Protecting Identity: Violence and Its Representations in France, 1815-1830 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Some forty years ago Natalie Zemon Davis published an article in Past & Present that opened up a new approach to the religious wars that tore France apart during the second half of the sixteenth century. Infl uenced by socio-cultural approaches and perspectives, as well as her own personal experience, 'The Rites of Violence' provided a fresh interpretation of the causes, enactment and perception of confessional violence during this confl ict. Professor Davis demonstrated that, faced with the threat of heresy or the assurance of the Reformed faith, rival confessional communities sought to establish their hegemony over each other and that violence was encouraged by religious leaders and vigorously pursued by their adherents. This infl uential essay has helped to shape our understanding of religious violence not only in the late sixteenth century but also in other periods. This volume provides a new assessment of religious violence by leading historians of early modern France. Building upon a generation of research, they explore new questions and dimensions of the religious strife of the late sixteenth century. Contributors consider not only the circumstances in which religious confl ict and violence developed, but also why it did not emerge in other places. They assess diff erent aspects of the internecine confl ict in France, including their judicial and sexual dimensions. Further themes include the emergence of religious coexistence as a real alternative to religious violence: confl ict resolution and appeasement; the diff usion of communal tensions; and initiatives for social reconstruction. Providing an important reappraisal of violence and religious confl ict in early modern France, this volume also suggests new avenues of research and points of comparison for those interested in these issues in other contexts, cultures, and arenas.
Lviv Seminar - Center for Urban History, 2024
First of all, I'd like to thank you for being here, and to express my regrets not being able to be with you tonight. As discussed with Bohdan, I do hope that this virtual seminar is just a first step to a more extensive and a more real one within the next months. I would also like to thank Sofia Andrusyshyn for the (unconcerted) choice she made to illustrate my presentation on the Lviv Center for Urban History's website with a detail from Edouard Manet's Civil War. I take this choice as an opportunity to introduce some reflections and notions that may be useful for the further developments of my presentation. As you may know, this lithograph was made in reference to the Commune de Paris, which took place in the French capital between the March 18 th and May 28 th , 1871. Initiated in the context of the French-Prussian War, a few weeks after Paris was freed from the siege, the Commune ended in May in fratricidal fighting between the Communard and the so-called Versaillais from the governmental party. It is not clear if Manet directly witnessed or not this bloody conclusion 1. But what is clear is that Manet, for the three compositions he made after the Commune, reused two previous of his works. First, in a watercolor entitled Civil War (The Barricade) (Fine Arts Museum, Budapest) and in another lithograph, The Barricade (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris), he reemployed the fire squad composition he achieved three years earlier (after several sketches made during almost a year) for The Execution of Maximilian (1868, Kunsthalle, Mannheim). As you know, this composition was itself inspired by the famous Third of May 1808 (museo del Prado, Madrid) Francisco Goya painted in 1814. As a matter of fact, the same happens for the dead soldier of Civil War. His position is given by The Dead Torero Manet painted around 1864, initially as a part of a larger composition he eventually cut into two pieces, isolating the torero from the Episode of a Bullfight (La Corrida) 1 His friend Théodore Duret asserts that Manet came back to Paris a few days before the "Semaine sanglante", and did witness the events. See: DURET, Théodore,
Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France
This collection of essays, edited by Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer, developed from a one-day conference—‘Religion and Violence in Early Modern France: The Work of Natalie Zemon Davis’—which was held in June 2008 at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. Five of the papers published here were initially delivered on that occasion, but the conference also sought to learn from the differing perspectives of violence outside sixteenth-century France. This concern is also reflected in this collection, which seeks to offer new insights and approaches to the relationship and significance of religion and violence as well as paying tribute to the immense contribution made in this field by the writings of Natalie Zemon Davis.
The Scandal at Le Sacre: Games of Distinction and Dreams of Barbarism
Avatar of Modernity. The Rite of Spring Reconsidered, 2011
For a century, the riot has pursued The Rite like a shadow, or like some strange alter ego. They came to signify the end of the world of yesterday, the triumph of modernity, even the first fruits of the Great War or totalitarianism: “It turned out opportune that the century of abominations to come was thus symbolically consecrated by some such eulogy of barbarism in sound.” They were able to sum up, on a more technical level, the unstable alliance between music, dance and painting, made by the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and unmade into the multiple fragments of the avant-garde. Or again to construct, together with Schoenberg’s Skandalkonzert in Vienna a few weeks earlier, a scandalous double portico for the whole history of twentieth-century music.
Image & Transgression, introduction and conclusion translated from the French.pdf
Why do we find an image shocking? Here an answer is gradually elaborated around the concept of montage – a montage of different views and places, of different figures and times. An increasing distrust with regard to images portraying evil, the birth of the pornographic sensibility, the emergence of anti-establishment graffiti, the destruction of images by the authorities that commissioned them and the skilful construction of the unimaginable are so many events that illuminate our changing relationship to images in the Western world. Images and the idea of transgression jointly form a history that the authors place in perspective with the present time. By so doing, they proceed to decipher our belief in the power of images.
The wounds of war and the scars of culture: Simone Weil and René Girard on the symmetry of violence
Studia z Teorii Wychowania
The philosophical discourses of violence developed in the 20th century can be grasped in two fundamental paradigms: the paradigm of force (Simone Weil) and the paradigm of domination (Horkheimer and Adorno). This article aims at situating René Girard’s theory of the culture within the paradigm of violence as an immediate force, stemming from Simone Weil’s phenomenological description of force in The Iliad. Simone Weil can be read as a model for modern reflection on violence in different ways. One of them can be identifying her interpretation of The Iliad as a starting point for the critique or even unmasking of blind reifying violence through the philosophy of culture: an example of this kind of translation can be found in Girard and his analyses of the figure of the scapegoat and rituals of violence, (sanctioned within myth), transferring violence into a sacral sphere. The pivotal point of the comparison is the concept of kydos, “the triumphant fascination of superior violence,” de...