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WORK TITLE: Natural Interests
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1956
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
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http://www.history.ucla.edu/faculty/caroline-ford * http://www.history.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/ford_cv_web_0.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Duke University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1977; University of Chicago, M.A., Ph.D., 1987.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, reviewer, lecturer, and educator. University of Chicago, lecturer, 1985-88; Harvard University, assistant professor, 1988-92, associate professor, 1992-95; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, associate professor, 1994-2004; University of California Los Angeles, professor of history, 2004—. Presenter at academic conferences and meetings. Bogacizi University, Istanbul, Turkey, visiting professor, 1989.
French Historical Studies, editorial board member, 1997-2001; Journal of Modern History, member of editorial board, 2003—.
MEMBER:American Historical Association, Society for French Historical Studies
AWARDS:Fribourg Foundation predoctoral grant for research in France, 1983-84; Georges Lurcy Educational Trust predoctoral fellowship for research in France, 1983-84; Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies predoctoral fellowship, 1984-85; Georges Lurcy Educational Trust Faculty Fellowship, 1991-91; Pergamon Prize, History of European Ideas, 1992, for article “Which Nation? Language, Identity, and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France, 1993; fellowship and research associate, Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School, 1994-95; UBC/Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada small research grants, 1995-96; Fulbright Faculty Fellowship, L’École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, 1997; Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, research grant, 1998-2001; Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fellowship, 2001-2002; Hampton Grant, University of British Columbia, 2004; named Distinguished University Scholar, University of British Columbia, 2004; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, 2011-12.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, edited by William Hutchinson and Hartmut Lehmann, Harvard Theological Studies (Minneapolis, MN), 1994; Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789, edited by Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett, Bloomsbury Academic (London, England), 1996; The Moral World of the Law, edited by Chris Wickham and Peter Cross, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge, England), 2000; and Encyclopedia of European Social History, edited by Peter Stearns, Scribner (New York, NY), 2001.
Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Journal of Modern History, Past and Present, French Historical Studies, American Historical Review, European History Quarterly, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Gender and History, French Politics and Society, Social History, and the Journal of Economic History.
SIDELIGHTS
Historian and educator Caroline C. Ford was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and grew up in Europe. After completing her Ph.D. in European history at the University of Chicago, she became a lecturer at her alma mater and subsequently took professorships at Harvard University and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In 2004, she became a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Ford teaches courses in various subjects, including French colonialism and the Algerian war, the history of Paris, modern European history, and European landscape and environmental history. Her academic research covers modern France, environmental history, and urban and architectural history.
In her book Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany, Ford “has put together a well-reasoned study that examines the relationship between religion and the development of French national identity in the lower Breton department of Finistere” during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” noted Historian reviewer Stephen D. Carls. Ford’s argument challenges what has long been accepted: that national integration and politicization in France occurred because of the development of modern economic and cultural elements that reduced the effectiveness of, and sometimes eliminated, local political structures. Ford uses as her main example the social Catholic movement and mines information from a substantial collection of primary sources and secondary materials. In this context, she presents significant evidence that French national identity resulted from interaction between the French political center and the political, cultural, and economic identities of rural areas. Carls concluded that Ford’s “work represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of religion in the conflict between regional and national values.”
In Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France, Ford sheds light on the “feminization” of French Catholicism during the nineteenth century, which manifested itself in a proliferation of female religious orders, sentimental forms of religious devotion, and a disproportionate number of female parishioners. The increased participation of French women in religious matters “informed the most vociferous political debates about the power of both the Catholic Church and the secular state,” commented J. P. Daughton in a review in French Politics, Culture, and Society. According to Daughton, “Ford’s central argument is that no single issue electrified anticlerical outrage or informed liberal political discourse on laicite more than male fears about Catholicism’s hold on French mothers, wives, and daughters.”
“Anxieties over women’s relationship to Catholicism led to a reexamination of four issues relevant to all French women’s lives: paternal authority, property relations, women’s role in the family, and women’s civil rights,” Daughton further observed. For example, Ford tells the story of Emily Loveday, whose father, Charles, was a staunch Protestant. Emily converted to Catholicism, entered a convent, and thus escaped the strictures she would have faced if she had remained under her father’s influence. Her story “sets a young woman’s religious freedom (to convert to Catholicism) against her Protestant father’s right to determine his daughter’s future and his family’s religious identity,” observed H-France reviewer Carol E. Harrison.
Reviewers responded favorably to Divided Houses. Church History contributor Clarke Garrett commented that Ford’s “treatment of the complicated topic of religion and the French Revolution is a model of clarity.” Garrett hailed the volume as “an important book, both in its treatment of a subject that had previously been inadequately explored and in its impressive weaving of archival sources.” Harrison similarly remarked: “Divided Houses unravels the tangled connections between gender and the secular ideal primarily through a series of microhistories, episodes in which female religiosity confronted male ambitions to establish a secular social and political order.”
n Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France, Ford combines her academic pursuits in environmental history and modern France. As a writer for the UCLA Newsroom website noted, the book “explores the roots of French environmental consciousness” during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and “shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during that time.” In addition, Ford explains how a substantial amount of legislation, as well as overall environmental consciousness throughout the country, was motivated by aesthetic interests and emotional reactions rather than ecological or environmental concerns.
In a review on the website H-France, Diana K. Davis said that the book “reads beautifully and is well documented.” Davis also thought that Ford successfully “makes the case for a French environmental consciousness that is far older than the post-World War II era.” In conclusion, Davis predicted that “a generation of scholars from history as well as environmentally interested disciplines including geography, sociology, and environmental studies will profit from this lovely book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Church History, June, 2006, Clarke Garrett, review of Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France, p. 438.
French Politics, Culture, and Society, spring, 2008, J. P. Daughton, review of Divided Houses, p. 133.
