Google France opened a new headquarters in Paris today – an event which, interestingly, merited a press conference with none other than President Sarkozy and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Given the rocky relationship between the technology behemoth and France, it was indeed, as Sarkozy put it “pas rien” that this press event took place. In the 55-minute film of the event (all in French, link above), the discussion touches upon important issues beyond technology, including French perceptions of success, the American university system, and France’s place in the global context.

In addition to covering the French market, the new headquarters will also serve as Google’s center of operations for southern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. If you’re curious about the complex itself, Le Figaro has you covered with a video tour.

Note: If you’d like to show only an excerpt of this video (or any video), try the SnipSnip tool. You just plug in the time stamp of where you’d like the excerpt to begin and end and voilà.

Above: Québec

Above: France (Not just French, bien sûr)

Above: North Africa

Images

Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina
You can browse by country, name, or subject (includes photos and many caricatures as well, like the one on the left).

Photos from the French site 1914-1918.fr.

Texts

For both in-class discussion and as a written assignment, I had students read an excerpt each from the following Barrès and Valéry texts.

Maurice Barrès, L’union sacrée (1915)
“A la veille de la guerre,” chapter III “La mort de Jaurès”
Troisième partie, chapter IV, “L’âme des soldats”

Find the full text on Gallica here.

Paul Valéry, La crise de l’esprit (1919)
Première lettre

Download the full text from the Université de Québec here.

Below are some of the sources I’ve used, with a few notes about class activities and analysis.

Charles Trenet, “Douce France,” 1945: I had the students listen to this song for our unit on les Trente Glorieuses. We picked out specific words and phrases to answer the question “qu’est-ce que la France?”: mémoire, souvenirs, enfance, village au clocher aux maisons sages, bonheur, insouciance, ma prairie et ma maison.
Video at DailyMotion
Text download (.pdf)

Michel Sardou, “J’habite en France,” 1970: Y’en a qui pensent que le champagne sort des gargouilles de Notre-Dame; Mais la France c’est aussi un pays où y’a quand même pas cinquante millions d’abrutis
Video on YouTube

Renaud, “Hexagone,” 1975: Of quite a different genre than Trenet’s song, and coming at the end of the Trente Glorieuses, Renaud’s song about his country is pessimistic and cynical. Mai ’68 has come a gone, the global economy is suffering after the 1973 choc pétrolier, Giscard is president, and the left is feeling left behind. Here, the key words and phrases we found included révolution manquée; moutons; l’ordre et la sécurité; y avait pas beaucoup de Jean Moulin; une révolution, qui n’a jamais éliminé la misère et l’exploitation; la bagnole, la télé, l’tiercé, c’est l’opium du peuple de France; 50 millions de prétendants (echoing Sardou’s line)
Video on Dailymotion
Download lyrics (.pdf)

Diam’s “Ma France à moi,” 2006: This song is firmly planted in the youth culture of the HLM, la banlieue, and in the post-October 2005 socio-political context. Dans ma bulle, the album on which “Ma France à moi” appeared, was the #1 selling French album sold in the country that year. My students noted how the song and video’s attack on French culture was based on social hypocrisy, and not along strictly racial lines (although racism is a theme in the lyrics).
Video on Dailymotion
Download lyrics (.pdf)

The first reading assignment I gave this semester was Ernest Renan’s lecture, delivered at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882, entitled Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (I had the students read it on Google Books in the interest of simplicity and consuming less paper – more to come on using digital manuscripts in the classroom.) It’s an excellent example of Third Republicanism taking a direct attack against contemporary studies (often German, although there are plenty of French examples) of race-based nationhood.

The lecture is divided into three parts following an introduction exploring the various forms of social organization (from tribes to empires) that exist and have existed on Earth. In class, we began with a short discussion of the author’s project, to define the nation in its specificity with regards to these other social forms. After remarking that Renan spends the majority of the time describing what the nation is not, we made a list on the board of characteristics that do not apply to nationhood in Renan’s view. These include race, language, religion, a community of interests, and geography. We discussed his reasons for rejecting these would-be markers of nationhood and Renan’s use of history to support his arguments.

