TORONTO, April 5, 2002 -- Historians of France will converge on Toronto to share new insights into a country that inspires romance in the public mind and is at the centre of western intellectual thought, at the 48th annual meeting in Toronto of the Society for French Historical Studies, hosted by York University and the University of Toronto, April 11-13.
"France has been a laboratory of social change and a nursery of many of the great intellectual currents that have taken hold in North America," said York University historian and co-president of the Society, Prof. Tim Le Goff. "The French have a much bigger hold on the western mind than we often realize," he added, citing the French Revolution of 1789 and the writings of Camus, Sartre, Derrida and Foucault.
Paris, the City of Light, remains a romantic icon in the public imagination, and the bucolic life of southern France continues to attract hoards of tourists. Public appetite also seldom wanes for the famous waxworks of Madame Tussaud that have immortalized images of the terror of the French Revolution in depictions of its heroes at the guillotine. About 350 historians, mainly from the United States and Canada, but also from France, the United Kingdom and Australia, will attend the conference, presenting new research on these subjects and many others. For a complete schedule of events and locations, check the website at www.yorku.ca/tjal/sfhs/sfhs2002.
Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks
Pamela Pilbeam, professor of history at the University of London and a leading British expert on mid-19th century France, looks at the wax exhibitions in Paris and London in the cultural and political history of their time, to determine why they were so successful. She will give a visual presentation of findings from her forthcoming book, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (Hambledon & London). She says many British people continue to see important aspects of French history through Tussaud’s eyes. The personal odyssey of Marie Tussaud in itself is unique for the times, traveling alone to London in 1802 with her four-year-old son Joseph and her collection of wax figures from Paris that became the leading tourist attraction in the British capital. "Tussaud offered her customers a diet of violence and glamour. In the Chamber of Horrors people could gaze at the deaths’ heads of Robespierre and other revolutionaries, plus a growing crop of English murderers, many of whom donated the clothes they wore at their trial before they were executed." Tussaud also amassed an unsurpassed collection of Napoleonic memorabilia which the emperor’s nephew Napoleon III tried unsuccessfully to buy from her.
A French Village Through Time
John Merriman is Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University and author of A History of Modern Europe (Norton, 1996), a standard history of the era. He now offers the connoisseur of southern France the chance to experience French village life in its historical context. In his forthcoming book, The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time (Norton, June 2002), Merriman enables us to see the presence of the past in the people and ways of this tiny medieval village that towers above the Ardeche River in southeastern France. Summer visitors find its dramatic landscape and Mediterranean climate very attractive, but over the centuries life has been harsh for the residents of Balazuc. They prospered in the 19th century through the cultivation of the "golden tree" and the silkworms it fed. Historical events from the French Revolution, through the Paris Commune and the two world wars, sent ripples through this isolated region, but the continuities of everyday life remained strong. Twenty-eight men from Balazuc signed the list of grievances against the king in the spring of 1789; the families of 19 still live in the village. It is a story of the tensions between Paris and the village, expressed in battles over the school, the church, the council, and people’s livelihoods, and the challenges of remaining a village and not just another scenic spot.
Court Life in Paris: Etiquette and Power
Philip Mansel, an expert in the behaviour of aristocracy as exemplified in the rituals of Court, is author of Paris Between Empires, 1814-1852 (John Murray, 2001). It describes Paris in the golden age, as the capital of Europe and a city of power and pleasure attracting people of all nationalities and exerting an influence far beyond the borders of France. Not since imperial Rome did one city so dominate European life. As a contemporary proverb put it: When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold. Paris was the stage where the great conflicts of the age, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, revolution and royalism, socialism and capitalism, atheism and Catholicism, played out before a European audience. Paris salons attracted the aristocracy and intelligentsia of Europe, freeing them from the political, social and sexual restrictions they endured at home. Rossini, Heine and Princess Lieven, Berlioz, Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier made Paris their home. It was also a period of political turbulence and intellectual ferment. Mansel draws on the unpublished letters and diaries of some of the city’s leading figures and foreigners who flocked to the city, including Lord Normanby, Lady Holland, Napoleon’s lifelong enemy the Russian ambassador Count Pozzo di Borgo, and Charles de Flahaut, lover of Napoleon’s step-daughter Queen Hortense. Mansel is also author of The Court of France, 1789-1830, describing the succession of courts and monarchies in France from the revolutionary period to the fall of Charles X. It shows that the revolution resulted in a stronger monarchy and a larger and more elitist series of courts than had previously existed.
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For further information, please contact:
| Prof. Tim Le Goff | Susan Bigelow |
| Department of History | Media Relations |
| York University | York University |
| 416-978-8097 | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| tjal@yorku.ca | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
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