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"Spreading the News: The Illustrated Press," focuses on the new concept of the illustrated universal survey periodical that appeared early in the 1830s, first in England, then in France. It was enabled by technological advances such as the steam press, cheaper paper, wood engraving and stereotypes, as well as greater literacy among the citizenry. The earliest illustrated periodicals were published by social reformers in both countries who were attempting to raise the status of the working classes, but the medium soon attracted wealthier, more educated strata as well; within decades the illustrated press had spread throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paysages et paysans: la vie rurale en France au XIXe siècle, 1820–1905 was the anodyne title of a loan exhibition inaugurated in March of 1978 at Beijing's National Gallery of China. As the first exhibition of Western painting in China after the instauration of the Communist regime in 1949, the show was a cultural- diplomatic landmark; its planning and reception can refresh our understanding of both Franco–Chinese cultural relations in the waning years of Maoism and the diplomatically recuperative uses of French nineteenth-century painting. This article uncovers the rationales of French actors and institutions as revealed in archival documents and then scrutinizes the unexpected reception of an art exhibition that remains an important episode in cross-cultural relations and aesthetic reclamation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1847-1848, two well-publicized events ended in colonial and metropolitan deportees crisscrossing the Mediterranean between France and Algeria. In the first, Abd al-Qadir surrendered to French forces in the colony after a protracted resistance and was deported to the metropole in January 1848. Then, after the bloody reprisals of the June Days months later, the National Convention sentenced thousands of Parisian insurgents to 'transportation,' eventually settling on Algeria as their destination. In both cases, the sentence of deportation seemed to satisfy both the penal and imperial goals of post-Revolutionary France: political stability, public order, and imperial expansion. But in practice, both episodes of deportation also heralded a new era. After 1854, the French government began consolidating punishment at the colonial peripheries while at the same time subjecting more individuals to deportation, signaling a shift in the relationship between colony and metropole that complemented emerging theories of crime and punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although mass migration to the United States and to France did not occur until after Tocqueville's visit to America, by rereading Tocqueville's classic De la démocratie en Amérique through the lens of immigration history, we can question some of the common assumptions about Franco-American differences. First, Tocqueville's comparativist gaze needs to be re-examined, especially with regard to the way in which it has been repeatedly invoked during the Tocquevillian renaissance of the last thirty years to differentiate the French and American experiences. Second, if Tocqueville did not discuss immigrants per se, his analysis of voluntary associations points to an important component of civil society which has been present both in France and the United States ever since immigrants began arriving en masse. Theories about the rise and decline of civil society as well as generalizations about Franco-American differences need to be challenged by including immigration associations in a new Tocquevillian analysis of democracy in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]