Historian, summer, 1994, Stephen D. Carls, review of Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany, p. 790.
Theological Studies, December, 2006, Ellen M. Leonard, review of Divided Houses, p. 927.
ONLINE
H-France, http://www.h-france.net (August 1, 2006), Carol E. Harrison, review of Divided Houses; (January 1, 2017), Diana K. Davis, review of Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France.
UCLA Newsroom, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/ (November 3, 2016), “Caroline Ford’s New Book Explores French Environmental Consciousness.”
University of California Los Angeles Department of History Website, http://www.history.ucla.edu/ (September 14, 2017), faculty profile and curriculum vitae.
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Caroline Ford Department of History University of California, Los Angeles 6365 Bunche Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473 Tel. (310) 825-1235 cford@history.ucla.edu Higher EducationUniversity of Chicago: M.A., Ph.D. in Modern European History, June 1987 Duke University: B.A., December 1977, summa cum laudeAcademic PositionsDepartment of History Professor—7/04 to present University of California, Los Angeles Department of History Associate Professor --7/95-7/04 University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Harvard University Associate Professor –7/92-7/95 Department of History Assistant Professor--7/88-7/92 University of Chicago Lecturer--1987-88 Department of History 1985-86 Bogacizi University Visiting Professor Istanbul, Turkey summer 1999 PublicationsBooksDivided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Nature and Artifice: Culture and Conservation in France and her Colonies, book manuscript in preparation, under contract with Harvard University Press. Articles
2“Nature’s Fortunes: New Directions in the Writing of European Environmental History,” Journal of Modern History, forthcoming. “Nature, Culture and Conservation in France and her Colonies, 1840-1940, Past and Present, no. 183 (May 2004): 173-198. "Landscape and Environment in French Geographical and Historical Thought: New Directions ," French Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 125-134. "Nationalism," in Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed.Peter Stearns, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 499-508. "The Use and Practices of Tradition in the Politicization of Rural France in the Nineteenth Century," in La politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle (France, Italie, Espagne, Portugal, et Grèce), ed. Maurice Agulhon and Gilles Pécout (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2000), pp. 327-341 "Story-Telling and the Social Imagery of Religious Conflict in Nineteenth-Century French Courts: The Case of Jeanne-Françoise LeMonnier," in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Chris Wickham and Peter Coss, Past and Present Publications, (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 161-77. "Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France," French Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 101-112. "Female Martyrdom and the Politics of Sainthood in Nineteenth-Century France: The Cult of Sainte Philomène" in Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789, ed. Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (London, 1996), pp. 115-34. "Private Lives and Public Order in Restoration France: The Seduction of Emily Loveday," American Historical Review ,99, no. 1 (Feb. 1994): 21-43. "Religion and French Identity: A Response to Thomas Kselman" in Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William Hutchinson and Hartmut Lehmann, Harvard Theological Studies (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 81-83. "Religion and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe" Journal of Modern History 65 ( March 1993): l52-175. "Which Nation? Language, Identity, and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France," History of European Ideas17 (January 1993): 31-46. "Religion and the Politics of Cultural Change in Provincial France: The Resistance of 1902 in Lower Brittany," Journal of Modern History 62 (March, 1990): 1-33. TranslationsTranslation of “Justice, History and Memory in France: Reflections on the Papon Trial” by Henry Rousso for Politics and the Past: Reparations for Historical Injustice, ed. John Torpey (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Caroline Ford and Keith Michael Baker, "Reports of Popular Unrest" (1789), "A Parish Priest's Views of Seigneurial Dues" (1789), "Proceedings of the Convention" (5
3September 1793), Saint Just's "Report on Behalf of the Committee on Public Safety" (10 October 1793), "The Revolutionary Calendar", and "A Description of the Festival of the Supreme Being," translations in Readings in Western Civilization, Vol. VII: The Old Regime and the French Revolution, ed. Keith Baker (University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 208-226, 342-368, 384-391. Book ReviewsReview of Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Royal Historical Society, 2004), American Historical Review, forthcoming. Review of Cock and Bull Stories: Folco de Baroncelli and the Invention of the Camargue(Lincoln: University fo Nebraska Press, 2004), European History Quarterly, forthcoming. Review of A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823-2000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), Journal of Interdisciplinary History, forthcoming. Review of Karine Salomé, Les îles bretonnes: Une image en construction (1750-1914)(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003), H-France Review, vol. 5, June 2005, no. 61. Review of Léon Harmel : Entrepreneur as Catholic Reformer (Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) American Historical Review , 110, no. 1 (Feb. 2005) : 233-35. Review of Gabrielle Houbre, Grandeur et décadence de Marie Isabelle, modiste, dresseuse de chevaux, femme d’affaires, etc. (Paris: Perrin, 2003) Clio : Histoire, femmes et sociétés, no. 20 (2004). Review of The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 by David A. Bell. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001) Social History, 29 (May 2004): 259-61. Review of The Origins of Nature Conservation in Italy by James Sievert. (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), Journal of Modern History, 75, no. 1 (March 2003): 191-93. Review of Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-30by Sheryl Kroen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Journal of Modern History, 74, no. 3 (September 2002): 652-55. Review of Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France by Tamara Whited (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Journal of Economic History, (March 2002): 234-36. Review of France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times by Raymond Jonas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), French Politics and Society, 19, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 123-25. Review of L'amour en toutes lettres: Questions à l'abbé Viollet sur la sexualité (1924-43) by Martine Sevegrand (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996) and Les enfants de bon Dieu: Les catholiques français et la procréation au XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), Journal of Modern History, 72, no. 4 (December, 2000): 1040-42