Finally, we identified what in fact does constitute a nation in Renan’s lecture: “une âme, un principe spirituel,” a memory of a shared past and a desire to live together. The focus is on the people, and on suffrage to settle border disputes, which is particularly relevant to the trauma of losing most of Alsace and Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War.

By divorcing the idea of nationhood from those of race, religion, or geography, Renan provides a strong basis for colorblind and geographically extensive citizenship, which, for better or worse, we’ll see reflected in the French conception of colonial empire as well as today’s approach – vastly different from the path taken in the U.S. – to ethnic differences within the nation itself. But to return to Weil’s “four pillars,” we now also see among many contemporary political thinkers the addition of the French language and an active movement of secularism to this concept of French nationhood. À suivre…

Texts for Comparaison:
Edouard Drumont, La France juive, 1886 (Part 1 and Part 2)
Charles Maurras, Dictateur et roi, 1899

In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the example of a geography text book to demonstrate the process. As an introduction to the Third Republic, I’ve found some excellent examples of republican ideology in the manuals used in primary schools from the 1880s to the First World War. Some of the most succinct, for my purposes, are the “moral instruction” guides, which are often written specifically for boys or girls and explicitly discuss the role of the child in the family, the citizen in the Republic, etc.

The example pictured on the left was published in 1904 for use in girls’ schools. You may find it on Gallica here. In addition to the parts about the family, school, and work, I am going to have the students read the “Janvier” chapter, which includes entries on “La Patrie,” “Devoirs de la femme envers la Patrie,” and “Droits du citoyen.” Additionally, the manual includes the full texts of the 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen and the 1791-1793 version. The second part of the book is dedicated to civic instruction. It’s particularly telling to read the matter-of-fact description of “le suffrage universel” in a girls’ schoolbook.

I also have a physical copy of a schoolbook for boys, entitled L’Année préparatoire d’Instruction morale (1912, 11th edition), and for which I have not found a digital version online. There are similar ones available on Gallica, however, if you simply search for “instruction morale” between the dates of 1880 and 1914. What I found revealing in this version, which I found in a little use bookshop in the provinces, is that from the start there are clearly delineated gender roles: men are the workers, women are the caregivers. But a child should love his mother and father equally, and they have equal importance in the family. These lessons are reinforced through short, illustrated stories. But there is also a clear class division, teaching the young boys who read the manual to respect servants, for example.

In class we are going to outline the principal values promoted in these didactic stories and examples, deduce the intended audience, and think about the republican project in general. Why moral instruction? What was this kind of teaching replacing or reinforcing?

My intermediate students have enjoyed the song and found the ending quite funny. (It’s momentous when you know enough French to understand a joke in the language.) The concept translates well to our term “turncoat.”

Download the cloze exercise as a pdf by clicking below:

Dutronc’s L’opportuniste Exercise

(As always, check YouTube for a video version of the song if you’re having trouble finding an mp3. I checked Amazon and iTunes but couldn’t find more than a karaoke version. )

One obvious candidate for shorter clips is Paris je t’aime (2006), which is made up of eighteen shorts, each one set in a different arrondissement and each one the work of different directors (twenty-two in all). In an intermediate language course, I used three clips:

Quais de Seine (~6 minutes): In this story, a group of young men (François and two friends) taunt young women walking along the quai – a major social meeting spot for summer picnics and late-night dancing. When a young Muslim woman, Zarka, trips and falls, François comes to her aid and befriends her. Meeting up with her later in front of the Institut du Monde Arab, François chats with Zarka and her grandfather. François is a student of history; Zarka of journalism. Her grandfather has the last line of the short, saying, “elle veut parler de la France…mais de sa France à elle.”

