau argued that the general will of the people could not be decided by elected representatives. He believed in a direct democracy in which everyone voted to express the general will and to make the laws of the land. ... Rousseau was rather vague on the mechanics of how his democracy would work. Julie and Emile helped launched romanticism and modern children's education. While his autobiography, The Confessions of Reveries of a Solitary Walker turned earlier spiritual quests for personal understanding in a more secular and psychological direction.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

A French philosophy professor who said that personal experiences and intuition were more important than rational thought and thinking. With Marcel Proust, they showed that the experience of time was vastly different from that of time as measured by the clock or by the calendar.

Spectral Music (1970s)

A French school of composition, founded by Grisey, which sought to create music out of timbre or tone color, rather than out of pitches and harmonies. By controlling instrumentation they tried to simulate overtone structures, seeking to control the overall sound that is generated. Their music is thus concerned with sound, itself. "Partiels" is such a piece and is "inspired" by the sound of a trombone.

Salon des Refusés

A famous exhibition in 1863, the 'Salon des Refuses', was commissioned by Napoleon III, the French Emperor, as a recourse for artists who had their works denied entry into the Academie des Beaux-Arts' annual 'Salon de Paris' that year. Amongst the mediocre rejects displayed, a few gems made their debut - including Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur 'Herbe" and Whistler's "Symphony in White, No. 1".

Popular Front

A government of all left-wing parties that took power in France in 1936 to enact social and economic reforms.

Oulipo (1960s)

A group of writer and mathematicians interested in subverting the ordinary routines of literary production in favor of chance or arbitrary limitations, such as avoiding certain letters or words longer or shorter than a certain size is known as Oulipo. Former surrealist Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec. Living life on the edge from the very start may have honed his creativity with literary experimenta- tion. For example, in his novel A Void (1969), Perec did not use the letter "E," and in one piece of less than 500 words he used only one vowel: A. He was also fond of palindromes—words or sentences that read the same back- wards or forwards. Indeed, he wrote what is considered to be the longest one ever, composed of over 5,000 words. In his most famous novel, Life: A User's Manual, Perec used the logic of the chess board to structure this tale of daily life in an apartment house. This novel is one of the most perceptive works on the emergence of French consumer culture during the 1950s and 1960s and details the central role that the modern home and consumer durables played in the lives of postwar France. Perec's exploration of consumer culture and urban daily life had been encouraged and inspired by Roland Barthes, who had himself pioneered the study of the symbology of daily life in his series Mythologies.

New Wave

A group of young French directors who came to prominence during the late 1950's. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard. The New Wave is a French art film movement which emerged in the late 1950s. The movement was characterized by its rejection of traditional filmmaking conventions in favor of experimentation and a spirit of iconoclasm. Also helped launch a new generation of actors, like Anouck Aimee, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve. Called for a film logic fretted from 19th century novelist procedures of clear ploy, storyline and resolution. Like Nouveau Roman of the 50s.

The Song of Roland

A heroic poem concerning the victory of Christians under the leadership of Charles Martel over Muslims at the Battle of Poitiers.

Critique of Jack Lang's cultural policy (1981-86, 1988-93)

A key charge was that Lang has slighted high culture in favor of contemporary popular culture but had also replaced education and edification through the study and appreciation of art and culture with a facile and glib notion of cultural tourism and ama- teurism. Creation, in short, had been sacrificed to celebration.

Postimpressionism

A late nineteenth-century style that relies on the Impressionist use of color and spontaneous brushwork but that employs these elements as expressive devices. Between 1880s and WWI, depicts Parisian, provincial or colonial life in the works of artists like Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Paris Commune of 1871

A leftist revolt against the national government after France was defeated by Prussia in 1871; crushed by the conservatives with much bloodshed.

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)

A nineteenth-century Polish romantic composer who spent most of his career in France. He is known for his expressive piano pieces; he composed almost exclusively for that instrument.

Naturalism (1860s)

A nineteenth-century literary movement that was an extension of realism and that claimed to portray life exactly as it was. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, Guy de Maupassant,, Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart, Alphone Daudet created a more sentimental variant on naturalism, especially in such famous stories as "The Last Lesson" in a school in newly annexed German Alsace.

Fauvism

A painting style developed by Henri Matisse in 1905 that formally lasted until 1908. The means "fierce animal." The style rejects Neo-Impressionism and expresses flat, bold, un-naturalistic color with impulsive brushwork; sometimes the blank canvas shows between brushstrokes.

Existentialism (1940-50s)

A philosophy based on the idea that people give meaning to their lives through their choices and actions. André Malraux (Man's Fate), Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea), Nathalie Sarraute (Tropisms), Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague)

French Religious Wars

A religious wars in France that started because of the Concordat of Bologna. This war was not only a religious war but a class war. It was between the Huguenots, who were Upper-class intellectuals who were Calvinist vs. the average poor French Catholics. The real fighting started after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and did not end until 15 years later when the Edict of Nantes was set into place.

Gothic

A style of architecture developed in northern France that spread throughout Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries. While the Gothic style can vary according to location, age, and type of building, it is often characterized by 5 key architectural elements: large stained glass windows, pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and ornate decoration. Give tangible form to the Capetian dynasty's claims of power and sanctity by encouraging a style of architecture that would become known as Gothic.

Neoclassicism (c. 1660-1798)

A style of art and architecture that emerged in the later 18th century. Part of a general revival of interest in classical cultures, Neoclassicism was characterized by the utilization of themes and styles from ancient Greece and Rome. Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779)

Cubism

A style of art in which the subject matter is portrayed by geometric forms, especially cubes Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, early 20th century

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

A third member of Sartre's inner circle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was also highly influential. Like Sartre and de Beauvoir, he was among the editors of Les Temps Moderns (Modern Times), the title inspired by the Charlie Chaplin movie, the journal founded by Sartre that would become one of the leading outlets for intellectual life in postwar France. Tragically, he died of cancer just as his productivity as a philosopher had become apparent. But in his books Sense and Nonsense (1948), Signs (1960), and Phenomenology of Percep- tion (1962) he refined Sartre's existentialism and anticipated the emergence of the philosophical movement of structuralism.

Celtic harp

A triangular, wire-strung instrument requiring great skill and long practice to play, associated with the Gaelic ruling class. Alain Stivell - Alan Stivell is a French, Breton and Celtic musician and singer, songwriter, recording artist, and master of the Celtic harp. From the early 1970s, he revived global interest in the Celtic harp and Celtic music as part of world music. The Celts are a collection of Indo-European peoples in parts of Europe and Anatolia identified by their use of the Celtic languages and other cultural similarities.

Types of French wine

AOC (wine of precise origin), AOVDQS (wine of high-quality origin), Vin de pays (country wine), and Vin de table (table wine). A growing consumption of higher-quality wine and a steady decline in overall consumption. Bordeaux and Burgundy for AOC wines

French cuisine during 20th century

After 1900, with the rise of the automobile, regional French cuisine achieved unprecedented prominence. The Michelin Guide (known also as the Guide Rouge), appeared after 1900 and evolved into a vast compendium of restaurant rankings. Adding to the luster of so-called gastronomadism was the work of Austin de Croze in Les Plats régionaux de France (1928) and Curnonsky in Le Tresor Gastronique de France (1933), which elaborated on the genius of regional cuisine, especially that of Lyon and the southwest. The 1931 Colonial Exposition exposed a large audience to the foods of the French Empire, especially those of Vietnam and North Africa, including couscous. Another monument of French gastronomy (culinary customs) was Prosper Montagne's (1865-1948) Larousse Gastronomique, an encyclopedia that covered the history and practice of eating restaurants and appeared just before WWII in 1938.

Engaged Literature

After WWII, Sartre was determined never again to be oblivious to politics. He developed the concept of engaged literature to call upon writers to not only bear witness to their age but also to change it. He would devote the rest of his life to causes such as trying to prevent or end Cold War, to dismantle France's colonial empire and to win equality and dignity for the working classes in developed and third world countries. Negritude

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Alain Resnais. The deep conversation between a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city. (Marguerite Duras)

Jazz

Almost from the moment of its creation in the United States, the new musi- cal form jazz was incorporated into compositions by French musicians. A turn of the century African American dance, the cakewalk, inspired Debussy, and this trend has continued ever since. During and after World War I African American soldiers or entertainers, either fighting in France or entertaining the troops, introduced a music that the French quickly took to their hearts. The arrival of Josephine Baker (1906-1975) in France in 1925 and the sen- sation she caused cemented this link, and Baker would eventually become a French citizen and icon. After WWII, trumpeter Boris Vian and American expatriates helped make the Saint-Germain district of Paris the new center of jazz.

First generation romantic writers (1820s)

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1868), in his Poetic Meditations (1820), saw the poet as replacing the theologian as the one best able to decipher the symbolic meaning of life. While Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) searched for the poetic essence in his work, Victor Hugo (1802-1885) began an extremely long and creative literary life that would be devoted to championing the cause of the un- derdog by attempting to develop a new poetic language drawn from the heart rather than from classical models.

Radio in France

Although France was not home to this invention, it was quickly part of this new technology as it developed before World War I. France continued to be among the leading radio countries during the Interwar period (1920-1930s). The start of World War II and France's stunning and immediate defeat ush- ered in a golden age of radio (initiated by broadcasts from Marshal Petain and Charles de Gaulle), which would last into the early 1960s (until the rise of television). Since the 1970s French radio has been deregulated and has become more diverse and is now also moving onto the Internet. Some of the most dramatic moments in French radio history occurred in the opening months of World War II, when war was not merely reported but also fought on the air waves. On June 17, as the Nazi military machine rolled across northern France and into Paris, one of the great heroes of the Great War, Marshal Petain, announced on the radio that he was taking charge of the government and asking Hitler for an armistice because the French cause was "hopeless." His most memorable phrase was the "making a gift of my person." All private broadcasting was immediately taken over by new Vichy "state" (as opposed to a republic) to be used in service of a "na- tional revolution." The day after Petain's speech his former subordinate and recently elevated general Charles de Gaulle's appealed over the BBC from London to the French to continue the fight and to look to the resources of the overseas French Empire as well as to England and eventually the United States. Throughout the war Vichy and the BBC would take the war to the airwaves. BBC devoted a daily half-hour show—the French speaking to the French—which not only provided moral support but also contained coded messages for resisters. In 1941, for example, Operation V called for the letter, victory, to be written or displayed in any manner possible in France. In 1944, De Gaulle, seeing the effects of propaganda of Vichy and fearing the domination of the US, kept radio in government's hands. Radios outside France still diffuse French programs.

TV in France

Although government-controlled television had presented a highly sanitized version of the Algerian war for liberation (1954-1962), during the 1965 elec- tions French television preformed its civic function objectively. All candidates received television time, and this exposure helped to push de Gaulle into a run-off election against Mitterrand. But government manipulation of televi- sion again became glaringly obvious three years later with the May 1968 events. None of the events appeared on television, and de Gaulle manipulated the medium, at the start of the events poorly but by the end brilliantly, to maintain power. Even so the staff and journalists of the ORFT went out on strike them- selves and demanded major changes in a system that they found oppressive. The two center-right successors after de Gaulle tried to liberalize French television. Georges Pompidou and Valery Giscard d'Estaing. During the 1980s, French channels imported many American content, as they were cheaper. The sensation at the start of 1980s was Dallas. Mitterrand deregulated TV and tried to limit American penetration (unsuccessful). TV5 was launched in 1984 to serve the Francophone community.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Amelie (2001)

Dadaism

An artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior and delighted in outrageous conduct. Marcel Duchamp

Impressionism (1860-1880s)

An artistic movement that sought to capture a momentary feel, or impression, of the piece they were drawing. How the eye comprehends light, historical record of the transformations in the popular culture of urban and rural life. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet (Olympia, shocking not that it contained nude women, which had long been acceptable in a mythological setting, but they were depicted in contemporary Parisian society with expressions not of serenity buy of either enjoyment or defiance), Mary Cassatt Impressionist painting became popular, despite the rejection of the establishment, in large part due to the growing American love of French culture and the new avant-garde artistic styles of Paris.

Baroque architecture

An artistic style of the seventeenth century characterized by complex forms, bold ornamentation, and contrasting elements. At the start of his reign a young Louis XIV brought the reigning genius of the new Italian ar- tistic style, the baroque, to Paris to add new additions to the Louvre. His stay was short due to his denigration of the French style. Nevertheless, the magisterial bust of the young king became the paradigm for royal portraiture for the next century (Versailles).