4Review of The Invisible Code: Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France 1814-48 by William Reddy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), French Politics and Society 16, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 84-86. Review of James K. Lehning, Peasant & French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Journal of Modern History, 69, no. 2 (June 1997): 473-4. Review of Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750-1910 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) and Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria and Reading Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, l994), Gender and History, 8, no. 2 (August 1996): 292-94. Review of Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Franceby Michael Paul Driskell (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), Journal of Modern History, 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 440-42. Review of Religion et cultures en Bretagne, 1850-1950 (Paris: Fayard,l992), Journal of Modern History, 67. No. 1 (March 1995): 173-74. Review of The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), European History Quarterly, 24, no. 4 (October 1994): 580-2. Review of 'We are not French': Language, Culture and Identity in Brittany by Maryon McDonald (London: Routledge, 1989), French Politics and Society, 11, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 71-75. "French Religious Histories," in Revue: A Survey of French Culture and Society (Spring 1991): 36-40. Review of Matériaux pour l'histoire religieuse du peuple français, XIXe-XXe siècles, eds. Fernand Boulard and Yves-Marie Hilaire (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, l987) Journal of Modern History, 63, no. 2 (June l99l): 399-401. Review of Peasants, Politicians and Producers: The Organisation of Agriculture in France since 1918 by M.C. Cleary (Cambridge University Press, 1989), French History, (Dec. 1990): 540-42. Review of The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century by Judith Devlin (New Haven: Yale University Press,1987), Journal of Modern History, 62, no. 3 (September, 1990): 620-22. Review of Communities of Belief by Robin Briggs (Oxford University Press, 1989) French Politics and Society 8 (Summer 1990): 104-107. Review of Quinze générations de Bas-Bretons: Parenté et société dans le paysbigouden sud, 1720-1980 by Martine Segalen (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1985). Journal of Modern History 62, no. 1 (March, 1990): 147-49. Academic Honors, Grants, Fellowships, PrizesDistinguished University Scholar, University of British Columbia, 2004 Hampton Grant, University of British Columbia, 2004
5Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Fellowship, 2001-2002 Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, research grant for "French Landscapes and the Urban Social Imagination in 20th-Century France" 1998-2001 Fulbright Faculty Fellowship ,(1//97-6/97), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France UBC/Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada small research grants (1995-96) Fellow and Research Associate, Women's Studies in Religion Program, Harvard Divinity School (1994-95) C. Boyden Gray Career Development Fund, Harvard University(1991-95) Pergamon Prize for "Which Nation? Language, Identity, and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France,” History of European Ideas (January, 1993) Georges Lurcy Educational Trust Faculty Fellowship (7/91-7/92--support for sabbatical leave) The Clark Fund, summer research grants, Harvard University (1989--1991) Norman Foundation Summer Fellowship (1989) Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies pre doctoral fellowship (6/84--6/85) Georges Lurcy Educational Trust pre doctoral fellowship for research in France (9/83-6/84) Fribourg Foundation pre doctoral grant for research in France (9/83--6/84) Fulbright pre doctoral fellowship (1984-85; declined) Bessie Louise Pierce Fund, University of Chicago (10/81--6/82) Selected Talks and Conference Papers“Settler Identity and The Creation of Environmental Knowledges in Colonial Algeria,” UCLA History Department European History and Culture Colloquium, May 2005. “Reboisement, Colonisation et Civilisation: Environmental Knowledges iin Colonial Algeria,” Society for French Historical Studies annual meeting, Stanford University, March 2005. “Between the Public and the Private: Laïcité and the Challenge of Islam in Modern France,” UCLA Humanities Consortium Andrew W. Mellon Seminar Series, Nations and Identites: The Secularization Thesis, March 2005.
6“’Les femmes voilées’: Religion, Gender and the Veil in Modern France,” Conference in Honour of Olwen Hufton: Gender, Religion, Poverty and Revolution, New College, Oxford, July 2004. Roundtable on “Multiculturalism in Europe: Beyond the Veil,” Institute for European Studies, University of British Columbia, January 2004. “Taming Nature: The Transformation of Environmental Sensibilities in France,” University of Sussex, UK, May 2003. “Environmental Knowledge in a French Perspective,” Boston College, May 2003. “Environment & History in the French Urban Imagination,” Conference on Cultural Returns: Assessing the Place of Culture in Social Thought, organized by the Pavis Centre, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, September 2002. “Changing Nature and the Politics of Conservation in Modern France,” Thirteenth Georges Rudé Conference, Hobart, Tasmania, July 2002. “Nature, Culture, and Conservation in the French Social Imagination,” Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Research, University of British Columbia, March 2002. “Preservation and Conservation in France,” Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, University of London, February 2002. “Les femmes en religion au XIXe siècle,” Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, February, 2002. “Relligion, Genre et la culture du républicanisme en France au XIXe siècle,” Université de Paris VII, December 2001. “Laïcité et républicanisme en France,” Centre National de Recherches Scientifiques, Paris, December 2001. “Nature, Culture, and the Politics of Conservation in Modern France,” Stanford University, Humanities Center, October 2001. “Forest Conservation and the Fate of Nature in Nineteenth-Century France,” City University of New York Graduate Center, April 2001. “Nature, Culture and the Politics of Forestry in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century France,” University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, November 2000. “The Re-Enchantment of the Forest: Fontainebleau and the Urban Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century France,” UBC Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century Studies, October 2000. “Religion and the Education of Women in the Nineteenth Century: The Dames de Sacré Coeur,” Barat College, Evanston, Illinois, April 2000. “”Landscape and Geography in French Historical Writing,” Department of History, University of California, Irvine, March 2000. "Rural Landscapes, French Identity and the Urban Social Imagination," Department of History, University of California, San Diego, December 1998.
