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"Madeleine's diary is unique as she wrote it to record as much as she could about everyday life, people and events so she could use these written traces to rekindle memories later for the family from whom she had been parted. Many diaries of that era focus on the political situation. Madeleine's diary does reflect and engage with military and political events. It also provides an unprecedented day-by-day account of the struggle to manage material deprivation, physical hardship, mental exhaustion and depression during the Occupation. The diary is also a record of Madeleine's determination to achieve her ambition to become a university academic at a time when there was little encouragement for women to prioritise education and career over marriage and motherhood. Her diary is edited and translated here for the first time.
Dr Wendy Michallat was born in West Yorkshire. She studied at the Universities of Warwick and Nottingham and lectures in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sheffield. She researches and teaches French cultural history, life-writing and popular culture and has published on diverse subjects including cartoon art, women's football and first-wave French feminism.
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This article begins with the recommendations of the Leathes Report of 1916 in connection with the internationalisation of language study and the reasons why the ideal of transnational mobility was slow to take root in language departments in the UK. It examines how the provision of safe, secure and affordable accommodation for women students was an effective counter to alarmist stay-at-home tales. And it looks at how feminist educators campaigned to promote international learning and teaching opportunities for women scholars. It argues that the Leathes concept of an 'immersion' experience conflicted with the University of Paris's interpretation of the 'internationalisation' of study. The Cité universitaire (CU) project, launched in the 1920s, offered the possibility for the easy placement of a growing number of students from the British red-brick universities in particular. But the conviction of British academics that the proposed Collège Franco-Britannique should house both French and British students was at odds with the University of Paris's concept of a campus of representative national houses in which only students of that country were permitted to live. It concludes that the mobilisation of the profession into subject bodies was a key factor in the evolution of study abroad programs and more broadly in the consolidation of 'modern studies' in the new civic and red-brick universities across Britain.

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine's letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach.

Madeleine Blaess, a British doctoral student studying at the Sorbonne, was trapped in Paris, unable to return home to York for the duration of the Occupation. In October 1940 she began a diary which she kept diligently until September 1944. This unique testimony written from the perspective of a British student at liberty to roam wartime Paris, focuses more on the civilian struggle through the everyday than on the political and military situation which Blaess, vulnerable to arrest, thinks wise to mention as little as possible. This exhaustively documented, voluminous record of the minutiae of a daily struggle with material hardship discloses a struggle with mental illness articulated and managed through the writing of the diary. That diaries can have a therapeutic purpose for writers under mental strain is axiomatic and this article examines a variety of palliative strategies both deliberate and involuntary invoked through the writing process. In so doing, the article will survey the incidence and causes of civilian mental distress on the home front over the period, an area of inquiry which, other than recent work into the psychological impact of Allied bombing of civilians, has been largely neglected in recent work foregrounding and valorising the historical importance of life-writing sources in the field of Occupation studies.

Hélène Brion's journal, La Lutte féministe, 'organe unique et rigoureusement indépendant du féminisme intégral' is generally thought to have first appeared in February 1919. However, the discovery of four elegantly handwritten manuscript issues of the same journal in the Sylvia Beach archive at Princeton University Library reveals that Brion had launched an earlier version of La Lutte féministe for limited distribution among an inner-circle of pacifist feminist schoolteachers and fellow political travellers barely a week before the Armistice in November 1918. These manuscript issues which are, to the best of my knowledge, single one-off copies, show Brion and her fellow activists urgently mobilizing around issues of suffrage and peace as the war ended. The manuscripts reveal what motivated Brion's initial Lutte féministe project and the progressive shifts in theme, content and presentation of the journals provide a fascinating insight into the popularizing strategies Brion rehearsed ahead of a print version aimed at a wider readership. Previously unpublished transcripts of correspondence and personal testimonies offer illuminating insights into the acrimonious relationship between Brion and the mainstream reformist feminist movement and enable a unique and intimate personal and political profiling of Brion and her entourage. This article not only brings to light these fascinating documents but also gives valuable insight into the evolving modalities of feminist publishing at the end of the First World War. It explains just how unemployed schoolteacher Brion managed to produce, circulate and popularize the journal with virtually no financial support. In addition, the article's examination of editorial choices she made ahead of the print version are revelatory of the proselytizing strategies used by feminists to reach women of the popular classes at a time of great optimism for lasting political and social change.

This article traces the development of women's football in France in the context of the evolving political and social status of women over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. It specifically examines football alongside women's broader struggle for social, political and sexual emancipation. In the early 1920s, football was championed by the French feminist movement. Subservient not to men but to a team ethic, robust female players rebutted the myth of women's fragility — seen then as a major obstacle to women's suffrage. Football also appeared to offer a means to rally a new generation of working-class women to what had been a middle-class cause. Sponsored by the feminist movement and administered by the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF) with state funding, French women's football flourished domestically and abroad. However, by the late 1920s it had been abandoned by the feminist movement and the FFSF in the midst of a sexual panic caricaturing participants as unnatural, `masculinised' and lesbian — a charge levelled at feminists in general with increasing vehemence as the suffrage issue made progress. This discussion links football's fall from favour over the course of the 1920s to the increasingly hostile political climate that faced the feminist movement and imperilled the survival of groups such as the FFSF who associated with it.

In 1998 Michel Houellebecq's novel Les Particules élémentaires provocatively sketched a causal link between the ills of modern-day society and the political legacy of May 1968. The author focused his critique primarily on the liberalization of sexual `mœurs', popularly seen as one of the few tangible achievements of May but denounced by Houellebecq as a pernicious determiner of social exclusion. The discourse used by Houellebecq to attack the legacy of `68 is not, however, altogether new; it finds expression in the popular media he both extols and denigrates in Les Particules élémentaires. Houellebecq uses comic-book art to evoke an idyllic faith in `pure', `universal' (pre-'68) values and the article traces a right-wing lineage for these `lost' moralities from children's comics of the 1960s back to the Vichy period. Highlighted also are similarities between Les Particules élémentaires and the anti-consumer culture ideology of the 1960s satirical magazine Hara-Kiri. The article pays particular attention to how both novel and magazine communicate disaffection through a nihilist discourse characterized by taboo-breaking caricature. Finally Houellebecq's depiction of the 1968 generation as dysfunctional and deluded can be seen in new social comment emerging in French cartoon art of the 1970s and 1980s.

Gidian Archives is a database created from the press cuttings preserved by André Gide in his personal collection. The archive consists of articles published during his life on the author's work, his person and his influence on the society and culture of his age. It is well known that the 'key contemporary', as Gide was called, represents an essential reference point for several generations of intellectuals. Thus the articles in Gidian Archives provide crucial evidence on the history of thought across half a century. In addition to press cuttings tracing the critical reception of each of Gide's works, the archives contain polemical articles on his cultural interventions, on his political commitments and on matters of contemporary concern. Through what his professional readers say about Gide it is possible to follow the careers of other writers who declared and defined their own thought in dialogue with his. Similarly, the evolution of periodicals which published texts on Gide can be traced by means of this key research tool. The interest of the collection extends well beyond Gide studies. The archive is rich in information on numerous aspects of the history of literature, society, culture, politics, ideology, etc., in the first half of the twentieth century. The Search Engine makes it possible to find articles on a given theme ('mots clefs') or an individual ('noms propes'). One can track down all the articles by a particular writer ('auteur') or published in a specific review ('Titre de la revue'). Similarly, items can be selected by date.