Episodes

  • Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Jan Machielsen, "The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    Dec 20 2024
    In June 1609, two judges left Bordeaux for a territory at the very edge of their jurisdiction, a Basque-speaking province on the Atlantic coast called the Pays de Labourd. In four months, they executed up to 80 women and men for the crime of witchcraft, causing a wave of suspects to flee into Spain and sparking terror there. Witnesses, many of them children, described lurid tales of cannibalism, vampirism, and demonic sex. One of the judges, Pierre de Lancre, published a sensationalist account of this diabolical netherworld. With other accounts seemingly destroyed, this witch-hunt – France's largest – has always been seen through de Lancre's eyes. The narrative, re-told over the centuries, is that of a witch-hunt caused by a bigoted outsider. Newly discovered evidence paints a very different, still darker picture, revealing a secret history underneath de Lancre's well-known tale. Far from an outside imposition, witchcraft was a home-grown problem. Panic had been building up over a number of years and the region was fractured by factionalism and a struggle over scarce resources. The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Jan Machielsen reveals that de Lancre was no outsider; he was a local partisan, married into the Basque nobility. Living at the Franco-Spanish border, the Basques were victims of geography. Geo-politics caused a local conflict which made the witch-hunt inevitable. The same forces eventually sent thousands of religious refugees from Spain to France where they, in turn, became new objects of popular fear and anger. The Basque witch-hunt is justly infamous. This book shows that almost everything historians thought they knew about it is wrong. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    50 mins
  • Marlene L. Daut, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe" (Knopf, 2025)

    Marlene L. Daut, "The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe" (Knopf, 2025)
    Dec 8 2024
    The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) is the essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over: in The First and Last King of Haiti, a brilliant, award-winning Yale scholar unravels the still controversial enigma that he was. Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon’s forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, reuniting with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe—after nine years of his rule as King Henry I—shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet. Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti’s first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south? The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval. Marlene Daut is Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • Richard J. Golsan, "Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)

    Richard J. Golsan, "Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
    Dec 6 2024
    The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France's first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention. Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes Against Humanity (U Toronto Press, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie's many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial. Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    George Steinmetz, "The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Dec 6 2024
    It is only in recent years that sociologists and historians of the social sciences have given empire the attention it deserves in histories of the discipline. In this context, George Steinmetz’s The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (Princeton University Press) is likely to be a touchstone text in these debates. Providing a new history of the French national discipline inspired by a ‘Neo-Bourdieusian Historical Sociology of Science’, Steinmetz highlights the centrality of ‘colonial sociology’, work centered on and/or created in the French overseas colonies and protectorates to the discipline’s development. The French state, eager to consolidate its empire after World War II, were eager to draw on the expertise of sociologists in pursuing this goal; as Steinmetz shows therefore, during this period, a focus on ‘the colonial’ became central to French sociology to the extent that roughly half the French sociological field could be considered ‘colonial sociologists’. Despite this entanglement with the French state these colonial sociologists became strong critics of imperialism. Alongside the many stories he uncovers Steinmetz explores in depth the case of four such colonial sociologists: Raymond Aron, Jacque Berque, Georges Balandier and Pierre Bourdieu, seeking to show not just the centrality of colonialism to each writer but how their experiences of empire formed their basis for their future work; for example, how Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field can be traced to his experiences in colonial Algeria. In our discussion, which also marks the imminent release of the text in paperback, George takes us through this hugely enlightening text, including reflections on why there may have been some ‘disciplinary amnesia’ in sociology’s unwillingness to confront empire, the relations between sociology and other imperial disciplines, how sociologists from the colonies developed their own work, the lessons from his text about how we should confront colonial sociologists and whether Durkheim had an ‘imperial gaze’. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and is the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 57 mins
  • Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Geneviève Rousselière, "Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
    Dec 4 2024
    The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    53 mins
  • Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

    Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
    Dec 3 2024
    This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Published by Cambridge University Press, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 follows the Plague of Provence from 1720 to 1722 to understand new forms of contagion and its management. As one of the last major epidemics of the plague to strike Western Europe, the Plague of Provence generated a public health crisis that impacted the social, commercial, and diplomatic choices of France, which eventually spread the public health crisis to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and their overseas colonies. In this transnational, transoceanic study, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 reveals how crisis in one part of the globe transcends geographic boundaries and influences society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicenter of disaster. Cindy Ermus is the Charles and Linda Wilson Associate Professor in the History of Medicine, and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She specializes in the history of medicine and the environment, especially catastrophe and public health crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. In addition to The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), she is also the author of Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023). Currently, she is at work on a co-authored global history of epidemics (with Claire Edington). Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Verge, Stat News, and The Miami Herald, and she has been a guest on BBC World News, Univision, Al-Jazeera, and others. She is also co-series editor for France Overseas of the University of Nebraska Press, and co-founder and co-executive editor for the digital, open-access publication AgeofRevolutions.com. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Isidro Gonzalez (he/him) is a pre-doctoral fellow of History at Claremont McKenna College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    53 mins
  • Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)

    Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)
    Dec 3 2024
    We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In Lustful Appetites: an Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity, 2024), Dr. Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    52 mins
  • Theara Thun, "Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

    Theara Thun, "Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
    Dec 2 2024
    In Cambodian history most people have heard of the great Khmer empire of Angkor, and the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. But who has heard of the famous story of the sweet cucumber farmer who became king of Cambodia in the fourteenth century? In this original book, Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 (U Hawaii Press, 2024), Theara Thun traces the development of Cambodian historiography, from the royal chronicle tradition of premodern times to modern histories based on Western historical methods introduced by French colonial scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theara discusses the intellectuals – Khmer, French, and maybe surprisingly even Thai - who helped shaped modern Cambodian history writing. He shows that indigenous Cambodian historiographical traditions survive in the present in surprising forms. This is an important contribution to an emerging scholarship on Southeast Asian intellectual history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    48 mins