7"Feminization of Religion in Nineteenth-Century France," Conference, Religious Differences in France: Past and Present, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, April 1998. “Between the City and the Country in Late Nineteenth-Century France,” Department of History, University of Connecticut, November 1998. “’Fanatiques et dévotes imbéciles’: Women in the French Revollution,” Department of History, University of California, Irvine, June 1998. “Religion and Family Law in 19th-Century France,” Institute of French Studies, New York University, February 1998. "Culture and Politics in France," Conference, Boundaries, Politics and Culture in the French Third Republic, University of Michigan, October 1997. "La politisation des campagnes en France," University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy, June 1997. "Religion and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century France," Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, April 1997. "The Use and Practices of Tradition in Rural France in the Nineteenth Century," Ecole Française de Rome, Rome, Italy, February 1997. "Towards a New Cultural History of the Restoration," Conference, Theodore Gericault:The Alien Body, Tradition in Chaos, Belkin Art Gallery and Department of Fine Arts, University of British Columbia, October 1996. “Fanatiques et Dévotes Imbéciles: Women in the Religious Discourse of the French Revolution,” Conference: Power and the Sacred, Center for West European Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, April 1996. "Story-Telling and the Social Imagery of Religious Conflict in Nineteenth Century France: The Case of Jeanne-Françoise LeMonnier," Past and Present Society, Birmingham, UK, July 1996. "A Religious House Divided: The Marquise de Guerry vs. the Community of Picpus," Western Society for French History, Orcas Island, Washington, Oct. 1992, AHA Annual Meeting (Dec. 1993) and Cornell University, Oct. 1994, Oxford University, February 1995. "National Identity Reconsidered," Conference: Worrying about French Identity, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, March 1994 . “A Religious House Divided: The Marquise de Guerry vs. the Community of Picpus,” American Historical Association, San Francisco, December 1993. "Identities and Identity Formation in Modern France," Department of History, University of California, Irvine, January 1993. "Which Nation? Language, Identity and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France," Past and Present Society, Oxford, June 1992. "Private Lives and Public Order in Restoration France: The Case of Emily Loveday." Society for the Study of French History, London, March 30- April 1, 1992. French History Group of the New York Area, New School for Social Research, May 1992.
8"Religion and Nationalism in France and Ireland," German Historical Institute, Conference, Religion and Nationalism, 1880-1920, Washington, D.C., June 1991. “Language, Identity, and Republican Politics in Post-Revolutionary France,” Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, Annual Meeting, Baton Rouge, March 1991. "National Identity and Revolutionary Memory in Napoleonic France," American Historical Association , Annual Meeting, New York, December 1990. Service:American Historical Association, Committee for the award of the Herbert Baxter Adam Prize (best first book in European history), four-year term, 2005-- Editorial Board, Journal of Modern History, three-year term, 2003--- Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, National Fellowship for Doctoral Candidates, 2003. Executive Committee, Modern History Section, American Historical Association, 2001-2004. Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Adjudication Committee (2000-2001, 2002-2003) and Faculty Associate, 2000-2004. Editorial Board Member, French Historical Studies, 1997-2001. Executive Council Member, Society for French Historical Studies, 1997-2000. Social Science Research Council (New York) International Dissertation Fellowship Final Selection Committee 1997 –2001. American Historical Association—member Society for French Historical Studies—member
Caroline Ford
PROFESSOR
CLASS WEBSITES
CURRICULUM VITAE
CONTACT INFORMATION
Email cford@history.ucla.edu
Office 5254 Bunche Hall
Phone 310-206-9607 Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Caroline Ford grew up in Europe.
She completed her Ph.D. in European history at the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University (1988-1995) as an assistant and associate professor, and then at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada (1995-2004) as associate professor, before joining UCLA as professor of history in July 2004.
Her first book, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton University Press, 1993) explores religion, nation formation, and the creation of regional and religious identities in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her second book, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2005), focuses on the feminization of religion in postrevolutionary France and its impact on the civil/political status of women and the creation of a distinctive laïc republican political culture by the early twentieth century. She has recently finished a book manuscript on the transformation of environmental sensibilities in France between 1789 and 1940, which has been published as Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France" (Harvard University Press, 2016), and she has begun to do research on a new book-length project on the Paris housing crisis and the emergence of architectural modernism, 1894 to 1940.
Caroline Ford teaches courses on modern France, French colonialism and the Algerian war, the history of Paris, modern European History, and European landscape and environmental history in comparative perspective.
A recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, she was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 2011-12.
Selected Publications
Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France (Harvard University Press, 2016)
"The Inheritance of Empire and the Ruins of Rome in French Colonial Algeria," in eds. Paul Betts and Corey Ross, Heritage in the Modern World: Historical Preservation in Global Perspective, Past and Present Supplement 10, 226 (Feb. 2015): 57-77.
"National Parks and Natural Reserves in French Colonial Africa," in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler and Patrick Kupper (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012)
"Museums After Empire in Metropolitan and Overseas France," Journal of Modern History 83, no. 3 (September 2010): 625-61.
"'Peasants Into Frenchmen' Thirty Years After" in a dossier on "Revisiting Eugen Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen" in French Politics, Culture and Society 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 84-93.
Co-editor with Tamara Whited of a special issue, "New Directions in French Environmental History," French Historical Studies, 32, no. 3 (Summer 2009).
"Reforestation, Landscape Conservation, and the Anxieties of Empire in French Colonial Algeria" American Historical Review (April, 2008): 341-362. Winner of the William Koren, Jr. Prize, 2009.
“Eugen Weber: El historiador como Viajero,” Historia Social 62 (2008): 121-31.
"Nature's Fortunes: New Directions in European Environmental History," Journal of Modern History (March 2007).
Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2005).
“Nature, Culture, and Conservation in France and Her Colonies, 1840-1940,” Past and Present, no. 183 (May 2004): 173-198.
“Nationalism,” in Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. Peter Stearns, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 2001).
“Landscape and Environment in French Geographical and Historical Thought: New Directions in French Historical Writing,” French Historical Studies, vol. 24 (Winter 2001).