Second generation romantic writers (1830s)

An edgier and more combative poetry that proclaimed the power of the poet in particular and the artist in general to create a new and more genuine existence through their work than that found in an increasingly utilitarian middle-class society. The most important writers in this generation were Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), Gerard de Nerval (1811-1872), and Théo- phile Gauthier (1811-1872). Alexandre Dumas, Père (1802-1870) - Three Musketeers and the Count of Monte Cristo. Short-story writer Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870), most famous for Carmen. George Sand (1804-1876), whose cross-dressing, cigar-smoking and love affair with Chopin posted towards the counterculture of the 1960s. Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve (1804-1869), greatest literary critic of the age, embodying the romantic virtues of empathy and openness to new literary styles.

Public sphere

An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment, where the public came together to discuss important issues relating to society, economics, and politics. By the late eighteenth century, an emerging notion of a "public sphere" tied to the rise of newspapers, provincial academies, salons, and cafés and the growing publication of books and the rising rate of literacy brought the ideas of these "enlightened" philosophes.

Modernism (1900-1914)

Andre Gide (The Immoralist), Guillaume Apollinaire (poetry, Alcools), Marcel Proust (Swann's Way). Gide brought a psychological and sexual dimension to French literature by wrestling with his cultural heritage as a strict French Protestant and homosexuality. Apollinaire - poetic experimentation, popularized painters Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, helped shift the site of artistic creativity from the Right Bank hilltop of Montmartre to Montparnasse (1900-1930s). Helped coin the term surrealism for art that went beyond symbolism to get to the inner workings of artistic imagery.

André Malraux

André Malraux, in full André-Georges Malraux, (born Nov. 3, 1901, Paris, France—died Nov. 23, 1976, Paris), French novelist, art historian, and statesman who became an active supporter of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and, after de Gaulle was elected president in 1958, served for 10 years as France'sminister of cultural affairs. His major works include the novel La Condition humaine (1933; Man's Fate); Les Voix du silence (1951; The Voices of Silence), a history and philosophy of world art; and Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (1952-54; Museum Without Walls). Minister: conserve France's cultural heritage, promote cultural creation, bring cultural heritage to the world against American culture, clean the monuments, fund young filmmakers in the late 50s

Second renovation of French cuisine

Another great renovation occurred during the French Revolution. Al- though the first restaurants had opened before the great explosion in 1789, many great chefs moved from palaces to open restaurants in the aftermath of the aristocracy's decline. The middle classes of France increasingly made the consumption and discussion of food and drink a public affair not only in res- taurants but also in newspapers and books. Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière (1758-1837), wrote his Almanach des gourmands in 1803, Anthelme Brillat- Savarin's (1755-1826) Physiologie du Gout (Taste) appeared in 1826, and the highly influential chef Antonin Careme's (1784-1833) L'Art de la Cuisine Francaise au Dix-Neuvieme Siecle arrived in 1833. At the end of the nine- teenth and start of early twentieth centuries, Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) updated and simplified this cuisine for the growing hotel restaurant trade.

Aristide Bruant (1851-1925)

Aristide Bruant was a French cabaret singer, comedian, and nightclub owner. He is best known as the man in the red scarf and black cape featured on certain famous posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He has also been credited as the creator of the chanson réaliste musical genre. Caberet of Paris. 1900, lower class cafés and café concert (music hall), upper class salons, operas.

Art deco

Art style of the 1920s and 1930s based on modern materials and repetitive geometric patterns. It continued, though modified, the beaux arts tradition of ornamentation and Art Deco buildings did not break radically from the beaux arts tradition that Baron Haussmann had used in rebuilding much of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s (and that has influenced the city beautiful movement in the US).

Dancing during the 19th century

As the pace of innovation in popular dance increased, rural and provincial France looked ever more stagnant and dull. Traditional rural and local dances remained strong, especially early in the century. Only after mid-century, as a national railroad network connected the country more closely together and as provincial towns increased the number of theatres, operas, and café con- certs, did dances become more standardized around France, and the qua- drille, polka, and waltz replaced such traditional rural and local dances as the branle, the rigadoon, and the gavotte. A few regions, however, kept their traditional dances, for example, the bourrée in Auvers, the Sardane in the Basque country and the farandole in Provence.

Renovation of French cuisine after modernization during the 1970s

As was the case before the war, Lyon remained a gastronomic powerhouse, pro- ducing Mother Brazier (who would help train one of the nouvelle cuisine's most famous chefs, Paul Bocuse). Another chef in nearby Vienne, Fernand Point, would also train many of the chefs who would become part of this new school. Moreover, from the early 1950s, the new medium of television played a vital role in renovating cuisines bourgeois (cooking in the home). Chefs such as Raymond Oliver, the owner of Le Grand Vefour in the Palais Royal of Paris, became household fixtures as they showed French housewives new recipes and cooking styles. Within a year of the dramatic near-revolution of May-June 1968, in March 1969, H. Gault and C. Millau brought out their Le Nouveau Guide. By 1972 they were lauding what quickly became known as "nouvelle cuisine." This new movement took advantage of postwar advances in farming and re- frigeration by stressing freshness and the variety of French regional products. Advances in ovens an steamers, influence of Japan and China, artistic presentation of small portions.

Asterix

Asterix or The Adventures of Asterix is a bande dessinée series about Gaulish warriors, who have adventures and fight the Roman Republic during the era of Julius Caesar. The series first appeared in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote on 29 October 1959. Comics in France have explored political and social questions much more freely than most of their American counterparts. They flourished in the aftermath of May 1968 and have remained a staple of French literature ever since.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

At the Moulin Rouge Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (24 November 1864 - 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant, and provocative images of the modern, sometimes decadent, affairs of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, with Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.

Labor Day (Fête du premier mai)

Back on 1 May 1560, King Charles IX of France was presented with lily of the valley ("muguet" in French) flowers as a lucky charm. The King appreciated the gift so much that he decided to gift the flowers to every lady of his court every year on 1 May. This gesture started to become more commonplace at the beginning of the 20th century with men presenting lily of the valley flowers to women to express their affection. These days, it has become custom to give a sprig of these flowers as a token of appreciation to close friends and family members on 1er mai. For one day each year, the French government allows the tax-free sale of lily of the valley flowers on the street to promote this tradition and ensure its continuation. The day also became a public holiday, formally known as La Fête du Travail (Labour Day), back in 1948. Since then, 1er mai has also been an opportunity for trade unions and to campaign for and celebrate workers' rights and other social issues.

Bernard Pivot

Bernard Pivot OC CQ is a French journalist, interviewer and host of cultural television programmes. He has been Chairman of the Académie Goncourt since 2014. Innovator of the television book review.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880)

Born German, but French most of his life The Tales of Hoffman, Orpheus in the Underworld--containing The Can-Can--, Robinson Crusoe

cafés

Brought to France and Europe by Turkish diplomats and businessmen in the 16th and 17th centuries

Guillaume Dufay

Burgundian composer who "ended" the Medieval age musically and began the "Renaissance era." Introduced the intervals of the 3rd and 6th as harmonic elements.

Charles-Louis Havas (1783-1858)

But the most durable innovation and institution created by French jour- nalists in this period was by Charles-Louis Havas. In 1835 he created the first international news agency. This filled an important need: a means by which small regional papers could have access to major stories. In essence Havas became the "father of global journalism" and the creator of the first real journalistic monopoly in France (which lagged on this score behind the Anglo-American world). In another innovation, in 1852 Havas created an advertising arm of his international agency. Here again he was way ahead of most French newspaper owners, who did not include as much advertising as found elsewhere. One area in which Havas lagged in innovations was in shifting from carrier pigeons (between London, Paris, and Brussels) to the telegraph. (Here one of his former employees, Paul Julius Reuter, would be the great innovator, first in Germany and then in London.)

The Mandarins (1954)

By Simone de Beauvoir. This novel traced, in fictional form, the intricate literary, political and personal lives of a literary intellectual group that was very similar to the one to which Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir belonged. In this novel, as in others, she did not portray women as what she hoped they would become - their own autonomous subjects free of male domination - but as they were in a sexist society dominated by middle-class morality.

pastis

By legal definition, pastis is described as an anise-flavored spirit that contains additional flavor of licorice root, contains less than 100 grams/l sugar, and is bottled at a minimum of 40% ABV (pastis) or 45% ABV (pastis de Marseille). Popularized during the 1930s. People started to enjoy more leisure and vacation, but during and after WWII, leisure reduced and even cafés diminished.

Francophone Literature

By the 1970s the already-developing literature in French produced around the world among French speakers was achieving growing prominence. The geographic and cultural range of this literature is fantastic: from the Antilles in the Caribbean, to West, Central, and North Africa, the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Vietnam, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland, and France. Pioneers of Francophonie included the creators of the negritude movement among Afri- can students and the African diasporas who attended college in Paris during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They included Léopold Sédar Senghor, from Senegal, later president when it became an independent nation, Aimé Césaire from the Antilles, and León Damas from French Guyana. In essence they asserted their identity as Africans within the French language and explored historically, literarily, and linguistically the paradoxes and possibilities of this dual identity, "assimilating, not being assimilated."

Dancing during the 20th century

By the late 1960s French ballet and modern dance had clearly been rejuve- nated, but over the next 20 years they would gain unprecedented popularity and exposure across France. The renaissance of French dancing really began in earnest after May 1968 when an interest in almost every form of dance accelerated. Inspired by the American counterculture, the growing popular- ity of modern dance, and interest in the religions and martial arts of Asia, student radicals in particular and French youth culture in general put a new emphasis on the body and freedom of movement. Moreover, as part of an attempt to spread culture through the provinces, dance companies were set up in provincial cities. At the same time, in 1969, the first Choreographic Festival at Bagnolet (a suburb of Paris) occurred. Since this date winning its annual prize has become a major honor in the world of dance. Socialist party in 1981 gave more funding to dancing. Recent choreographers have incorporated techno music into their programs shows the ever-growing contact between different levels of French dance. The popularity of raves - in essence large free-form music and dance parties often with techno or hip-hop music, has been growing since the late 1980s. As with so many earlier forms of popular culture, raves began in the US (Detroit).

Cuisine of Center of France

Cattle of Charlolais are considered France's best, home of beef burgundy. Lyon competes with Paris for the right to call itself the capital of French cuisine. The Massif Central's plateau also features hearty dishes like dried cod, aligot (pureed potatoes with cheese), truffled (sautéed potatoes with melted cheese and cream), Potee Auvergne (pork and cabbage in bouillon). These dishes began as staples of the working class steadily moved upscale.

1889 World's Fair

Celebration of the centennial of the French Revolution and the secular scientific culture that was emerging. The Eiffel Tower was meant to show that republican France could produce worthy monuments to compare with anything the Catholic Church or the monarchy had produced (Third Republic).

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

Central pillar of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "the unconscious is structured like a language", which he substantiates in the essay The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious. Lacan draws on Saussure and emphasizes that meaning is a network of differences.

Alain Ducasse

Chef of twenty-plus restaurants worldwide. His restaurants display eclecticism (nouvelle cuisine, regional dishes, local ingredients, Asian, North African and American influences) and embrace globalization.

E. J. Marey (1830-1904)

Cinema's origins are found primarily in three nations: US, England, France. The role of Edison is well known. E. J. Marey, a French doctor, created the first motion picture made with a single camera during the 1880s, in the course of his study of motion.

Colette (1873-1954)

Colette's popular novels concerning the coming-of-age and sexual exploits of young women (with men and women) mark an important development in the emergence of French literary feminism. Claudine

Dancing

Complex history over the past 50 years. After soccer, the second most popular physical activity. Throughout history, dance has been a means by which local communities display their unity and solidarity. On the other hand, different social classes have used dance as a means of distinguishing themselves from the others. Louis XIV is a dancer, and good dancing is seen as a genetic expression which commoners don't possess.

Tour de France

Created by journalist Henri Desgrange in 1903, this annual event cover a 4800km course across France over a three-week period.

Baron Haussmann

Creative city planner used by Napoleon III to improve and beautify Paris. Boulevardes/wide avenues were established (facilitated military movement). Public squares were constructed, broad vistas, Place de L'Opera, sewers, water supply, etc. This planning and improvement stimulated business and increased employment in Paris.