Tuileries (~6 minutes): Set in the Tuileries Métro station, this film short addresses the stereotypes of French love and the all-important rule of avoiding eye contact. An American tourist falls victim first to the latter, and then to the former.

Porte de Choisy (~5 minutes): A short broadway-esque production set in Paris’s Chinatown, this film takes place in the 13th arrondissement and follows a salesman, Mr. Henny, peddling beauty products for “Asian hair problems.” The manager of one salon declares “le problème, c’est toi.” He is then better received for tea in another salon, where we learn a play on words: “Henny” – “ai ni” – means “je t’aime” in Cantonese.

These are all short enough to show more than once in class, and the beauty of this collection of films is that each one is a complete story in itself. The “lessons” or themes treated in each short are certainly not overly sophisticated, but they are a good entry into many issues in contemporary France. In the intermediate course, I had students write their biweekly composition choosing one of the shorts and discussing its view on a particular aspect of contemporary French culture. The students seemed to enjoy the films and did quite well reflecting on them in their written work.

Psst – you can find a lot of these shorts on YouTube.

Benjamin Stora, “La Guerre d’Algérie 40 ans après: connaissances et reconnaissance” (1994)

Françoise Picq, “Parité, la nouvelle exception française” (2002)

Martin O’Shaughnessy, “Post-1995 French Cinema: Return of the Social, Return of the Political?” (2003)

Paula Schwartz, “The Politics of Food in Occupied Paris” (1999)

In addition to the featured free articles, the journal offers many others for full-text download as well, including special issues entitled Empire and Culture Now (2010), The Fifth Republic at Fifty (2008), and French Cinema (2007). It seems like something to peruse if you’re also planning a course with specific analytical aims and more contemporary content.

Here are some ideas on which I’ve fallen back to make our class time more effective, as my plan A (or plan B when things go awry).

First, I set a specific skill or content goal. This goal doesn’t have to be the same for each class period, but it should be focussed on a skill that fits with the overarching goals or themes of the course. Examples of daily goals:
- Textual analysis: building skills of close reading that the students will use in their own written work.
- Written expression: being able to organize ideas into an argumentative structure, or working on a particular grammatical difficulty.
- Oral participation: debating a point or presenting an idea or summary of an argument to the class.
- Content: a particular text or argument needs explanation or elaboration.

Second, I try to develop a variety of activities that will lead to the accomplishment of each goal. Examples of these active strategies:
- Write three claims on the board and have students work in partners or groups to find specific textual evidence to support or refute these claims. A variation of this activity is to write three claims on the board, two of which are true and one false. Have the students decide which is false and support this with textual evidence.
- Editing: peer editing, working on an entire (short) essay to see what works (If using real student essays, only use positive examples) or a series of problematic sentences.
- Draw a table on the board and have students informally throw out short phrases or words to complete the table. For example, on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality I drew a table with two columns: “noble” and “man of ressentiment” and had students look at one particular section to list characteristics of these groups.
- Debate: To begin the debate, assign roles to different groups, since students are often uncomfortable disagreeing with their peers. Have the groups formulate their argument using evidence and then give equal time to each side, going back and forth in questioning/refuting/supporting the claims brought up in the debate. Keep a running tab of main points on the board. In addition to helping students with their oral expression, this can be a model for students’ written work, if they are expected to write argumentative papers.
- Bring to class a list of discussion questions submitted by the students themselves, then break into groups to answer them.
- Preparing the Readings: Give your students specific, directed questions in advance of a reading assignment. Ask them to summarize the author’s argument in a sentence or two, for example, or to define a key term (using the definition the author uses, which may not be the everyday use of the word). Directing the students’ reading will better prepare them for confidently discussing the text in section.
- Incorporate examples from popular culture, the visual arts, etc., and ask students to explain how they relate to the themes of the course.
- Have students lead discussions.