“The Use and Practices of Tradition in the Politicization of Rural France in the Nineteenth Century,” in La politisation des campagnes au XIXe siècle (France, Italie, Espagne, Portugal, et Grèce), eds. Maurice Agulhon et Gilles Pécout (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2001).
“Story-Telling and the Social Imagery of Religious Conflict in 19th-Century France: The Case of Jeanne Francoise Le Monnier,” in The Moral World of the Law, eds., Chris Wickham and Peter Coss, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
“Violence and the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1998).
Creating the Nation In Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton University Press, 1993).
Research
Modern France, environmental history; urban and architectural history
Graduate Students
Lauren Janes (Ph.D. 2011)
Deborah Bauer (Ph.D. 2013)
Rachel Schley (Ph.D. 2015)
Roii Ball
Caroline Ford's new book explores French environmental consciousness
UCLA Newsroom | November 03, 2016
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Caroline Ford
UCLA
Professor of history Caroline Ford
Caroline Ford's new book, "Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France," explores the roots of French environmental consciousness in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ford shows how French society began to understand how humans adversely affected their surroundings during that time.
Popular writers like Francois-Antoine Rauch demonstrated how deforestation altered the climate and damaged the habitability of the nation. War, revolution and a series of devastating floods brought the questions of deforestation, urbanization and industrial capitalism into conflict with the finite resources of nature, according to Ford. Public worries over resource depletion and climate change mingled with a new bourgeois consciousness developing in the 19th century. France’s countryside became a place of romantic longing for families, a source of inspiration for artists, and an important symbol of national pride.
Ford teaches courses on modern France, French colonialism and the Algerian war, the history of Paris, modern European history, and European landscape and environmental history in comparative perspective. She completed her Ph.D. in European history at the University of Chicago and taught at Harvard University (1988-1995) as an assistant and associate professor. She then joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, (1995-2004) as associate professor before taking her current position at UCLA as professor of history in July 2004.
Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France
J.P. Daughton
French Politics, Culture and Society. 26.1 (Spring 2008): p133.
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Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Over the last few years, historians of modern France have shown an unprecedented level of interest in a subject long neglected: Catholicism. Outstanding works by Ruth Harris, Raymond Jonas, Suzanne Kaufman, and others have demanded a reassessment of the common assumption, so often promoted by ardent republicans since the Revolution, that Catholicism was little more than a vestige of the Old Regime that stood at odds with the development of the modern nation-state. Instead, recent studies have offered a complex image of both faith and the Church in nineteenth-century France that shows Catholics to have been far more engaged with and responsive to the hallmarks of "modernity"--from science and medicine to consumerism and entrepreneurial schemes--than many historians have traditionally acknowledged. The Catholic Church no doubt offered many believers a place to recoil from and react against an increasingly liberal and anticlerical state. But it now seems indisputable that many nineteenth-century French men and especially women found in Catholicism a surprisingly open venue from which they could articulate complex political perspectives as well as address anxieties about a rapidly changing world.
Caroline Ford's Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France complements in an original way the recent wave of books on Catholicism's role in modern French politics and society. At the core of Ford's book is an examination of how the "feminization" of Catholicism in the nineteenth century--exemplified by the increased percentage of female parishioners, the proliferation of female orders, and the "sentimentalization" of forms of devotion--informed the most vociferous political debates about the power of both the Catholic Church and the secular state. Ford's central argument is that no single issue electrified anticlerical outrage or informed liberal political discourse on laicite more than male fears about Catholicism's hold on French mothers, wives, and daughters. In analyzing and plotting the development of anticlerical discourse, Ford asserts that anxieties over women's relationship to Catholicism led to a reexamination of four issues relevant to all French women's lives: paternal authority, property relations, women's role in the family, and women's civil rights.
Divided Houses is a short book with a very broad scope: it begins in the seventeenth century and ends with reflections on debates about Muslim schoolgirls and the veil in France today. But its primary terrain is the "long" nineteenth century, and, for Ford, the French Revolution witnessed a pivotal transformation of the discourse about the feminization of Catholicism. In a powerful opening chapter that sets the stage for the study as a whole, Ford shows how male revolutionaries, particularly in the wake of the 1790 vote on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, increasingly defined women as counterrevolutionary "fanatiques" under the dangerous spell of a corrupt papacy. Such fears made the radicalization of the Revolution all the more devastating for women, religious and secular alike. Male anxieties about female religiosity ultimately led to the exclusion of women first from the Revolution (prone to piety, they were deemed enemies of republicanism), and ultimately from all civic and political participation in the nation--a legacy that would haunt French women for over a century.
The subsequent chapters move the story along chronologically as well as thematically via four microhistories, three of which deal directly with legal cases. The widespread concern that women were regularly seduced or kidnapped by religious orders against their will is the subject of the first two studies. Ford argues that, in addition to solidifying the lines of battle over religion, charges that Catholic organizations perpetrated "rapts de seduction" raised a number of fundamental legal and political questions. By exploring cases like that of Douglas Charles Loveday, a Protestant Englishman living in France who contended that his Catholic-convert daughter had been kidnapped by a convent, and that of Jeanne-Francoise Le Monnier, a nun in Bayeux who accused her superior of incarcerating her in an insane asylum, Ford shows that basic questions about paternal authority, the state's right to intervene in family conflicts, and the civil status of women remained largely unresolved during the Restoration and July Monarchy. One of the ironic twists in Ford's story is how adversaries lined up on these issues. In Loveday's case, for example, it was anticlerical liberals who stepped up to defend paternal authority, while Catholic reactionaries supported the individual rights of his daughter to practice the religion of her choice. Anxieties over female religiosity, it seems, upended even the most intractable ideologies.