Cuisine of Southeast (Marseille, Savoy)

Cuisine of olive oil, citruses and garlic. Marseille fish stew (bouillabaisse), fondue of Savoy, chicken of Bresse (AOC) and poulet à la crème Bresse, Nice pissaladiere tart (onion olive oil and anchovies), island of Corsica (fiadone, a flourless cheese and lemon cake)

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

Cultural Capital: several forms of capital or social currency stem from our membership in different groups Since 1991 liberalism has not achieved dominance in French thought. Problems with an increasingly global marketplace and the demands to cut the French welfare state to make the nation more competitive within Europe and the world have led to a vigorous response from both establishment intellectuals and new social movements. Although long a central thinker in French sociology, Pierre Bourdieu became, in the last decade of his life (1992- 2002), one of the most eloquent defenders of European social democracy. Humanity, not economic efficiency, should be the guiding value in French society.

Influence of the Church from the Middle Ages to 18th Century

Daily life was organized tightly by the Catholic Church through the eighteenth century. Church bells in both country and city announced the daily and weekly pattern of religious observance, and the calendar of saint's days and religious feasts in the Catholic Church created a religious rhythm to the year and for life. The enforced public display of religion is one reason why Jews in France, as in most of Europe, were restricted to living in ghet- tos. Although Protestantism would be tolerated after the end of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the Edict of Nantes that granted such tolera- tion mainly applied to Protestant fortified cites in which the reformed faith created its own daily routine. One reason Louis XIV revoked the Edict was to ensure that no aspect of French life would escape his control and that it moved to the rhythms he demanded.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Debussy's favorite poet and founder of poetic Symbolism; author of the poem "Afternoon of a Faun," that so inspired Debussy. Symbolism strives for impression of feelings

Education in the Third Republic

Devoted to weaning the peasants from Catholicism and the workers from socialism. French nationalism and the benefits of a republican society were emphasized. However, education in late 19th and early 20th centuries did not lead to much democratization, since few (primarily sons), of the lower classes could go to high schools. Schools focus on basic skills of reading, writing and national culture, not on elite culture or advanced math/science.

In 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy required that bishops in France be appointed by the pope.

Divisive, it made the Catholic priests swear allegiance to the French state, de-christianize. Napoleon brought much of this conflict to an end when he signed a concordat with the pope in July 1801.

French filmmaking during the 1930s

During the 1930s French cinema entered a complex and highly creative period. At the start of the decade the nation's film industry found itself play- ing catch-up. Talking pictures came late to France, after both the United States and Germany had pioneered this new process. As a result French di- rectors frequently went either to Hollywood or Berlin during the early sound period to do their films. In the early years of French talking cinema, dramas predominated, to be followed at the end of the decade by the school of poetic realism that most critics consider the classic, indeed, golden age of French cinema. The seeming contradiction in the term poetic realism captures well an agonizing age, on the verge of another war, that struggled between the political extremism of communism and fascism. By 1935, due to rising Nazism and Great Depression, a politically engaged cinema emerged. Cinema Liberté, created to defend French cinema amid the economic crisis. The most characteristic mood in French cinema by the second half of the 1930s, found abundantly in "poetic realism," was a hopeful but resigned fatal- ism. An extraordinarily talented cluster of directors emerged including Marcel Carné, Jean Vigo, Jean Gremillon, Jacques Feyder and Julien Duvivier and perhaps the greatest screen writer in French cinema history, Jacques Prevert. Most of their movies expertly explore the physical and sociological shadows and corners of French society, especially of working-class neighborhoods. Many films took up such dark themes as night and fog. These directors could draw upon some of the first and greatest of French movie stars, Jean Gabin, the archetypical worker, and Arletty, the quintessential female seductress.

Tanguy Law (1850)

During the Second Empire (1852-1870), the law required writers to sign their names to articles, poets and novelists became more infatuated with the press as a means of enhancing their reputation.

Moulin rouge

During the early nineteenth century, as the middle classes gained power and society in general, but not in equal measure, became wealthier, dancing became both more pervasive and more stratified. At the top of the dancing pyramid-were aristocratic dances, still almost always held in aristocratic town houses. These balls took many forms: costumed or masked, as well as offi- cial governmental and charity balls. Middle-class dances, often held in halls rented for the purpose, were usually based on occupational, associational, or regional affiliation. University students had their own balls, the most dis- tinctive being the ones organized by Beau Arts students at the end of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century also witnessed a proliferation of commercial dancing halls such as the Bal Mabille and Bal Bullier, on the Left Bank of Paris, and the Bal Moulin Rouge and the Bal du Moulin de la Galette, both on the north side of the city. These latter two balls have become world famous due to their depiction in the paintings of Jean Renoir and Paul Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. For the most part the clientele of these two balls ranged from middle to lower middle class. But dance halls in cafés and taverns on the outskirts of Paris, frequented primarily by the working class, acquired a criminal reputation.

Saint German des Pres

During the occupation, this neighborhood became a cauldron of cultural activity.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) - The Wretched of the Earth

Earliest significant theorist of black identity - Justifies black revolution vs. white society on basis of Existentialism and Marxism. Raised in the Caribbean, a partisan in the Algerian liberation struggle (1954-1962)

Montparnasse 1920

Eclipsed Montmartre as the center of the artistic avant-garde. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso are among the café frequenters.

French Cinema During WWII and Occupation

Emerged stronger from Nazi occupation. American films were banned, provided refuge for people, surprisingly free from Nazi propaganda unlike press and radio. The 1930s poetic realism was censored, working class and Nazi representations were not allowed. But films in general were oriented to entertainment rather than political mobilization.

Andre Antoine (1858-1943)

Emerging theatrical avant-garde. French theater must take account of the innovative new naturalistic drama emerging in Scandinavia. Realistic style of novelists like Zola and Leo Tolstoy must be brought to stage. He would stage plays or adaptations of novels at this Theatre Libre from 1887. Theater as a place to focus on the message of the play rather than to see and socialize with others in the audience.

Dennis Diderot (1713-1784)

Encyclopedie, summing up the Enlightenment viewpoint on virtually every subject

The Directory

Established after the Reign of Terror / National Convention; a five man group as the executive branch (conservative) of the country; incompetent and corrupt, only lasted for 4 years.

Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1790

Established by National Assembly in dealing with issue of Church. Clergy to be elected by the 50,000 electors. Protestants, Jews and agnostics could take part. Number of diocese reduced from 130 to 83 and were to be coterminous with the new departements. No papal approval of appointments was necessary. State was to pay salaries. Abuses such as pluralism were ended. Significance - many did not approve and became counterrevolutionaries. Created big division. Left the Catholic laity terrified and puzzled. Many of peasantry were still devoutly catholic and found this aspect of revolution difficult to accept.

Cannes Film Festival

Established in France, it was the center of the international film industry which eventually became one of the world's largest market for film. Started in 1946

Action Française

Extreme right/royalists in France. Anti-republican. Acted principally outside the Chamber of Deputies as a militant and noisy pressure group. (They were somewhat Fascist - something of an imitation of the groups gaining power in Italy and Germany). A journal started during the Dreyfus Affair, argued that only a return to French classical civilization (the age of Louis XIV) could restore France to greatness.

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923)

Famous 19th century French actress. Known for her extravagant behavior. Slept in a coffin in order to connect with her tragic characters. Played Hamlet and made one of the earliest silent films.

Madame de Stael (1766-1817)

Feminist pioneer, first to detail the new romantic literary movement in Germany, sustain salon life

Showing of films

Films had first been shown not only in cafes but also at fair grounds and amusement parks, as well as in theatres and music halls and café concerts. Often individuals peered into nickelodeon machines permit- ting only one viewer at a time. After 1907, cinemas built specifically to show films, rather than converted from theaters, erupted across Paris and France. By 1918, France had 1,444 cinemas. Two years after the end of World War I (1920), the number had jumped to 2,400. By 1929, this number almost doubled to 4,200, but then by 1937, it declined to 3,700 towards the end of the Great Depression.2 With their elaborate architecture and ornamentation (often recalling exotic locations such as Muslim palaces and Asian temples) and large organs (especially during the silent era) these spaces truly became the magic and dream spaces of modern secular life.

French Avant-Garde Filmmaking (1920s)

Focuses on human psychology and creatively fused cinematic technique and avant-garde painting, surrealist. Germaine Dulac, René Clair

System of universal free public education

Following the Revolution, education is made to be more secular and scientific. Established by the Third Republic to counter the traditional role of the Church. Secular and more scientific

Couscous

Food that looks like small pellets of pasta made from wheat. Used in North African and Southwest Asian cooking.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Foucault uses the term 'power/knowledge' to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and 'truth': ... 'Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. History of Sexuality

French film situation during early 20th century

France dominated world cinema production and distribution: by 1910 two-thirds of the world's cinema production occurred in France. WWI changed film industry. After WWI, French cinema dethroned and Hollywood rose. the 1920s became the first great age of the French art form and initiated modern film criticism. The literary and artistic avant-garde, es- pecially drawing upon the painting schools of impressionism through expres- sionism along with the new surrealist movement and new decorative school that would become known as art deco, played a central role in French cinema. While World War I may have radicalized all aspects of culture, the conflict produced great vigilance in the French government. In 1919 the government imposed new regulations on the film industry, which often resulted in inno- vative films being banned.

Women equality today

France has high women labor-force participation rate and highest birthrate in Europe.

Music in France

France has produced composers of consequence, especially Guillaume de Machaut in the Middle Ages and Guillaume Dufray in the Renaissance. Composers since the 17th century include Louis Couperin (1626-1651), Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) and Claude Debussy (1862-1918). In the interwar and immediate postwar periods, France produced jazz musicians such as Django Reinhardt and Stephen Grappelli and popular singers such as Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Yves Montand, who gained and have retained an international reputation. Although George Brassens, Leo Ferre, and Jacques Brel never attained such an international reputation, they did achieve an unprecedented statue in literary circles and high culture for their lyrics. Since the 1990s, French techno, known as French Touch, rap, rai (a fusion of North African and French music), and African (these latter often lumped under the term World Music) have gained prominence.

Characteristics of French cuisine

France is the only nation that spans both norther and southern Europe and it contains an extraordinary richness in local dietary practices. At the same time, the long tradition of a strong centralized state has ensured an overall coherence through a steady interaction between its capital and its diverse hinterlands.

French Renaissance Architecture

Francis I built a chateau that introduced the Italian Renaissance style to France. Across the following century, the French aristocracy pioneered a distinctive French architectural style found especially in the chateaus of the Loire Valley.

Les Quatre-cents Coups (400 Blows)

François Truffaut, France, 1959 The 400 Blows, French Les Quatre Cents Coups, French film drama, released in 1959, that defined the New Wave cinema movement created by young French directors in the late 1950s and '60s. It was the first film in François Truffaut's acclaimed Antoine Doinel series, which followed a character widely considered to be the director's alter ego. The somewhat autobiographical tale follows 12-year-old Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) as he tries to thrive despite his distant mother and father. Compounding his problems are the schools and courts that seem to do more harm than good for troubled youths. As Doinel drifts into petty crime, the adults around him take sterner measures, only to aggravate the worst impulses of a child who is not inherently bad.

Free France Movement

Free French, French Françaises Libres, in World War II (1939-45), members of a movement for the continuation of warfare against Germany after the military collapse of Metropolitan France in the summer of 1940. Charles de Gaulle

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

French Impressionistic music composer; won the Prix de Rome (award given by the French government) Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun; LaMer In the late nineteenth century, French classical music took an especially innovative turn with the impressionism of Claude Debussy and the more classically restrained but later jazz-inflected work of Maurice Ravel. Debussy's wide range of music production, from operas to concert tone poems, piano, song, and chamber music, broke not only with late romanticism after the fashion of Wagner but also opened Western music to Asian influences from Japan and Indonesia. Along with Igor Stravinsky, another expatriate composer who made his home in Paris before World War I, and Arnold Schoenberg, Debussy is one of the great innovators of modern music with its break from traditional notions of harmony, chordal progression, and melody.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721)

French artist during the rococo style; Embarkation for Cythera is one of his rococo masterpieces. The notable elements that make Watteau'sstyle unique are the combination of his lofty content and brightly colored landscapes.

Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665)

French classical painter who painted the Rape of the Sabine Women, known as the greatest French painter of the 17th century. Claude Lorrain (1600-1682)

Jacques Chirac (1932-2019)

French conservative president elected in 1995 to 2007; pursued a plan of sending illegal immigrants back to their home countries; an outspoken opponent of the US invasion of Iraq.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

French critic and theorist - basic premise is around the replacement of the real with signs of the real In Simulacra and Simulation and other works he argued that modern media and technology had supplanted ordinary reality and put in its place a hyperreality. A good example, he noted, was how the ancient cave paintings as Lascaux in the South of France had been deemed too fragile for tourists, so a virtually exact copy, a Lascaux II, had been built right next to the original.

