This timely study sheds new light on debates about humour and identity in France, and is the first book about humour and identity in France to be published in either English or French that analyses both debates about Charlie Hebdo and standup comedy. It examines humour, freedom of expression, and social cohesion in France during a crucial time in France's recent history punctuated by the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. It evaluates the state of French society and attitudes to humour in France in the aftermath of the events of January 2015. This book argues that debates surrounding Charlie Hebdo, although significant, only provide part of the picture when it comes to understanding humour and multiculturalism in France. This monograph fills significant gaps in French and international media coverage and academic writing, which has generally failed to adequately examine the broader picture that emerges when one examines career trajectories of notable contemporary French comedians. By addressing this failing, this book provides a more complete picture of humour, identity, and Republican values in France. By focusing primarily on contemporary comedians in France, this book explores competing uses of French Republican discourse in debates about humour, offensiveness, and freedom of expression. Ultimately, it argues that studying humour and identity in France often reveals a sense of national unease within the Republic at a time of considerable turmoil.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a remarkable group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by delving into matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture provides cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today. These essays were assembled in honor of Lawrence D. Kritzman, whose writing and editorial work in French studies inspired the wide-ranging themes examined here.

From Zinedine Zidane to Michael Jordan and from Marie-José Pérec to Lance Armstrong, over the last thirty years, numerous individuals have emerged through the global sports industry to capture the imagination of the French public and become touchstones for the discussion of a host of social issues. This book provides new insights into the evolution of the global sporting spectacle through a study of star athletes, emblematic organisations, key locations, and celebrated moments in French sport from the mid-1980s to the present day. It draws on a wide range of sources, from film, television, advertising, newspapers, and popular music to cover key developments in sports including football, motorsport, basketball, and cycling. Sport here emerges as a privileged site for the discussion of the nature of contemporary nationhood, as well as for the performance of France's postcolonial heritage. Simultaneously, sport provides a platform for the playing out of concerns over globalisation, and, in a time of post-industrial uncertainty, for nostalgic reminiscences of an apocryphal bygone era of social cohesion. The exploration of these themes leads to new understandings of the ways sport influences and is implicated in broader social and cultural concerns in France today.

Through official maps, this book looks at how government presentations of Paris and environs change over the course of the Third Republic (1889–1934). Governmental policies, such as the creation of a mandatory national uniform educational system that will eventually include geography, combined with technological advances in the printing industry, to alter the look, exposure, reception, and distribution of government maps. The government initially seemed to privilege an exclusively positive view of the capital city and limited its presentation of it to land inside the walled fortifications. However, as the Republic progressed and Paris grew, technology altered how Parisians used and understood their urban space. Rail and automobiles made moving about the city and environs easier while increased industrialization moved factories and their workers further out into the Seine Department. During this time, maps transitioned from reflecting the past to documenting the present. With the advent of French urbanism after World War I, official mapped views of greater Paris abandoned privileging past achievements and began to mirror actual residential and industrial development as it pushed further out from the city centre. Finally, the government needed to plan for the future of greater Paris and official maps begin to show how the government viewed the direction of its capital city.