Research colloquium which takes place on Monday 24 January, at the Maison Française d’Oxford. This research colloquium brings together historians of nineteenth and and twentieth-century France to explore the issue of “political legacies”.

This research colloquium brings together historians of nineteenth and and twentieth-century France to explore the issue of “ political legacies”. It is one that overshadows, of course, the history of a country that has lived with the profound and ambiguous legacy of its revolution. That was a political movement devoted to liberty, although what that liberty actually and was and how it would be realized, were open questions then and thereafter. As historians, we often talk about the 'burden' of the past - and it was often the case that a political legacy served to constrain the way that people thought about the present, seeing it through the hopes and fears that had been experienced by previous generations. But political legacies often had a more positive impact that that suggests. They served to shape the way in which contemporaries sought to harness the opportunities of the present, and orient the expectations of the future. In short, we shall focus on the dynamic and ambiguous nature of political legacies as one of the ways in which the past inevitably shapes the political space of the present. The colloquium will be an occasion to examine the role of political legacies in a comparative light, and to explore what other disciplines (notably political science) have to tell us about political legacies. It will also be a moment for British historians to honour the contribution of Professor Malcolm Crook to the discipline of French History, notably through his many years as editor of French History.

Programme

Morning session: 10.45 am - 12.45 pm

11.00 : Welcome from the Directeur de la Maison Française d'Oxford, M. Luc Borot

11.10 : First Session : Political Legacies and the French Revolution

Chair and Discussant: Julian Swann

• Michel Biard (University of Rouen), « Machine jacobine » et « centralisation jacobine », deux fantasmes historiographiques revisités à l'aune d'un exemple local : la Société populaire de Honfleur.
  

• Alan Forrest (University of York), A Military Legacy: The Army and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France.

Afternoon session: 14.00 pm - 18.00pm

14.00: Second Session: The Weight of Political Legacies in Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century, France

Chair and Discussant: Colin Heywood (University of Nottingham)

• Julian Wright (University of Durham), Between the present and the future? the uncertain reformist legacy of French socialism.

• Christophe Prochasson (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), François Furet, la révolution et le futur passé de la gauche.

16.00: Third Session: The Legacies of the Recent Past

Chair and Discussant: Julian Jackson (Queen Mary, University of London)

• Robert Gildea (Worcester College, Oxford), The Legacy of the Resistance in the oral testimony of 1968 activists

• Sudhir Hazareesingh (Balliol College, Oxford), The Myth of Charles de Gaulle

• Jean-Pascal Daloz (CNRS-MFO), Political Representation in France and the enduring tension between Republican ideals and court style

18.00: Concluding Remarks by Professor William Doyle, University of Bristol.