Jose Bové

French farmer, anti-globalization activist, drove his truck through the windows of a McDonald's to protest the usage of hormone-fed beef and genetically modified foods (2002). Since then, the movement has shifted from being anti global to a more positive alternative vision of global civilization. Slow Food movement: strives to protect biodiversity and sustain local food production and traditional cuisines through the creation of vegetable gardens in schools and the promotion of restaurants that eschew fast food and high prices.

Jean Vigo (1905-1934)

French film director who helped establish poetic realism in film in the 1930's and was a posthumous influence on the French New Wave. Directed "Zero for Conduct." - regarded as one of the finest achievements of French cinema for its searing and haunting portrayal of the inhumanity of the French school system. L'Atalante: Capricious small-town girl Juliette (Dita Parlo) and barge captain Jean (Jean Dasté) marry after a whirlwind courtship, and she comes to live aboard his boat, L'Atalante. As they make their way down the Seine, Jean grows weary of Juliette's flirtations with his all-male crew, and Juliette longs to escape the monotony of the boat and experience the excitement of a big city. When she steals away to Paris by herself, her husband begins to think their marriage was a mistake.

Cinema du look (1980s)

French film genre which arose with Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva in 1981, designating youth-oriented films with high production values. The 'look' of the cinema du look refers to the films' high investment in non-naturalistic, self-conscious aesthetics, notably intense colors and lighting effects. Took inspiration now from Marxism but from the mercantile world of advertising and fashion. Luc Besson's film Subway (1984), shot mostly in the Paris metro and portraying a world of punk-rock music that is both violent and mercenary. At this point, we are a long way from Carné's poetic realism; aesthetics is now driven by technology, not artistry.

Nouvelle cuisine

French for "new cooking"; a mid-20th-century movement away from many classic cuisine principles and toward a lighter cuisine based on natural flavors, shortened cooking times and innovative combinations. Immigrants from former French colonies from the Caribbean to Algeria to Vietnam brought their distinctive cuisines.

French Touch

French house, also known as French touch, filter house and tekfunk, is a style of house music originally produced by French musicians in the 1990s. It was a popular strand of the late 1990s and 2000s European dance music scene and a form of Euro disco.

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)

French literature languished during the periods of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, during the Revolutionary era, writers like Chateaubriand heralded the return of Christianity to intellectual favor, and he thus anticipated the Restoration with his Genius of Christianity and helped consolidate an age of romantic inner self-disclosure with his Memories beyond the Grave.

George Méliès (1861-1938)

French magician considered to be the "Father of Movie Special Effects". Antithesis of Lumières Brothers. The first real movie director. "Trip to the Moon" (1902), inspired by Jules Verne's novel. He also pioneered in contemporary historical documentaries with a movie on the ongoing Dreyfus Affair (1899). He never used mobile cameras during a time when others were discovering that a mobile camera brought greater excitement to the new medium.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

French mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions in both fields. He is best known for his work with hydrostatic forces and fluids and invented the hydraulic press and the syringe (the SI unit of pressure is named after him: Pascal). Pensées

Jacques Louis David (1748-1825)

French painter known for his classicism and his commitment to the ideals of the French Revolution. His works include The Oath of the Horatii (17850 and The Death of Marat (1793).

Gustave Courbet

French painter noted for his realistic depiction of everyday scenes (1819-1877).

Nicolas Poussin

French painter. Founder and greatest practitioner of 17th century French classicism. Poussin's work embodies the virtues of clarity, logic, and order. 1594- 1665.

Tristan Tzara

French poet (born in Romania) who was one of the cofounders of the Dada movement (1896-1963). A type of anti-art that intentionally means little more than the rhyme in a children's game and signals that notions of cultural hierarchy must be overturned.

Guillaume Apollinaire

French poet was closely associated with the cubists, particularly PICASSO, and was involved in a rivalry with MARINETTI. ___ had championed *African sculpture*, defined the principles of cubist painting and literature, and once observed that "catalogs, posters, advertisements of all types, believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch." His unique contribution to graphic design was the 1918 publication of a book entitled *Calligrammes*, poems in which the letterforms are arranged to form a visual design, figure, or pictograph. In these poems he explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting, introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence-bound typography of the printed page. cubist form of poetry Max Jacob

Philippe Pétain

General who assumed power of the French government after its fall, signed a peace treaty with Germany, and became the leader of Vichy France. (Marchal, hero of the Battle of Verdun in WWI). France Right viewed him as a possibility to transform culture to their own image. Parisian culture, along with Jews, Freemasons, and café owners and alcohol producers were targeted. Catholicism and traditional rural life became official models for French regeneration. Ecole des Beaux Arts, instead of the avant-garde, again became the approved model for high culture. The trio of republican values - liberty, equality, fraternity - enshrined since the French Revolution of 1789 were replaced by a new trio - work, family and country.

La Nouvelle Revue Française (1908)

Gide helped found this journal, the most influential journal for most of 20th century. One great error was to reject Proust's first volume. Proust explored regions of memory, time, and experience to an unprecedented degree, completing what the French philosopher Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud were doing at the same time.

Fifth Republic

Government established in France in October 1958 by De Gaulle. The First Republic lasted from 1793 to 1804; the Second, from 1848 to 1852; the Third from 1875 to 1945; and the Fourth, from 1946 to 1958.

Montesquieu (1689-1755)

He wrote The Persian Letters (1721) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748) and tried to use scientific method to find natural laws that govern the social and political relationships of human beings. He believed in the separation of powers and identified three types of governments: republics, despotism, and monarchies. He was famous for his satire and wit in his works.

Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)

He wrote about developing everyday habits that lead to awareness of God and acting out of love for God. Known as "The Gentleman Saint," his spirit of optimism, hope, freedom confidence in God's love.

resistance movement

Helped the allies and Charles de Gaulle and the French army unite to liberate Paris and France. Cultural democratization and decentralization, originated from the Popular Front.

Louis Delluc (1890-1924)

Impressionist critic and theorist; used inherited money and other assistance to support the tiny companies that produced low budget films; created film journal "Le Film". Important figure in post WWI film industry. La femme de null part and Fièvre. Created the word cinéaste for those who followed and critiqued films. Prix Louis Delluc to honor his role in film development.

French art

In art we can see this especially since the French Revolution, which cre- ated the world's first modern museums, through the romantic period in lit- erature and art, which emphasized the virtues of the people, to the modernist school, with such figures as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, who radically expanded the notion of art to include everyday objects. French photographers across the last century have been especially skilled at portraying the drama and sentiment of French daily life, and their work has thus complemented that of these painters. After World War I, France produced one of the greatest mod- ern architects, Le Corbusier, who reoriented architecture away from grandeur and luxury and toward the concept of "machines" for living. After the twenti- eth century's second horrible war, postwar governments spent unprecedented amounts of capital not only to solve France's centuries-long housing crisis but also to inject new forms of cultural animation into urban life. At the same time, recent trends in art have increasingly focused on environments and thus have helped spur the intersection of culture and everyday life. Whereas French culture in the Old Regime focused on elite patronage, and in the long century of republican consolidation (1789-1981) on the artistic creation, we may be moving into an era in which consumer enjoyment takes center stage in French culture.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

In the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss did fieldwork with the Nambikwara people of Brazil, which formed the basis for his thesis on "The Elementary Structures of Kinship." He held the chair in social anthropology at the Collèege de France from 1959 to 1982, during which time he published such books as The Savage Mind and a tetralogy about world mythology whose volumes include The Raw and the Cooked. He pioneered in applying the structuralist methods of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology, which led him to study cultures as sets of binary oppositions.

Press after WWII

In the early twenty-first century the French press presents a complex por- trait. On the one hand the Parisian press still retains much cachet, both do- mestic and international, but has seen its press runs steadily fall. Increasingly the regional press, catering to local concerns, dominates. On the other hand, the rise of free newspapers and the increasing recourse papers have had to In- ternet sites offers hope for future increases in press distribution. (These points will be further discussed shortly.) In 2004 the French press had its biggest drop in sales since World War II. This affected the Paris press in particular. Le Monde saw its circulation drop by 4.1 percent (to a circulation of 330,768). Le Figaro's drop was slightly less: 3.1 percent (to 329,721). Liberation and France Soir fell by even greater rates: 7.8 percent for the former and 11.6 percent for the latter. On the contrary, the Paris regional edition of Le Parisian (Aujourd'hui) increased its circulation by 3.1 percent, the financial Les Echos by 2.1 percent, and the Communist daily L'Humanite and the Catholic La Croix by smaller percentages. These latter papers have seen increases in circulation recently also after languishing during the 1990s. The national sports daily, L'Equipe, however, had the most impressive increase, raising its circulation by 8.6 percent (with 355,135 daily readers). Free newspapers are attractive because of easy access, attractively laid-out short articles, especially on cultural issues and coming events. Magazines have much bigger circulation than newspapers, attract more ads and are delivered rather than bought.

French techno

In the mid-1990s French musicians made a major mark in techno (a new wave of electronic music with roots in disco). French techno achieved so much success, especially in England, that this style has become known by the title be- stowed by English music critics: French touch. While some musicians in this movement originate from the poorer suburbs around Paris, such as Bagnolet, most come from affluent suburbs such as Versailles. Saint-Germain, Daft Punk, DJ Cam, Cassius, Air, Mr. Oizo, Bob Sinclair and Modjo (disco, funk, new wave and rock). Tied to new forms of entertainment, sociability, youth culture of the 1990s like raves and free parties. Awarded for their contributions to the diffusion of French culture.

Surrealism (1920-1950s)

Interwar period, Andre Breton, a reinvigoration of art through a rejection of middle-class notions of morality and beauty (often held to be the cause of WWI) and an embrace of the emancipator impulses to be found in the human unconscious (after Freud) and the cause of the workers and the peoples of Africa and Asia oppressed by European colonialism (after Marxism and Russian Revolution). The human unconscious was the ultimate source of artistic creativity and could be tapped by free association by writers and artists. Raymond Queneau (Exercises in Style), François Mauriac (Thérèse), Céline (Journey into the End of Night). Céline was the first to incorporate working-class slang into a major novel and combined this stylistic innovation with a deft touch for atmospheric description that produced a forlorn feeling about the fate of modern society. Céline's despair would end in his becoming a fascist and collaborationist during WWII.

Années folles (Crazy Years of 1920s)

It was coined to describe the rich social, artistic, and cultural collaborations of the period. The same period is also referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age in the United States. In Germany, it is sometimes referred to as the Golden Twenties because of the economic boom that followed World War I. Paris during the 1920s would reach the zenith of its cultural influence over the world, including African American jazz and Latin American dances such as the tango. One of the most enduring stars and symbols of this age was the African American expatriate dancer and singer Josephine Baker.

Jacques Copeau (1879-1949)

Jacques Copeau (1879-1949), steeped in the origins of theatre in the Greek chorus, the medieval mystery plays, and the street performance of the multitalented Italian Renaissance Comedia dell'arte, set out to cleanse French theatre and to restore the basic human energies animating theatre. From 1913 to 1924 he directed a theatre on the Left Bank of Paris, the Vieux-Colombier. He had the theatre's rococo interior completely renovated, tearing out its loges, its chandeliers, and its gold ornamentation. In the renovated theatre all at- tention focused on a stage that connected rather than separated the audience from the actors and that was bathed in subtle indirect lighting. Despairing of the decadent, cloistered, and nonchalant nature of Parisian life, in 1924 Copeau went to the French provinces in the hopes of reenergizing national life at its popular foundations and thus planting the seeds for a true theatrical renaissance. He left behind him, however, two students who in turn would be central to French theatre in the twentieth century: Charles Dullin and Louis Jouvet.

Jean Gabin (1904-1976)

Jean Gabin was a French actor and singer. Considered a key figure in French cinema, he starred in several classic films including Pépé le Moko, La grande illusion, Le Quai des brumes, La bête humaine, Le jour se lève, and Le plaisir.

Johnny Hallyday

Jean-Philippe Léo Smet, better known by his stage name Johnny Hallyday, was a French rock and roll and pop singer and actor, credited for having brought rock and roll to France during the 1960s.

