Suchergebnisse

In Nicolas Sarkozy's embrace of 'French national identity' during his presidential campaign, one could sense the lepéniste nature of his campaign. Sarkozy's cultural platform, specifying France's Christian roots and the national language as vital to the country's national and democratic heritage, has likewise betrayed his definitions of 'Europeanness' and 'Frenchness' as essentialist. Given his political success, the hardening of France's universalist values has therefore become palpable, specifically the concept of fraternité ('brotherhood' or 'solidarity'). The following analysis will examine how, during Sarkozy's tenure as Interior Minister and now as President, the original concept of fraternité has been displaced in favour of a cultural predisposition to democracy — a shift that, along with France's new immigration policy and longstanding opposition to Turkey's candidacy for membership of the EU, coincides with a resurgence of Islamophobia.

The recently published Journal de l'Occupation (1995), written by Jean Giono from September 1943 to September 1944, allows a privileged view of the French author who was subsequently blacklisted for collaboration. Contemporary critics generally consider Giono guilty of literary collaboration. In this article, I inquire into the legitimacy of these claims through a close reading of his occupation diary and other publications of the occupation period. In the end, I reject this commonly held notion in favour of the portrait that the diary provides: that of a disillusioned French author and French citizen, who is unwilling to take sides in the civil conflict beyond his local allegiances, and thus refuses to submit his vision to an overarching political project. Moreover, his total belief in an individual's freedom of conscience makes him subversive in his refusal to submit to one doctrine or another.