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This article examines the urban transformation of Nice in the early nineteenth century. It does so using the papers of the Consiglio d'Ornato (1832-1860), an urban planning committee charged with overseeing the development of the city at a time of demographic and economic growth brought about by tourism. This article argues that the Consiglio cooperated with private speculators to create a city rooted in a series of myths—Orientalist, Greco-Roman, and early Christian—that both shaped and were shaped by the expectations of world-wearied tourists. Nice was turned into a commodity whose purpose was to provide tourists with a feeling of fleeing a modern world characterized by instability and inauthenticity. Paradoxically, as a direct result, Nice became one of the earliest cities to experience a modern form of consumer capitalism in which people, places, cultures, and nature itself were packaged and peddled to the leisured classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores changing patterns of class mobility in the city of Toulouse, France during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Class categories are used to map out mobility patterns across locations in the social relations of production rather than across locations in status hierarchies. Data on patterns of intergenerational mobility derived from the marriage records of 1830 and 1872 are used to document the rigidity of class boundaries at different points in time, the sources of recruitment for newly emerging working-class positions, and the impact of changes in production relations upon the character and meaning of mobility patterns. Changes in mobility patterns are situated within the historical context of the changing social relations of production that marked the rise of early industrial capitalism. The final section of the paper provides some hypotheses regarding the impact of changing mobility patterns upon the process of class formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 9 March and 21 March 1931 12 men and two women, all French citizens from French Guiana, were put on trial at an extraordinary session of the cour d’assises in Nantes. All were accused of looting and murder during riots which had taken place on 6 and 7 August 1928 in Cayenne; all were acquitted. Despite being one of the biggest trials of the interwar period in France, the event was largely forgotten until a major exhibition staged in Nantes in 2011. Examining the public reaction to the trial in 1931, this article has two key aims. First, it will explore attitudes towards colonialism and republicanism in the provinces and metropolitan France. Second, it will use the exhibition of 2011 as a means of addressing the memorial debate to show how such recoveries of forgotten events, however laudable and necessary, risk perpetuating an image of an idealised republicanism based upon universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the interpretations of language difference in France and makes a comparison of the situation with Great Britain. The two contexts of Great Britain and France offer two worlds of very different political and linguistic sensibilities. Both France and Great Britain have some consciousness of being "nations," and have ideas about national languages. The political units of "nations" as is now known, and related ideas about national languages, took their shape largely in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, in many ways, France which gave the model of the modern nation to the world, and which encouraged the map of Europe and the wider world to organize itself into these apparently objective and inalienable units of the natural order. Ideas about "nation" and about national languages do not, however, easily translate between the very different units of Great Britain and France. The stories of English and of national identity have not been so neatly aligned. In France, the ideal of French-for-all became a fairly constant battle throughout the nineteenth century, and on into this century, with fears for the very existence of France amply confirmed by opposition from largely clerical, aristocratic and anti-republican supporters of regional languages.

The cause of death, at the age of 37, of Louis-Victor Marcé (1828–64), one of the most innovative alienists of the nineteenth century, was concealed by his contemporaries and colleagues. Recently it has been discovered that he committed suicide, but the circumstances and reasons for this were unknown. Information has now been found about his family, the events of the last year of his life and an unprecedented correspondence from his father-in-law, the chemist and academician Jules Pelouze, describing Marcé’s condition during the last month of his life. All of these point towards a diagnosis of melancholy, for which none of the appropriate measures were taken, probably as a result of the ailing Marcé’s social situation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The flâneur has remained little more than a hazy, nostalgic figure since first described in detail by Baudelaire in 19th-century Paris. Here, the work of Walter Benjamin, who did more than any other to advance the notion of flânerie post-Baudelaire, is considered alongside that of his friend and critic Theodor Adorno, in an attempt to conceive of a modern-day version of the type. The many critical exchanges between Adorno and Benjamin are envisioned as a moving dialectic: a constant interplay between anticipation and suspicion. What results is a concept of flânerie that mingles a tentatively optimistic Benjamin with a perpetually sceptical Adorno, in order to conjure up an image of the individual strolling and wandering about the margins of contemporary urbanity, balanced on the cusp of hope and hopelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Parisian Expositions universelles of the nineteenth century were massive showcases for the latest in scientific advances and modern thinking. The Exposition of 1878 featured an exhibit organized by the Anthropological Society of Paris and endorsed by the newly republican administration. The exhibit aimed to educate the public in secular material determinism – to promulgate the concepts of human evolution from apes and behaviour governed by physiology. The anthropological exhibit drew criticism, unsurprisingly, from a certain section of the Catholic community, which was outraged by the messages of the Anthropological Society. This article seeks to add an illuminating episode to the history of France’s late nineteenth-century culture wars by exploring the negative reactions of some Catholic commentators to a manifestation of anti-clerical, materialist modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents case studies of the use of physics textbooks in science education in France and England in the nineteenth century. The author discusses growing demand for physics textbooks in both England and France and examines textbook production, authors, and the relationship between textbook production and teaching. Textbook physics is considered in a cross-national context.

The article presents case studies of American higher-education institutions the United States Military Academy (West Point), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Clemson University in order to highlight the influence of French polytechnic approaches to science education on American higher education in the mid-nineteenth century.

During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first French psychology society was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the use of series by social scientist as well as within socialist doctrine in France, focusing particularly on the period of the 19th century during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Some of the subjects considered include the use of series in the book "Introduction à la science de l’histoire" by J. P. B. Buchez, social reform movements of the period, the idea of progress in sciences such as physiology, zoology and geology, and the introduction of the terms “sociology” by Auguste Comte and “socialism” by Pierre Leroux.

An interview is presented with John Merriman, a Professor of History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Merriman explains that he became interested in history at a young age and even attempted to write a history of the world at ten years old. He explains his expertise on nineteenth-century France and his intention to study ordinary people caught in the dynamics of economic and social change. He discusses his book "The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century." This interview is translated by Grégory Beriet and Christine Haynes.

Drawing on recent interest in the environmental impacts of cities, and in the urban metabolism, this article examines efforts in late-eighteenth-century France and mid-nineteenth-century Britain to understand cities primarily as chemical systems, and accordingly, to see urban management as properly the province of the chemist. Drawing on historical-sociological studies of professionalization, the article also contrasts the failure of chemists to acquire cognitive authority over the city with the greater degrees of success of other professions: architecture; engineering; medicine: and the practitioners of the new entity, "urban planning," which came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the so-called science empire in the early years of the nineteenth century in France. Pierre-Simon Laplace was one of the greatest scientists of France during this period and the most influential scientist in the country's history. Laplace used the word empire in his scientific publication in 1908.