Press during the Third Republic (1870-1940)

Law of 29 July 1881 accorded freedom of press. The press helped make the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) not only a na- tional but an international media event. The end of WWI (1918) started the long decline of the French press, especially the mass-circulation dailies of Paris. Total war and mass slaughter brought a general disillusionment with authority. Radio began to challenge the dominance of papers.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

Le Corbusier was an influential architect and city planner whose designs combined functionalism with bold sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture, which promoted such characteristics as clean geometric forms and open efficient spaces.Reoriented architecture away from grandeur and luxury and toward the concept of machines for living.

Leon Blum

Leon Blum, who began as a literary critic, became active in politics as a result of the Dreyfuss Affair. In 1919, he was elected to the French Chamber of Deputies. In 1925, he became the head of the Socialist Party and, in May 1936, he became France's first socialist Prime Minister since 1870. During his one year in office, he instituted a number of important social reforms, including the 40-hour work week and 2 weeks of paid vacation. He used the Popular Front very successfully and it was used the workers and lower middle class. Revolutions by conservatives and inflation ruined the Popular Front and because of this Blum was forced to resign in June 1937. By the 1930s, the French Right viewed Nazi Germany as less of a threat than Soviet Russia. Thus there could be no real union sacré as war approached in 1939 as there had been in 1914. Indeed, for many on the Right, France's fast defeat by the Nazis brought more gloating than weeping.

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Liberty Leading the People (1830). Most important French romantic painter

Luc Besson (1959)

Luc Paul Maurice Besson is a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. He directed or produced the films Subway, The Big Blue, and La Femme Nikita. Besson is associated with the Cinéma du look film movement.

Marcel Carné (1906-1996)

Marcel Albert Carné was a French film director. A key figure in the poetic realism movement, Carné's best known films include Port of Shadows, Le Jour Se Lève, The Devil's Envoys and Children of Paradise, the last of which has been cited as one of the greatest films of all time

The Children of Paradise

Marcel Carné, 1945 In this expansive drama, the lovely and enigmatic Parisian actress Garance (Arletty) draws the attention of various men in her orbit, including the thoughtful mime Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault) and the ambitious actor Frédérick (Pierre Brasseur). Though Garance and Baptiste have an undeniable connection, their fortunes shift considerably, pushing them apart as well as bringing them back together, even as they pursue other relationships and lead separate lives. This film embodies the resilience and courage of the French people and synthesizes the achievement of the national cinema. greatest of all French films, written by Jacques Prevert (poet, Paroles)

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

Theater in the 18th century

Marivaudage (emphasis of emotions, especially love, rather than actions), Voltaire's Oedipe (1718). Denis Diderot called for a new type of theater, one that explored the lives of ordinary people in modern society rather than glorifying classical heroes or the aristocracy. Le Fils natural and Le Père de famille were not very successful, his theories on middle-class drama had a major impact on playwrights like Beaumarchais. Le Marriage de Figaro (1784)

Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1796-1846)

Modern European mime is a creation of nineteenth-century France, growing out of royal (before 1789) and Napoleonic (after 1807) decrees that prevented any speaking on the Parisian stage by companies other than the Comédie Française and the Paris Opera. This constraint on silence pro- duced, starting in 1819, the career of Jean-Gaspard Deburau (1792-1846) at the Funambules Theatre. Deburau would create the character of Pierrot, with white face and long, loose white smock and pants, which was immor- talized in Carné's The Children of Paradise. Mime declined after his death and the abolition of the restriction on speaking on the Parisian stage. Only with the advent of Jacques Copeau and his school at the Theatre du Vieux- Colombier did mime become renewed. The renaissance stemmed from Copeau's emphasis on the actor's body as much as the text as the conveyor of meaning and his call for actors to have a rigorous training in gymnastics and mime (all part of the traditions of the ancient Greeks, Commedia dell'arte, and Japanese stages that Copeau believed could renew French theatre). One of Copeau's students, Etienne Decroux (1898-1991), would develop what Decroux termed a corporal mime (as opposed to the nineteenth-century pantomime that concentrated on face and hands). Decroux developed this style not only as a teacher but also as author in his book Words on Mime (1985). Decroux's first student was Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-1994), who would star as Deburau in Carné's The Children of Paradise and was also a part of Dullin's Atelier Theatre. Another of Decroux's students is the most famous mime of the past half century, Marcel Marceau (1923-), who has transgressed his master's theory by incorporating mime and pantomime. Moreover, mime is a vital part of Jacques Lecoq's (1912-) school. Since the 1980s a series of French and international mime festivals have inspired a new school of postmodern mime.

Cuisine of Northeast (Flanders on the English Channel to Paris, then to Alsace on the German border)

Mussels, French fries of Flanders, Picardy and Artois; the onion soup of the Parisian food markets; Alsatian sauerkraut with foie gras

Theater during the Revolution

Not fruitful. The most famous was François-Joseph Talma (1763-1826).

French cinema during 1960s

One of most vital developments in the wake of May 1968 was the fusion of filmmaking and the new feminism. Chantal Ackerman brought a decon- structive sensibility and a mordant wit to the industry with such films as I You He She (1974), which rejected traditional pacing and focused on interior monologue. Catherine Breillat is another filmmaker from the women's liberation movement.

Emile de Girardin (1802-1881)

One of the first examples of the modern popular press was La Presse (1836) brought out by an early incarnation of the modern press lord, Emile de Girardin. This ambitious publisher had already amassed 120,000 subscriptions for his magazine Useful Knowledge (Connaissance Utiles), and he was also one of the most successful publishers of almanacs (one of the staples of French journalism from the very beginning) with his Almanack de France (1834), which sold more than a million copies. But Girardin also appealed to the Parisian upper crust in La Mode. La Presse was targeted at a mass audi- ence, cost half of what other newspapers did (the difference being made up in advertising revenues), and emphasized such attention-grabbing items as serial novels, such as those by the best selling Alexandre Dumas. This enabled the daily press run to expand to over 20,000 copies. Like many French journalist of the age, Girardin also became embroiled in duels and played a central role in King Louis Philippe's abdicating in 1848.

French cinema during 1970s

One of the ironies of the 1970s is that, as many French directors moved to the far left, the audience increasingly moved right, in front of the television. As the government created more television stations and allowed them to pro- duce more shows and movies with broader entertainment value, the French increasingly stopped going to the movies and stayed home. As a result of the shrinking movie audience—ticket sales declined from the high of 400 million annually in the late 1950s to around 130 million during the 1970s and early 1980s—movie theater owners divided their theatres into more halls and cut down on the length of time movies were shown. Thus small-budget movies, such as the new wave had produced, became more infrequent. Even some of the established new wave directors such as Resnais and Varda found it hard to get their movies distributed in the more restricted and commercialized market of the 1970s. Some, as in the case of Chabrol, made banal comedies. Nevertheless, Resnais's Stavisky (1974) and My American Uncle (1980) and Chabrol's Violette (1978) and The Horse of Pride (1979) did show that both filmmakers still had their touch. Nevertheless, the emergence of television cine clubs on Antenne 2 and Cinéma de Minuit on FR3 and the television broadcasts of the French academy awards (the Césars, which began in 1976) ensured that the new generation coming of age watching television was aware of the French cinematic heritage and of the latest developments. One response was to create a new genre of political thriller that combined radical politics and a critical historical perspective with Hollywood action. Another was the rise of an overt pornographic industry and films that explored gay and lesbian themes.

Alice Guy (1873-1968)

One of the worlds first directors, First female director, First to use film to tell a story (the life of Christ) of the company Gaumont. Produced over 200 films between 1896 and 1920.

The revolutionary generation (1789-1815)

One the one hand it continued the tradition of government patron- age of the arts; on the other hand it produced an unprecedented "market" in cultural goods. Along with opening the Louvre as a public museum, the early years of the Revolution witnessed the establishment of the Ecole National des Beaux-Arts and the Institut de France. From 1797 what would become known as the Ecole would gain the right to name the winners of the Prix de Rome. Under Napoleon the bureaucratic infrastructure of these institutions developed. Across the nineteenth century, this "academy" retained the exclu- sive rights to train musicians, painters, sculptors, and architects. The greatest annual moment in French art was the salon that the academy would host, en- compassing all art deemed most worthy. Increasingly "academic art" became the foil of new artistic movements intent on forging new styles. Freedom of commerce

Eastman film process

Patented in 1909 by Pathé brothers, streamlined film production process like that of Henry Ford.

Symbolism (1880s and 1890s)

Paula Verlaine, Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck (whose poetry would influence the great French composer Claude Debussy - who created an opera out of Maeterlinck's Pelléas and Mélisande, Stéphane Mallarmé, the most innovative of the symbolist to push the movement into an exploration not only of the symbolism of words themselves but also of their sonority and rhythm without any necessary reference to the outside world. In short, a poem became a self-contained referent only to its own inner dynamics. In this fashion Mallarmé was exploring in poetry what the French Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was doing: showing that language was a system of signs with no necessary relation to external reality.

French music hall

Political repression after the 1848 revolution through the Paris Commune could not hold back this venue of popular entertainment and intellectual and artistic discussion and debate. Indeed, as noted above, the French version of the music hall emerged from café life. Parisian newspapers innovated across the nineteenth century by reducing the price of the newspaper and increasing the quality (adding color and photographs). By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris had some of the largest newspapers in the world.

Edith Piaf (1915-1963)

Popular French singer of Big Band era. A big band is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s and dominated jazz in the early 1940s when swing was most popular. Her songs incarnate the ordinary people of Paris, their passions (love, heartbreak, hatred, joy) and their spaces (the street and its entertainers and merchants, the cafés, dance halls, churches, rivers and the metro).

zouk

Popular music style of the French Antilles and the Caribbean, popularized in the 1980s by the band Kassav and other artists from Guadeloupe and Martinique

livre de poche

Post WWII, paperback revolution, started by Henri Filipacchi, one of the directors of Hachette, helped spread literature at an unprecedented rate.

Postmodernism

Post-World War II intellectual movement and cultural attitude focusing on cultural pluralism and release from the confines and ideology of Western high culture.

Georges Pompidou (1911-74)

President of France (1969-74) who strengthened ties with French allies, such as the United States, and ended French opposition to British membership in the European Economic Community. Successor of de Gaulle. Great lover of modern art, initiated a revolution in French museum building. A new art museum near the impoverished old central market district of Paris (les Halles)

François Mitterand

President of France from 1981 to 1995; launched a vast program of nationalization and public investment designed to spend the country out of economic stagflation [this technique failed]; His partnership with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl advanced European integration via the Maastricht Treaty, but he accepted German reunification only reluctantly. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he was the first left-wing politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic. Jack Lang as Minister of Culture. Gave workers more benefits and leisure time, attacked American imperialism. Work time to 39 hours, retirement age lowered to 60, deregulated media, Fete de la musique, promotion of once marginal or new cultural forms like rap, hip-hop, world music, graffiti and comics. From 1983, Lang shifted his cultural policy from Malrauxian conservation, creation and preservation to recognizing and promoting a broad range of contemporary cultural practices. Incorporate rather than reject American culture.

Nicholas Sarkozy

President of France from 2007-2012

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98)

Previously introduced in the Media and Culture section, a postmodernist who favors a stance of "incredulity toward metanarratives," including Enlightenment rationality and Western science. Lyotard was the first European phi- losopher to use this term, and he did so in two memorable books, The Post- modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) and Le Differend (1983). In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argued that both the great narratives of history and progress in the twentieth century—the capitalist vision of mass affluence and the Marxist ideal of equality and freedom—had failed. Instead, he argued, local comities and subcultures were increasingly turning their at- tention to their own local conditions and stories. Mass culture was giving way to a widening variety of lifestyles. In Le Differend Lyotard explained that this growing diversity in culture and in the theories of the human and hard sciences could not be put into some overarching theory and that culture and science were increasingly fragmented, lacking the coherence found in the nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century thought and society.

Calvinism

Protestant sect founded by John Calvin. Emphasized a strong moral code and believed in predestination (the idea that God decided whether or not a person would be saved as soon as they were born). Calvinists supported constitutional representative government and the separation of church and state. After the death of Henry II in a jousting accident in 1559, at the moment when a vigorous new French form of Protestantism emerged in the work of a young lawyer from Noyon in Picardy—John Calvin—the monarchy fell into feeble hands. Although Calvinism failed to take root in France, this austere doctrine of predestination (that is, God has already determined who will be saved and damned even before the start of a person's life), which inspired hard work and sober living, spread throughout much of Europe from the French-speaking city of Geneva, especially into Holland and Scotland. Calvinism would provide one of the main founda- tions of the Protestant work ethic that has increasingly become both secular and universal around the world.