The third microhistory leaves the world of legal disputes in order to examine the meaning of the hugely popular cult of Sainte Philomene, a martyr said to have been tortured and killed for having spurned the sexual advances of Diocletian in the third century (though later archeological studies cast doubt on the legend). Ford argues that Philomene, who steadfastly protected her purity in the face of an aggressive pagan, both reflected women's daily concerns about sexual violence and came to represent the embattled Church as a whole. By comparing the saint with similar stories of secular female martyrs of the French Revolution, Ford links this microhistory with the others by demonstrating how "the female image was at the symbolic center of the post-revolutionary struggle between the Catholic Church and a secularizing state" (115). But, interesting as her close reading of martyrdom is, the chapter seems somewhat out of step with the book's central engagement with the language of anticlericalism and the rise of laicite.
The final case study brings the story back to the book's central theme. By telling the story of a wealthy nun, Madame de Guerry, who became embroiled in a property dispute when her religious order refused to return her savings after she announced her departure, the chapter explores debates over the rights of individuals and associations under the Second Empire. Ford concludes by arguing that cases such as Madame de Guerry's (as well as Loveday's and Le Monnier's) "stirred up" the public because they highlighted the arbitrary power of the Church and empowered politicians and bureaucrats to check the influence of Catholic organizations. The Church's treatment and manipulation of women, Ford argues, became a central part of the "male bourgeois political culture" (136) that was larger than republicanism. The book makes a convincing case against the common notion that anticlericalism was largely about galvanizing the center and the Left against a common foe in the early decades of the Third Republic. Ford adeptly argues that the French state was well on the road to laicization decades before Gambetta ever thundered, "Clericalism--there is the enemy!"
Divided Houses is rich in many ways. It is, first and foremost, a skillful blending of cultural and legal history. Ford is at her strongest when closely analyzing legal arguments, memoires judiciaires, as well as the pamphlets and newspaper articles generated by the cases. The creation of anticlerical discourse is her primary focus, and the choice of microstudies allows for more detailed analysis of various narrative strategies, rhetorical devices, and storytelling (all terms that Ford herself employs) than a general history of the period could. This analysis places the rhetoric of specific moments within the context of broader political debates and public outcries about Catholicism and the state so that the big picture is never lost in the details. As such, the book should be a model for anyone interested in the relationship between legal narrative strategies and the formation of political discourse in nineteenth-century France.
The focus on discourse, however, will likely disappoint some readers. Throughout, the women so often the subject of the debates discussed in the book are surprisingly quiet. Instead, male lawyers, politicians, and pamphleteers occupy center stage. Their words most frequently express male anxieties, though women's concerns are not entirely lost in the process. Ford's attention to detail allows for insightful reflection on how legal uncertainties about religious associations allowed women a space in which they could challenge paternal authority and "press their claires for freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, and freedom to dispose of their property" (143). But at a number of points in the book--especially in the section on the Sainte Philomene cult--the reader is left with little sense of what drew women to faith and Catholicism in the first place. Such attention to the experiences of "lived religion," which Ford concedes is essential to understanding the significance and meaning of religiosity (100), would make the analysis in these microhistories all the more engaging and rewarding.
The book's reliance on individual "affairs" also presents some limitations. None of the chosen cases deals directly and extensively with girls' education, an unfortunate omission considering how central it was to anticlerical legislators during the Third Republic, as well as to the foulard controversy in France today. Such a discussion of girls' schooling could have exposed further paradoxes considering that, as late as the 1880s, even some staunch republicans remained ambivalent about it, believing a religious education to be essential to girls' moral development. Also lacking from the chosen studies is any mention of the French Empire, despite the fact that thousands of women who flocked to Catholic organizations in the nineteenth century lived in France's overseas territories. Missionary sisters in places like Guyana, New Caledonia, and Tahiti often fulfilled what would become the "civilizing mission" by teaching, nursing, running orphanages and leper colonies, and otherwise serving what were often the only French outposts in distant possessions. A consideration of whether these women and their organizations were seen as pariahs or patriots would have added an intriguing dimension to the metropolitan story.
But it is clear that Ford has not set out to write an all-encompassing history of religious women and the politics of anticlericalism. She shows a mastery of the secondary literature on an impressive array of subjects and is cognizant of what she has chosen not to write about. Instead, the book is a series of essayistic studies of how the perceived problem of female religiosity has fuelled anticlericalism and laicite in modern France. Lest we think it to be a distant chapter in French history, Ford rightly reminds us that this "problem" still looms in recent controversies over headscarf-wearing Muslim schoolgirls. While a number of French commentators have recently tried to suggest that policies banning veils at school are designed to promote social unity and not intended to attack individual girls or Islam, Divided Houses offers the important historical corrective that laicite was indeed originally born of discord over women and religion. Nineteenth-century anticlericalism has rarely seemed so relevant to the contemporary world.
Review by J. P. Daughton, Stanford University
Daughton, J.P.
Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France
Ellen M. Leonard
Theological Studies. 67.4 (Dec. 2006): p927.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.ts.mu.edu/
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DIVIDED HOUSES: RELIGION AND GENDER IN MODERN FRANCE. By Caroline Ford. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 2005. Pp. xi + 170. $35.
Caroline Ford explores the impact of the feminization of Catholicism on the development of secular French republican culture (8-9). Although the feminization of Catholicism was not a new phenomenon, France's revolutionary experience, according to F., transformed that feminization and had profound consequences for the civil and political status of French women in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the work focuses on the 19th-century rise of female religious congregations. The book is constructed around four microhistories that provide windows onto the social and political processes of postrevolutionary France. During the 19th century, active, noncloistered communities offered women opportunities that were denied them elsewhere. According to F., the rapidly rising number of women who entered these congregations threatened the authority of family, church, and state, spurring conflicts over paternal authority and property rights. Although feminism and drives for the political emancipation of women were relatively weak in France, F. documents how a number of 19th-century women religious used the language of individual rights to argue for freedom to respond to their vocation and to dispose of their property. F. has also provided a historical and gendered dimension to contemporary conflicts in France. She suggests that the debate over Moslem girls wearing the veil in French classrooms is rooted in France's earlier 19th-century struggle to establish a secular nation in reaction to Catholicism. In doing so the author has presented aspects of the impact of women religious communities that have been previously overlooked.
