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In his accounts of Montmartre and Marseille, Nicholas Hewitt shows how places on margins and frontiers channel flows of different sorts running across city, nation and world. In doing so, they open up suggestive perspectives on the nature of French territory, how it is conceived, and how it can be imagined. In particular, they foreground the productive tension of the marginal place as edge and opening, and interrogate the bounded and regulated space implied by the geometrical trope of the French 'hexagon'. What emerges instead is a curiously liquid sense of French space-in-time as shifting, shimmering and mercurial, caught up in and contributing to the ebb and flow of global circulation. This article explores how movement, flow and liquidity have featured in recent explorations of French territory and topography, drawing on work by Jean Rolin, Agnès Varda and the photography project France(s) territoire liquide, whose title spells out its assumption about the nature of contemporary French space. At the same time, the article situates those accounts in relation to conceptions of French territory which informed the work of post-war spatial planners, whose substantial material and infrastructural legacies reflected their own sense of territory as flux, flow and liquid force.

Post-war France was reshaped by a sustained period of spatial planning and modernization. This was particularly so during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958–69), as the country positioned itself as a modern European nation after decolonization. In its approach and execution, French spatial planning represented the sort of imperious state intervention critiqued by radical spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre. Yet it remained the case that the planners articulated a rich vision of France's future, filled with space and light. Not only that, but they had the means to bring their vision into being. During the mid-1960s, the building of New Towns became central to their thinking. This article revisits spatial planning as a realm of the imagination and considers how the nation's future was portrayed in textual and visual forms. It explores how the translation of dreams into built realities became a source of political tension, and how those tensions found public expression in the visual media.

During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle (1958–1969), state-led spatial planning transformed the Paris region. The aim of the Schéma directeur d'aménagement et d'urbanisme de la région de Paris (1965) was to improve urban life through modernization; but its scale and ambition meant that it came to represent the hubris of state power. This article examines the role of discourse and narrative in state planning. It explores the role of planning discourses in the production of space, as well as stories told about planning by the planners and those who live with their actions. It investigates perceptions of power in post-war France, placing the Gaullist view of the state as a force for good in the context of contemporary critiques of state power. Addressing the relationship between power, resistance, and critique, it sees the environments produced by spatial planning as complex objects of dispute, enmeshed in conflicting hopes and visions of the future.

This article examines Annie Ernaux's Journal du dehors (1993), and its representation of life in the New Towns which emerged on the outskirts of Paris in the post-war period. Revisiting the recent history of urban development around Paris, and in particular the Schéma directeur d'aménagement et d'urbanisme drawn up by Paul Delouvrier in 1965, it sets Ernaux's text in the context of other recent portrayals of life in the Parisian suburbs to argue that what seems at first to be a narrative of alienation, as the narrator is confronted by strange and threatening urban worlds, in fact emerges as one of adaptability, as we watch her become absorbed into the systems and networks designed by the planners. The text offers us a portrait of an individual who is not so much modern as modernised, as she gradually becomes accustomed–or more accurately, conditioned–to life in the New Town.

Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France's Algerian past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship, remain a key preoccupation in both countries. A central role in shaping understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture. This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations are imagined. Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of the Mediterranean – from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers – this new book is the first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range of images and media within this field of visual culture. It shows how the visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics

Clausewitz, the great Prussian strategist, noted that although war has its own "grammar," politics must ultimately provide its "logic."

About a year ago I wrote in these pages that before coming co the Naval War College I had heard some criticism of the curriculum's emphasis on the lessons of history to the neglect of preparation for the present. I found, I noted then, that a judicious balance has been struck between both needs. I went on to discuss our recurring themes as they illuminate problems that have historically taxed the genius of our states­men and military men and that need continual resolution in every age. I described the way the study of these themes is integrated into, indeed constitutes almost half of, our 10-month curriculum.

Media coverage of the Charlie Hebdo crisis was striking for its triangulation of locations which are emblematic of contemporary France. From the banlieue where the attackers grew up, to the public spaces in central Paris where French national values were reasserted, space and its representation emerged as key perspectives from which to consider the events and what they reveal about the current state of the country. This article examines the spatial dynamics of the crisis, its visual representation, and their role in the framing and consumption of the events. It discusses the work of photographer John Perivolaris, who was present in Paris in the week following the crisis during a visit planned before the attacks. His images record how popular reaction was inscribed in public space, how memories of previous moments of resistance were re-enacted, and how shifting forms of protest are indicative of broader pressures at work in contemporary France.