1990 World's Fair

Restore France's position in the world after its defeat at the hands of the new German Empire in 1870-1871 (Third Republic).

School of Fontainebleau

Royal palace of Francis I where he wanted to re-establish his own Renaissance. Francis I (ruled 1515-1547) aspired to outdo Italian princes as a patron of the arts, and he brought Leonardo da Vinci to France. He brought other artists as well to add artistic glory to his reign and to transform one of his hunting lodges, Fontainebleau, into a pinnacle of Renaissance architecture and art (with murals, painting and stucco work, for example).

African Singers

Salif Keita of Mali, Youssou N'Dour Al Farka Touré and Xalam of Senegal

Being and Nothingness

Sartre 1943, the universe is an irrational meaningless fear; existence is absurd; life has no sense, purpose, or explanation; death makes life more intolerable and ridiculous. La Nausée In short, existence precedes essence. Even when one is imprisoned or living in an occupied city or country, a person can still choose their fate. Indeed, Sartre said that the occupation, when almost every moment was fraught with crisis and danger, was the time he had been the most free in his life. For Sartre, the worst thing a human can do is to not take responsibility for their actions, to pretend to be a mere pawn in the course of events. Such evasions he termed "bad faith."

Differences between Sartre and Camus

Sartre, on the one hand, came from an intellectually promi- nent family (which included Albert Schweitzer) and went to the elite schools of France. Camus, on other hand, was born into a poor white settler family in Algeria. Although he joined the Communist Party at a young age, he steadily drifted away from it (in the very years Sartre was becoming the classic fellow traveler and a partisan of the Communist position, but not formally join- ing and keeping a critical distance). Camus's novels, such as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, dealt with the absurdity of human intentions in a world deprived of God, but the nobility of human actions when harnessed to struggle against barbarism and brutality. Camus, as a native of Algeria, could not reconcile himself with the nation winning its total independence from France. Towards the end of his life he despaired of a just and equitable solu- tion for both native Muslim and colonial settler. He broke with Sartre over the questions of Algeria, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Camus had been the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize (at 44) in 1957 and delivered an address that tried to speak for the generation that had come of age during World War II. Jean-Paul Sartre would also receive the Nobel Prize (in 1964) but rejected it as both superfluous and as a protest against so few Soviet writ- ers having received the award. Here we see the fascinating dialectic of Sartre, the French-born intellectual, rejecting his heritage to live life on the edge and Camus, the born outsider, embracing the West at a time when it seemed to offer a more humane alternative than the Soviet system.

World War II Victory Day (Fete de la Victoire; Fete du 8 mai)

Schools, colleges and universities spend the period before May 8 focusing on the history of the Nazi oppression and World War II. Lessons related to this topic ensure that all generations know what happened during the war and why it is important to preserve everyone's rights in modern society. Many people attend parades and church services on May 8 each year to celebrate the end of World War II and the freedom of France from Nazi oppression. They also sing patriotic songs and display the French national flag on their homes and public buildings. The mood on WWII Victory Day is generally joyous but people may also make time to remember family members or others who died during World War II. In the past, World War II veterans played an important role in the celebrations but many of them are now older and some are unable to perform a public role. Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French Forces, announced the official end of World War II to the French people on May 8, 1945. Church bells rang to communicate and celebrate this message. It marked the end of a six-year war and the Nazi oppression in France, which resulted in millions of deaths.

Cuisine of Northwest (Brittany and Normandy)

Seafood, cream, crepes, apples. The French believe Breton lobsters to be the best in the world and one of the great specialities is lobsters in tomato-cream sauce (Howard à l'armoricaine). Sole Normande (sole with shellfish and mushrooms in a cream sauce). Cream is central to Northern cooking, and there is an AOC for cream and butter in this region, the only place in France. Breton crepes are distinctive due to use of buckwheat.

Annie Ernaux

Simple Passion (1991): profound ruminations aboutt the nature of love and social class in contemporary French society. Love is not, as traditionally conceived, the fusion of two souls and bodies in a perfect harmony, but, following the work of Kristen, a revolutionary act of individuality in which the person in love gains greater insight into his or her own personality.

Leisure activities

Since WWII, shifted from the public face-to-face ambiance of cafés, cinemas, theaters, music, and dance halls or the intimate act of reading to home-centered entertainment ranging from watching TV or listening to music, puttering around the home and garden, and surfing the Internet. Working-class complete homebound activities, while French professional class of engineers and technicians, les cadres, is praised for all their cultural activities like going to restaurants and museums, high rates of reading.

History of theater in France

Since the age of Louis XIV, drama and dance have been well subsidized elite activities. since the 1960s, an explosion of new musical styles and increased government support. Theater was the main public entertainment for society. French theatre, though born in the Church, also took its inspiration from the street and the marketplace. Passion plays in Latin for the sacred and vul- gar farces in evolving French based on ordinary life were two sides of the Middle Ages, centuries in which the sacred and the profane were dramatically juxtaposed, especially on the stage. Richelieu's Académie franchise was established to judge Corneille's Le Cid (1638). All events occurring in a play also have to be able to occur off the stage (reality); all plays must teach a moral lesson - good over bad; genre cannot be blended, plays must either be comedies or tragedies; any stage representation must have a unity of time, place and action; a play must have five acts. The rules would essentially be observed until the romantic age.

Guy Debord (1931-1994)

Situationalist, inspired may 1968 demonstration Formed out of lettrism, an earlier philosophic movement in which he participated and which wished to transcend the distinction between art, literature, and life, Debord turned his attention to transforming the modern capitalist city. By traveling through the city on foot in spontaneous fashion and trying to inspire art and creativity, Debord hoped to disrupt the rationalist and consumerist rhythms of capital- ist life and create a new type of freedom. He also advocated taking advertise- ments and other productions of a consumerist society and turning them away (his master verb was detournement) from the purpose of selling goods and showing how their images and rhetoric dehumanized rather than liberated people. The extraordinary explosion of poster and graffiti art that accompa- nied the May 1968 near-revolution was inspired by Debord's ideas.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

Starting with a brilliant set of analyses of the seemingly banal objects and customs of daily life, from the drinking of wine or professional wrestling through advertisements and magazine covers, Barthes showed how the national identity was formed and reinforced. One of his most telling examples was of a magazine cover (before the process of decolonization had started in the 1960s) showing a uniformed member of the Foreign Legion saluting the French flag. This seemingly banal image had been turned into what Barthes called a "sign." How? Because the person in the photograph was of African descent, his allegiance to France provided the French populace with the reassuring notion that its colonial subjects re- mained loyal despite all the agitation for liberation. In general, Barthes used this type of analysis to show the way in which a society tried to portray its ideas and customs as the product not of a specific history tied to class struggle but of some timeless and "mythic" correct way to lead one's life.

Minitel, 1980s-90s France

Starts by providing online phone books in France by France Telecom; Grew to be the world's largest E-commerce business (banking, shopping and all kinds of services)

Realist writers (1820-1850)

Stendhal (1783-1842) The Red and the Black and The Charter House of Parma and Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy

Charles Baudelaire

Symbolist, rather than paint or depict the gods and nymphs of classical mythology, writers and artists should reveal the nature of the modern city: cafés, train stations, workers, the unemployed, and those on the margin such as prostitutes. Les Fleurs du mal

Le Figaro (1853)

Tapped talents like Baudelaire, Dumas, and Henri Rochefort. Founder strived for mass circulation.

Comics

Te modern form emerged during the 1930s after the Belgian writer Hergé.

Rai, Africa, World

The 1980s brought a musical revolution to France. Lang increased subsidy for music, create the Fete de la Musique (June 21), freed the airwaves of regulation to allow for a spate of new FM stations. New concert halls (Le Zenith 1982 and La Cite de la Musique 1985). 1981 Radio Beur in Paris and Radio Galèere in Marseilles began broadcasting the rai music that had been a staple of Alge- rian culture since 1900 but was largely absent from a monotone French radio before this date. In 1984 Karim Kacel's song "Banlieues Bleues," expressed the new sensibility of the Parisian and Lyonaise suburbs that had become ethnic and religious melting post since the 1950s. The first rai festival oc- curred in the northern Parisian suburb of Bobigny in 1986 and propelled Cheb Khaled, later known simply as Khaled, into stardom. In the same year another rai group, Carte de Sejour (the French word for visa) released a ver- sion of Charles Trenet's "Sweet France" at a time when the conservatives who controlled the French parliament passed a more restrictive set of laws on French nationality. The song displayed the complexities of multicultural identity in a postcolonial world. Carte de Sejour broke up shortly thereafter, but its main singer, Rachid Taha, along with Khaled, Cheb Mami, and Faudel are the leading synthesizers of North African music with contemporary popular music.

Nicholas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711)

The Art of Poetry during Louis XIV gave definitive expression to European classicism for the coming centuries with him emphasis that all great art should aspire to the nobility and universality of the ancient Greeks and Romans and avoid the vulgar, the plebeian and the contemporary.

Sacré Coeur Basilica

The Catholic Church's political partisanship was especially manifest in their rail- ing against the Commune in 1871 (the conservative leaders of the early Third Republic and the Church built the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the top of Montmartre to "atone" for this revolt) and against Lieutenant Alfred Dreyfus (unfairly accused of spying for Germany) in "the affair" that divided France at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. Indeed, the Radical Party that came to power to defend the Republic against the Right separated the Catholic Church from the state, in large part due to the Dreyfus Affair in 1905. (Dreyfus would finally be exonerated in 1906.)

the Césars

The César Awards is the national film award of France. It is delivered in the Nuit des César ceremony and was first awarded in 1976. The nominations are selected by the members of twelve categories of filmmaking professionals and supported by the French Ministry of Culture.

French Republican Model

The French Republican model postulates that legal equality buttressed by educational opportunities and a robust welfare state provides a better means of integration into a modern state than rights or privileges given to certain groups (10% nonwhite).

Political division after WWI

The French Right came out of the war unified in demanding revenge against Germany, reparation of the nation and renewal of the culture. A Return to Catholicism, the implementation of sport, a rise in birthrate and a repression of cafés and other forms of popular culture. The Left wanted a vast increase in government intervention to solve the problems of housing and unemployment and to provide France with wart we now know as a welfare state.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin

The French aristocrat who founded the modern Olympic games (1896) in order to help his people become a leading athletic nation. Following France's loss in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), reformers believed that French people need more sport to compete. Popular Front and Vichy governments put in a lot of resources to develop sport. Sport has also been a useful tool for people to move up socially.

The Cathedral of Reims

The French kings were coronated with holy water, is a particu- larly fine example of Gothic style.

French press

The French press has always been intimately related to the government. Early centralization of the monarchy ensured that new media such as the press were carefully policed and regulated. Printing developed not far from France, first along the Rhine River in Mainz (with Johann Gutenberg's first printed book in 1455). Publishing in France began shortly thereafter, in the 1470s, but really came of age after the onset of the Protestant Reformation (started in 1517 by Martin Luther). By the 1570s a short-lived French Prot- estant surge of publishing was overtaken by a militant Catholic Counter- Reformation press spearheaded by the crown. Paris (1631) had its first newspaper a few decades after Strasbourg (1609) and was the first European city with a newspaper. (This city on the Rhine was then not yet part of the kingdom.) In 1631 two Parisian booksellers brought out a publication entitled Ordinary News of Diverse Places (Nouvelles Ordinaires de Divers Endroits), but the ever-watchful prime minister Cardinal Richelieu quickly had the named changed to La Gazette and found a new publisher, Théophraste Renaudot. This event illustrates the tight control that the French monarchy maintained over the publishing and newspaper indus- try through the Old Regime. Paris would not have its first real modern daily newspaper until Le Journal de Paris in 1777. Although the number of periodi- cals grew across the eighteenth century, the censorship of crown and church remained pervasive. Sweden would be the first nation to declare freedom of the press with a law of 1766.

La Fronde (1648-1653)

The Fronde ( 1648 - 1653 ) was a civil war in France. The word fronde means sling, which Parisian mobs used to smash the windows of supporters of Cardinal Mazarin. The original goal of the insurrection was to protect the ancient liberties from royal encroachments.