ELLEN M. LEONARD
St. Michael's College, Toronto
Leonard, Ellen M.
Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France
Clarke Garrett
Church History. 75.2 (June 2006): p438.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 American Society of Church History
http://www.churchhistory.org/church-history-journal/
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Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. By Caroline Ford. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. xi + 171 pp. $35.00 cloth.
In the introduction to the series of related case studies or "microhistories" that comprises her book, Caroline Ford defines her task as the exploration of "the political and cultural significance of nineteenth-century understandings of female religiosity" (5). She is interested not only in the stories themselves but also in what they meant to the general public, through a careful analysis of the highly charged language and rhetoric that the various disputes and controversies produced, interpreted in terms of the evolving "discourse" that was engendered by the greatly increased presence of women in the French Catholic Church.
In her introduction, Ford carefully sets out the larger issues that her case studies will demonstrate. Her characterization of the role of women in nineteenth-century French Catholicism is richer and more complex than has sometimes been the case. Women indeed were socially and legally subordinate to men and in most cases were defined by their familial roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. When they instead chose the religious life, however, they acquired, at least potentially, a degree of power and independence that challenged that subordination.
Ford contends that although anticlericalism had long been a force in France, in the nineteenth century it became more intense in part because of the remarkable proliferation of new female religious orders, which thrived despite their lack of formal legal or juridical recognition in post-Revolutionary France. They thus gave some of the impetus to what Ford calls "the great secular crusade" (16) against the role of religion in the French state. While the crusade had largely accomplished its goals by 1918, in an epilogue Ford argues that the recent controversy over the wearing of Muslim headscarves by North African female students demonstrates that the issue is far from being resolved.
Ford traces the evolution of female religion from the Counter Reformation, in which women played a prominent role not only in cloistered communities but also in communities involved in the world, engaged in teaching, nursing, and charitable work with the poor. By the eighteenth century, these developments coincided with a marked decrease in male religious observance in many regions, notably in the south of France. Her treatment of the complicated topic of religion and the French Revolution is a model of clarity, although she relies too much on zealously anticlerical historians like Jules Michelet, Michel Vovelle, and Mona Ozouf, whose conclusions have been modified in important ways by a number of American and English historians.
Among the four microhistories, the first is crucial to Ford's larger purpose and is exceptionally interesting as well. It is the story of a petition that an Englishman named Douglas Loveday presented to the French government in 1821, protesting his daughter Emily's conversion to Catholicism and her flight to a convent. As the case unfolded, Ford demonstrates, it became an example of one of the most popular literary forms of the day, a melodrama, in which the Loveday family's private conflicts and disagreements received wide publicity in pamphlets and newspapers. Coinciding as it did with the founding of new female religious orders and the creation of mission societies dedicated to returning the "dechristianized" areas of France to the Catholic fold, the Loveday affair led Liberals to abandon their Enlightenment principles and support the claims of the father. The Conservative majority, similarly, in order to protect the role of the Church, rejected the father's claims and affirmed Emily Loveday's civil and legal autonomy. After further complaints reached the government expressing concern at the threat that the irregular status of female religious congregations might pose to family stability and patriarchal power, in 1825 the legislature granted legal recognition to female orders that requested it and that engaged in public service.
The least persuasive of the case studies concerns what Ford calls "The Politics of Sainthood." It focuses on the enormous but short-lived popularity of a new saint, Philomene, allegedly a Christian martyr whose skeleton had been discovered in Rome and whose story had been revealed in a series of visions recounted by a nun in Naples. By the twentieth century, the cult of Saint Philomene had largely disappeared. She was removed from the calendar of saints in 1961.
It is certainly an interesting story, but Ford tries to make too much of it, connecting Philomene to the ephemeral cults of female Revolutionary martyrs, to the twentieth-century cults of Therese of Lisieux and Joan of Arc, and to the anthropological theories of Mary Douglas. Ford proposes that Philomene's story is "a manifestation of a 'lived religion' experienced by men and--more significantly--women in nineteenth-century France" (100), but she fails to develop this insight sufficiently.
Divided Houses is an important book, both in its treatment of a subject that had previously been inadequately explored and in its impressive weaving of archival sources, legal records, and theoretical perspectives ranging across the historical spectrum. It is surely to the credit of the author that the only major complaint is that at fewer than 150 pages, the book is too brief. A more extended conclusion, drawing together what had gone before and proposing suggestions for further research, would have been welcome.
Clarke Garrett
Dickinson College, Emeritus
Garrett, Clarke
Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity inBrittany
Stephen D. Carls
The Historian. 56.4 (Summer 1994): p790.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc.
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Caroline Ford has put together a well-reasoned study that examines the relationship between religion and the development of French national identity in the lower Breton department of Finistere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She challenges the commonly held view that the emergence of national integration and politicization in France were the result of the introduction of modern economic and cultural forces that broke down local political forms. Using the social Catholic movement in Finistere as her main focus, Ford convincingly argues that national identity did not necessarily come from the imposition of fixed values from the political center on rural areas but rather through an ongoing process of interaction between the two.
In her careful analysis of religion in Finistere, Ford shows how the area's social Catholic movement evolved into a promoter of national unity at the end of the nineteenth century and served as a bridge between the political demands of the state and the cultural attachments of the Bretons. Although she concedes that religious institutions did resist state attempts at national integration, she contends that they served as a force for unity as well.