Jean Renoir (1894-1979)

The Grand Illusion (1937), La Bête humaine (1938), son of impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Renoir's antiwar film about World War I (Grand Illusion, 1937) and his devastating satire of French decadence on the eve of World War II (Rules of the Game, 1939) are also among the most impor- tant French and international films.

Les Freres Lumiere

The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905. They were the first to show a movie in pubic on December 28, 1895. The Arrival of a Train at the Station terrified the audience and made them jump out of way because they feared that the train was coming straight at them. Realist, banal scenes of everyday life.

Existantialism

The belief that individual free human existence is the most important thing

Edmond Rostand (1868-1918)

The best example of late romantic drama is the work of Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). Although famous for a variety of plays in his time, one of the most famous being The Eaglet starring Sarah Bernhardt (about the life of Napoleon's short-lived son—he would die at 20—in exile in Austria), he is now best know for Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), the story of a swashbuckling noble solder with a big nose in unrequited love with his cousin Roxanne. Cyrano had the longest run of any French play (December 28, 1897, to May 3, 1913) of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) and has been adapted as a movie in France and Hollywood numerous times.

Theater of the Absurd/Absurdism

The continuities that Sartre could find between his dramas and the clas- sics were something that cannot be said of the most important creative play- wrights writing in France during the twentieth century, those of the theatre of the absurd. The term absurd comes from Camus's 1943 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which denied that the universe contained any meaning except that which humanity made for itself through its actions. For Camus such a world need not necessarily produce despair. This was not the opinion of most of these dramatists however. During the 1950s, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Fernando Arabel, and others, however, would shock the international theatre with a series of plays that called into question, if not overturned, every theatrical convention. Ionesco would term his plays "antiplays." Indeed, the very idea that humanity, even if God did not exist, might be able to construct meaning in any coherent or satisfying fashion was questioned. Although Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950)—a thorough deconstruction of the plot and dialogue of boulevard theatre—was the first great statement of the new school, its success was not as immediate or intense as Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). In this short play with four characters, the plight of humanity—waiting senselessly and witlessly for a character by the name of Godot (God?) who never shows up—is revealed to be nonsensical absurdity. In the plays of Jean Genet, such as The Balcony (1956) and The Blacks (1958), notions of love and intimacy are subjected to the same savage gaze, and the result is an exploration of the infinite complexities of dominance, submission, power, and pleasure, along with race and gender. Perhaps the play that best represents the culmination of this school of theatre is Beckett's 1970 play Breath, in which no actors or speech is seen or heard, just a 30-second clip of human breathing. Ability to synthesize a broad range of artistic styles: dadaism, surrealism, existentialism. No widespread appeal.

French theater after WWI and before WWII

The disillusionment and disguise with conventional culture that dadaist and surrealists felt after WWI translated to the theater. Tristian Tzara (The Gas Heart, 1920) and Andre Breton (If You Please, with Soupault) further developed the disorienting techniques and themes of Jarry and Apollinaire. With an exhausted population found diversion and excitement in boulevard theater, the French state feared that the nation's moral fiber needed to be restored through more edifying material. In 1920, the government provided funds for a National Popular Theater in Paris under the direction of Firmin Gémier, working-class origin. Jean Giraudoux (The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, 1935), Jean Cocteau

French rock

The emergence of American and then British rock 'n' roll transformed the French music scene during the 1960s. In the early 1960s a group of young sing- ers imitating Elvis and the early Beatles became known as the yéyés (the French translation of yea-yea). One of them in particular, Johnny Hallyday, has become a national institution. Over the last 40 years (1963-2003), he has sold 80 mil- lion records (18 of which have gone platinum) and sung to 15 million people (eventually, Hallyday would be an extra in an Elvis Presley motion picture filmed in Paris, Loving You.)15 Virtually none of this first generation of French rockers continued the tradition of the singer-songwriter (aside from Françoise Hardy), and although their records continued to sell their status was soon diminished in France with the arrival of the Beatles. By the end of the 1960s, in the wake of the escalation of the Vietnam War and the events of May 1968, French youths switched to a steady diet of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan. By the end of the 1970s, with the emergence of punk and then alterna- tive styles of rock music, French rock 'n' roll developed a more authentic voice. The virtuoso Jacques Higelin was one of the first to create a distinctive French punk sound, and he was followed by bands such as Métal Urbain, Star- shooter, Indochine, and the relatively long-lasting Telephone (1981-1990). Nevertheless, it was groups in the second half of the 1980s that proved most distinctive and successful, such as Les Negresses Vertes, Têtes raides, Mano Negra, and especially the duo of Les Rita Mitsouko. This last duo, Catherine Ringer and Fred Chichin, produced in 1985 a single entitled "Marcia Baïla," which supposedly has received more play on French radio than any other song.16 One of the members of Mano Negra, Manu Chao, went on in the 1990s to become a solo act and in the late 1990s and early 2000s sold over4 million copies of Clandestino (1998), making it one of the best-selling albums in France and in the rest of the world ever for a French artist.

Literature after 1960s

The events of May 1968 profoundly shook up cultural categories in France. Distinctions between high and low culture and high and low literature became less pronounced and, in part, dissolved, the notion of both established and avant-garde literatures. Literary landscape was transformed: women's, lesbian, gay, postcolonial and immigrant literatures all emerged. de Beauvoir, Duras, Kristeva The past 20 years have not seen the emergence of any literary schools such as the ones in previous periods. If any one term summarizes recent trends in French literature, the term would be postmodernism. Duras' The Lover marked an important turning point in French novel. After great skepticism about love as a literary subject, her novel reinstated this seeming eternal theme to centrality in French fiction.

Emile Cohl (1857-1938)

The father of the animated cartoon Fantasmagorie. Acknowledged by Disney as pioneering work in animated film.

First renovation of French cuisine

The first great renovation in French cuisine occurred in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1651 one of the principal chefs at the kitchen of Marie de Medicis, La Varenne, wrote his Le Cuisinier François. This was the first cookbook to list recipes in alphabetical order and to provide instruction in the preparation of veg- etables. Cooking meats in their own juices and the deft use of mushrooms and truffles replaced the emphasis on heavy spicing of medieval kitchen. Although natural flavors and the use of chicken, meat, or fish stock were emphasized, sauces were also stressed.

Birth throughout history

The institutions of gender, courtship, and marriage in France have for millennia been rooted in the Catholic Church. At least in theory Catholi- cism prohibited premarital sex, abortion, and sex outside of the function of procreation. In practice, sexual and matrimonial mores were quite diverse. For example, to ensure the fertility of the couple and thus the reproduction of the family, for centuries peasant couples in particular went to the altar after pregnancy was underway. The Church usually overlooked such sins in the name of the greater good of the faith and its expansion. (Especially in the light of the Protestant Reformation, the Church enjoined its faithful to have large families.) After 1789 Catholic morality was tempered by the new republican tradition. Although praising motherhood, fatherhood, and devotion to the children, and as recent historical work shows creating a more open and equal family life, the revolutionary decade would inaugurate a century-and-a-half decline in the French birthrate. Historians still puzzle over the reason for this unprecedented drop. Some argue that the denial of the right to vote to women in the new republican regimes (Olympe de Gouges, the woman who would pen a Decla- ration of the Rights of Women to supplement the absence of women from the Declaration of the Rights of Man, would go to the guillotine) was important, others that laws requiring equal inheritance among all children encouraged farmers to limit family size to keep their holdings viable. Napoleon, after seiz- ing power following 10 years of revolutionary turmoil, kept two gains won by women during the Revolution—equal inheritance and the right to divorce. But he made gender relations dichotomous and draconian. The influence on women of his Civil Code would not be fully erased until the 1970s (husband controls wife). Homosexual acts were not punished done in private.

Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377)

The most important French composer of the Middle Ages, he wrote in the complex Ars Nova style and composed chansons, motets, and the first complete setting of the Mass Ordinary (the Messe de Notre Dame [c1350]), which was the first to include a Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). Classical music developed out of polyphonic choral church music especially centered around Paris during the tenth century (the Notre Dame School). By the twelfth century, polyphonic music (based on several singers with different melodies) had developed into a more structured form known as the motet. The leading composer in the ars nova school of French composers was Guil- laume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377). The succeeding generation of French composers became known as the ars subtilior for their more complex and intricate compositions. In southern France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the troubadours created various genres of poetic love songs either for aristocratic court ladies or, in some cases, shepherdesses.

Abel Gance (1889-1981)

The most important commercial director of the years between the wars in France who made two versions of a profound antiwar film called I Accuse (J'accuse). Also director of La Roue, Napoleon, and A Great Love of Beethoven (Un Grand amour de Beethoven). Gance personifies the visionary ambition of much of French avant-garde cinema in the 1920s. He could not adapt to the constricted budgets of French film in the 1930s, as did the following generation of filmmakers.

Paris Conservatory

The most important development during the French Revolution was the creation of the Paris Conservatory, which would make Paris a center of music training over the coming centuries and bring such composers as Frederic Chopin (1810-1839) and Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) to the city of light.

French press after the Revolution

The number of journals jumped rapidly. Most of these papers became part of the opinion press, meaning that they eschewed objectivity for partisan politicking. They remained a staple of French journalism for much of the nineteenth century. Starting with the Terro during the mid-1790s through the age of Napoleon, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the press was rigorously controlled.

Max Linder (1883-1925)

The one great comic Frenchman before Chaplin. He has also been cited as the "first international movie star."

Right to divorce

The right to divorce was restored in 1884 (after having been abolished following the fall of Napoleon by the government of the Restoration, 1814-1830).

French theater after WWII - Sartre

The second world war within a generation, as we see above, spurred many of these dramatists to deepen their explorations in myth and created a new younger school of playwrights inspired by the new philosophic theory of exis- tentialism. Not far from the Vieux-Colombier theatre lie the cafés of the Saint German des Pres neighborhood that would become the center of this sober but liberating philosophy that was molded by the wartime deprivation and dissent. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir would also write plays along with their other prolific literary and philosophic output. Some of the most famous of their plays are Sartre's The Flies (1943), No Exit (1944), Death Without a Burial (1946), The Respectful Prostitute (1948), and Dirty Hands (1948); Camus's The Misunderstanding (1944), Caligula (1945), The State of Siege (1948), and The Just Assassins (1949); and Simone de Beauvoir's Useless Mouths (1944). All these plays dealt with the questions of freedom and constraint under the impact of war or racism. The staging and timing of No Exit was especially historically charged. Premiering 10 days before the Allied landing of D-Day (June 9, 1944), this play opened in Copeau's Vieux-Colombier and was a fitting example of the renewal of French theatre. Sartre would later remark upon how the oppressive claustrophobia of the Nazi occupation not only heightened his sense of freedom, in particular the necessity to choose your own actions, but also heightened his sense of the power of the three unities of French classical drama.

Free Radio Movement (1960s-80)

The spirit of youth and rebellion of the 1960s and early 1970s was best captured, however, in the emergence of a free radio movement and the cre- ation of pirate and anarchist radio stations. Despite the strike at the ORTF, de Gaulle and his successors in the Elysée did not change the basic fact of government control. A few new shows aired, such as Listeners have the mike (Les Audieurs ont la parole) on France Inter, but no attempt at freeing up radio occurred. Mitterrand in 1981 liberalized radio.

Aftermath of the French and Indian War

The stirrings of American independence after the French and Indian War led to a cultural and then a political alliance between the nascent North American Republic and France. Thus a long-standing Franco-American affinity was born at this time. Leading American revolutionaries such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all went to France as diplomats for the fledging nation. These American dazzled French intel- lectual and high society in that they seemed to be putting into practice the ideas of the French philosophes. When French aristocratic officers, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, went to fight for American independence, they too would be proclaimed national heroes in France.

Thirty Glorious Years (trente glorieuses)

The term the French had for the years from 1945-1975, when the global and European economies flourished. Economic growth and urbanization. Living rooms with TVs and stereos, and almost every family owned a car. Increasingly, cafés, music halls, theaters and even cinemas were deserted as the French enjoyed movies, music and the new television fare in the privacy of their homes. At the same time, as cultural and leisure activity in daily life was becoming more private, the emergence of the car and air travel also saw an unprecedented development of mass tour- ism. Two of the most characteristic and distinctive French traits of this new cultural expression were the emergence of the French company Club Med (Club Mediterranee) and the purchase of second homes in the countryside.

separation of church and state doctrine

This is part of the French Republican ideology that subordinates cultural diversity to political equality. It is also a legacy of the battles between the Catholic Church and the Republican gov- ernments since the French Revolution (1789) over the question of the role of church and state in society. In 1905 the Third Republic officially separated the French state and the church. Since that time the Fourth and Fifth Re- publics have tried scrupulously to keep the two spheres separate. One result has been high-profile conflict over the wearing of "conspicuous religions sym- bols" (a subject we shall explore in the chapter on religion).

Concordat of 1801

This is the agreement between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon that healed the religious division in France by giving the French Catholics, Jews and Protestants free practice of their religion and civic rights and Napoleon political power.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)

This late-Baroque French composer also established the premises of tonal harmony in his theoretical treatises (Treatise on Harmony, 1722). He is also known for his operas and keyboard music. Castor et Pollux [tragedie lyrique] 1737

Fourth Republic (1946-1958)

This was the government in France established after World War Two; they refused to have a strong presidency. They granted the right to vote to women. Disintegrated over the question of French colonialism, especially in Algeria. Should this overwhelming Muslim nation still e part of France or should it gain its independence? De Gaulle believed that Algeria could not be assimilated into France, that its high birthrate would pose a threat to its cultural identity in the future and that its underdevelopment would be a drag upon a rapidly modernizing society

May-June 1968

Thought the events of May-June 1968 did not wind up overthrowing de Gaulle's government, for many that was the intent. While many student leaders used the language of Marxism and Third- World liberation, the proliferating posters on Paris streets, which were among the most innovative aspects of the events, put the spotlight on cul- tural change. The essential message critiqued a society that cared more about discipline than knowledge, more about wealth than wisdom, and more about constraint than freedom. Particularly gratifying to the student radicals was that their demonstrations and protests, first at a new university in the drab Parisian suburb of Nanterre and then in the university district of Paris (the Latin Quarter), sparked the largest strike in the history of the French working class, involving 10 million workers, a third of the labor force. Women, gays, lesbians, regional minorities and ecologists achieved unprecedented prominence during the 70s. Much of the political impetus of student revolutionaries turned from trying to overthrow the state to connecting with the ordinary people and their experience of daily life in order to build a mass movement from the ground up. notions of revolution shifted from political and economic change to cultural and behav- ioral transformation and from social class to personal identity.

Parnasse (1860s)

Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Banville, Sully-Prudhomme, Verlaine, Coppée rejected romantic effusions in favor of a more rigorous and symbolic poetry that drew upon both classical and exotic subjects

The Anti-Oedipus: Capital- ism and Schizophrenia (1972)

To understand the failure of the near-revolution, these philosophers turned away from Marxism and toward psychoanalysis, but one that was far more radical than Lacan's. In essence, the revolution failed because the repressive forces of a capitalist society had been implanted at an early stage in the minds of almost everyone. Schizophrenia, traditionally viewed as one of the worst of the "mental illnesses," was instead a legitimate response to social control, because it could liberate the body and overcome "the cop within" imposed by a capitalist order. The idea of the body as a potential site of social and cultural liberation was also prevalent among the French feminist movement. Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous

Alfred Jarry

Ubu Roi, late 1890s, the use of absurd or pornographic dialogue

Jules Ferry (1832-1893)

Under the leadership of Jules Ferry, the moderate republicans of small towns and villages passed a series of laws between 1879 and 1886 establishing free compulsory elementary education for both girls and boys. At the dame time, they greatly expanded the state system of public tax-supported schools. Thus, France shred fully in the general expansion of public education, which served as a critical nation-building tool throughout the Western world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on reason, science, and nationalism. But little hope existed for members of the lower classes, much less women, to go to high school, much less college.

Youth today

Unemployment and violence are the greatest fear for 15-24-year-olds. Most did not see much opportunity for upward social mobility and looked more for a permanent job than an interesting one. Unlike the 1960s generation, the turn-of-the-century generation is not turning to politics to solve their problem. Most youth focus their attention on the new leisure products of the digital age - from cellphones to music and video CDs - and the youth culture - from baggy pants to rap music - with a heavy American accent.

Leon Gaumont and the Pathé brothers (late 1890s)

Unlike other media and arts, French cinema innovated as much and as quickly with its commercial organization as with its technical and artistic. Gaumont and Pathé brothers laid the foundation for production and distribution companies that in one form or another are still in existence. They sold phonographs and by 1900, other cinema companies emerged: Eclipse, Lux, and Eclair.

Rococo

Very elaborate and ornate (in decorating or metaphorically, as in speech and writing); relating to a highly ornate style of art and architecture in 18th-century France. Rococo style is characterized by elaborate ornamentation, asymmetrical values, pastel color palette, and curved or serpentine lines. Rococo art works often depict themes of love, classical myths, youth, and playfulness. After the heroic age of Louis XIV, French painting through most of the 18th century became lighter and more playful.

Theater during the 19th century

Victor Hugo, Cromwell (1827) called for the overthrow of the three unities and the freedom to deal with subjects and characters that might be viewed by the larger society as bizarre or unbelievable. Hugo's play Hernani (1830), battle of Hernani. By the 1830s Paris theatre had evolved into a well-known set of theatres catering to the various tastes and classes of society. While the Comédie Fran- çaise and the Odeon staged the classics, what became known as boulevard theatre emerged for the growing middle class on the increasingly affluent western side of Paris. The greatest figure of the boulevard theatres was Sarah Bernhardt, with a career that would span 50 years and every continent. On the generally poorer eastern side of the city, the "boulevard du crime" held a series of theatres that appealed to lower-middle and working-class tastes. These eastern theatres are the subject of Carné's movie The Children of Para- dise. The most famous theatre catering to the proletarians was the Funam- bules. Here a famous mime, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, himself risen from the street, dazzled an audience that eventually included much of high society by the 1850s. These theatres would be demolished as part of Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann's urban renewal of Paris in the early 1860s. After this point workers often went to theatres in the new peripheral districts of Paris or to new café concerts, and later in the century, to theatres in the sub- urbs. The international prestige of French theater during this period is best illustrated by the triumphant world tours of Sarah Bernhardt (1870s-1910s).

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot; theater of the absurd

French theater during the 1960s

What appeared like anarchy to many conservatives made more sense than might first appear. In the late 1960s, notions of "living theater" came from the English-speaking world and fuse with the concept of collective creation. Jean-Louis Barrault (actor of Children of Paradise) had been moving this direction, advocating less emphasis on the text and more creative input from the theater ensemble and the audience. Emphasis on the director rather than the text.

Cut of work week hours

When Socialists won the presidency and the parliament in 1981, they immediately cut the workweek by one hour (to 39) and provided a fifth week of paid vacation. When they came to power in parliament in 1998, to 35 hours. The rationale for these measures continued to be the Popular Front assumption that a truly democratic society would expand the leisure opportunity of its citizens plus in the hope, born of the high unemployment of the post-1973 oil shock era, that freeing up of work time would provide additional jobs. Chirac argued that the 35 hour week had put a brake on French economy.

Cuisine de terroir

With the traditional three-course meal now accounting for only about 17 percent of dinners and lunches (and mostly among those over the age of 50), it is not surprisingly that recent cuisine trends in France have striven to return to the basics. Over the past 20 years a style of cooking dubbed grandmother's cooking, or country cooking (cuisine de terroir), has become a staple of French cookbooks. The traditional peasant and proletarian soup and stew is at the heart of this cooking. To preserve family recipes across France, Mitterrand's Socialist government created the National Center for Culinary Arts (initials CNAC in French) in the early 1990s. By 1998 the CNAC had published numerous volumes on regional cooking before being closed by the center right government of Raffarin, which came to power in 2002.

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907)

Within a decade o Antoine's experiments, experimental theater erupted in France. The best example was Alfred Jarry, whose 1896 playn King Ubu, sparked a riot when its eponymous character walked out onto the middle of the stage and said Shit. At the end of WWI, the avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire's The Breast of Tiresias (1917) blended themes from Greek mythology with an exploration of the human unconscious and the indeterminacy of language.

Women during WWI

Women shouldered more of the burden of running civil society and war production. Men thought women became much more masculinized due to having worked in war factories and being out in public more, and especially having experienced the new syncopated jazz dances and smoking and drinking more freely in that new site of liberation, the night club. During WWII, birth raised perhaps due to Vichy government's financial assistance to large families and to the propaganda of the collaborationist. Vichy was the first French government to enact a law against homosexuality since 1789 and Charles de Gaulle continued the rule.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Writer, filmmaker, Nouveau roman. Turn from grand themes of life to explore the complexity of language and the conventions of the novel

the Yé-Yés

Yé-yé was a style of pop music that emerged from Southern Europe in the early 1960s. The term "yé-yé" was derived from the English term "yeah! yeah!", popularized by British beat music bands such as the Beatles.

André Breton

[1896-1966] French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism. He believed that Western Civilization was terminally ill, if not dead. Only new sources of creativity from outside the traditional sphere of rational elite white European male power - for example African, Asian and Native American art and cultures, the working class, women and the inspiration of the human unconscious - could create a more humane and just society in the future.

Surrealism

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images. Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Jacques Prevert, André Breton

Cinémathèque Française

a French film organization that holds one of the largest archives of film documents and film-related objects in the world. Created by Henry Langlois in 1936.

Henri IV

a Protestant who decided to act as a Catholic in order to be king of France; considered by the French to be their best monarch; assassinated in 1610 by a radical Huguenot

l'art pour l'art

a form of art (and a concept of art) that highlights the intrinsic value of art, art for art's sake. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), against the capitalist consideration of art by popularity. Gérard Nerval

rai

a style of music fusing Arabic and Algerian folk elements with Western rock. Raï, sometimes written rai, is a form of Algerian folk music that dates back to the 1920s. Singers of Raï are called cheb as opposed to sheikh, the name given to Chaabi singers. The tradition arose in the city of Oran, primarily among the poor.

Nouveau roman (1950s)

a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the term in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new style each time. Most of the founding authors were published by Les Éditions de Minuit with the strong support of Jérôme Lindon. Nathalie Sarraute (Tropisms), Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Erasers, The Voyeur), Marguerite Duras (The Lover), Claude Ollier, Michel Butor (Passing Time and Second Thoughts) and Claude Simon (The Wind, The Grass).

Structuralism

an early school of psychology that used introspection to explore the elemental structure of the human mind a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behavior, culture, and experience that focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system that reflect patterns underlying a superficial diversity.

François Truffaut (1932-1984)

an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave; "The 400 Blows" (1959)

Académie Française

chartered by Cardinal Richelieu to resolve the Cid controversy in 1635; Louis XIV assumes official patronage 1672

Cuisine of Southwest

confits and cassoulet (Cassoulet is a rich, slow-cooked casserole containing meat, pork skin and white beans, originating in southern France. It is named after its traditional cooking vessel, the casserole, a deep, round, earthenware pot with slanting sides), foie gras, poulet au pot of Béarn, Basque tart

Royal Academy of Dance (1661)

established in 1661 to systemize the rues governing the kind of virtuoso that he admired and lamented only few among the court to do. Louis XIV consecrated the role of ballet in French culture and established a model that was followed by others. Jean-Baptiste Lully, Louis XIV's favorite composer, composed opera with extensive dance sequences that laid the foundations for modern ballet compositions.

Phrygian bonnet

hood with a rounded point projecting forward

Postwar French Cinema (1946-1958)

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/France-LEGACY-AND-REGENERATION-1944-TO-1959.html

Charles Lebrun (1619-1690)

master of 17th century French art. He glorified Louis as the sun king. He decorated chateau of Versailles, the Louve, and many churchs. Founding royal academy of painters. He made connections b/w Louie and Alexander the Great .

belle époque

name for positive view of the 1880s - 1914 (no major wars, industry/wealth, middle class is dominating, galleries/music halls/theartres, education, universal male suffrage)

fin de siècle

referring to the last years of the nineteenth century; decadent

les six

six French composers of the 1920s whose music reflected the strong influence of popular styles like jazz

The Second Sex (1949)

written by Simone de Beauvior, teacher, novelist, and writer; challenged marrige, the basic unit of modern society; theorized that marriage held women back because of male-dominated societies; recognized females as the "Other" and as second-class citizens. Women, she argued, had been made subordinate to men not by nature but by society. It was incumbent upon women to struggle against the definition imposed upon them by society in order to create their own existence and then overcome a stereotypical "essence" imposed by society but not mandated by nature.

Marie Louis Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, also known as Madame Le Brun, was a prominent French portrait painter of the late 18th century. Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style.