According to Ford, a key development in the social Catholic movement came in the early 1890s when the lower clergy of Finistere began to reject royalism, to question their long-standing alignment with the nobility, and to accept the Third Republic through their support of political candidates from the social Catholic movement. The lower clergy defied the church hierarchy, which sought to continue its policy of resistance to the Republic's secular orientation. In the process of shifting their emphasis from charitable deeds to the need for social justice, the democratic priests used both traditional and modern means of dissemination to promote their ideas. An early turning point in the lower clergy's efforts was the election in 1894 of their candidate, Albert de Mun, to the Chamber of Deputies, an event that Ford characterizes as the "beginning of the conversion of the region to Christian democracy" (127).
When treating the subject of social Catholicism in Finistere in the early twentieth century, Ford shows how the movement benefited from the state's anticlerical policies, and how conservative papal policies, culminating in the condemnation in 1910 of the progressive Catholic organization, Sillon, fragmented the social Catholic movement and contributed to the declericalization of its leadership in Finistere. A lay leadership of republican Catholics with political aspirations emerged and revitalized the movement through the formation of the Federation des Republicains Democrates du Finistere (FRDF), a political organization that stressed both national unity and regional interests. Ford demonstrates how this silloniste party came to dominate politics in interwar Finistere and how it helped form, in 1924, France's first national party of Christian democracy - the Parti Democrate Populaire.
Ford's book provides the reader with a fresh interpretation based on a vast array of archival and secondary sources. Though marred by distracting editorial slips in areas like French accent marks and capitalization, her work represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of religion in the conflict between regional and national values.
Stephen D. Carls Union University
H-France ReviewVolume 17(2017)Page 1H-France Review Vol. 17 (January 2017), No. 13Caroline Ford, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. x + 281 pp. Maps, table, figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-6740-4590-3.Review by Diana K. Davis, University of California at Davis.This is a notable book that reads beautifully and is well documented. Natural Interestsadds to the growing literature on French and European environmental history, as well as global environmental history. In seven substantial chapters, a useful introduction, and conclusion, Caroline Ford makes the case for a French environmental consciousness that is far older than the post-World War II era. Several interesting illustrations and two maps accompany the text. One of the book’s many strengths is the way it gathers previously disparate historical information and notions about the environment in France into a single coherent text that spans nearly one and a half centuries.Chapters one and two emphasize the importance of forests in the French environmental imaginary in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ford chooses a detailed discussion of a few figures as a way to convey what were becoming more mainstream ideas about the environment in France by the early nineteenth century. Chapter one explores a lesser-known nineteenth-century engineer and geographer, François-Antoine Rauch, and his emphasis on the state’s duty to protect forests to maintain a “civilized” climate. Chapter two broadens to consider three well-known figures in the debates about deforestation and reforestation, namely Jean-Baptiste Rougier de la Bergerie, Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès and Antoine-César Becquerel. As has been noted by authors such as Tamara Whited, among others, these nineteenth-century discussions and debates ultimately resulted in significant legislation being promulgated, governing reforestation and “regrassing” of mountainous regions in France and some of its colonial territories.Detailed information about floods in France is provided in Chapter three. This chapter expands what is primarily a focus on elite views of the environment in much of the rest of the book to include some views ‘from below’ in the form of popular photography, various forms of writing, painting and theater. It makes very clear, with extensive documentation, the great extent of many floods in France from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth and the frequency with which they occurred.In one of the most innovative sections in the book, Chapter four analyzes the importance of nostalgia and heritage to environmental thinking and nascent environmental protection. With a primary focus on the forest of Fontainebleau, Ford argues that this forest was the first to be conceived of as a natural museum of sorts and that this, among other drivers including art and tourism, facilitated its eventual designation as an “artistic reserve” with certain protections in 1861. With this chapter, she articulates one of her main arguments in the book, that much environmental consciousness and legislation in France from this time forward was motivated by aesthetic concerns more than by strictly environmental or ecological concerns.
H-France ReviewVolume 17(2017)Page 2Chapter five brings together some well known material on the international and institutional history of nature protection and the origins of national parks while aiming to demonstrate the importance of France to these international debates and decisions. A more comparative approach would have strengthened her claim that France led the charge on the internationalization of “nature protection.” Chapter six is a lightly revised version of Ford’s 2008 article on the environmental “anxieties” of empire in French Algeria. As with Chapterfive, a more comparative approach to the Algerian material would have made more persuasive Ford’s assertion that the environmental “anxieties” in French Algeria were in some ways unique. Chapter seven takes a very different course than the rest of the book and addresses the urban environment in France with a focus on Paris. It covers some well-known material such as Hausmannization but also some new material on the French digestion of the mostly British idea of the “garden city.” The battle to increase green space and parks in Paris over the course of the long nineteenth century is placed in an interesting conversation with the adoption of a somewhat modified form of the garden city for French suburbs. As a geographer trained to “think big,” I found the book’s limited time period to be somewhat constraining as there is ample evidence of “environmental consciousness” well before the French Revolution going back to at least the seventeenth century. Ford nods to this early in the book, but it is not discussed further and could be fruitfully explored in the future. Bringing the implications of this story into the present would have been quite helpful. I also found it curious that some of the recent research by Noelle Plack, among others, questioning the environmental impact of the Revolution, specifically undermining the received wisdom of significant deforestation, was not discussed. Moreover, a greater engagement with the material results of “reforestation,” nature protection, and the development of national parks, especially but not only in the colonial context, would have strengthened the book. The silence here regarding the very negative impacts on poor, local populations that have been extensively documented by scholars such as Roderick Neumann, among many others, seems to reinforce the elite frame of reference of Ford’s book. The relentless and curious emphasis on “anxiety” that permeates the entire book may be due in part to this frame of reference that gives voice primarily to those in positions of power, with the exception of Chapter three. The deeply problematic outcomes of this kind of culturally conditioned anxiety have been amply illustrated in the literature, and discussion of this would have improved Ford’s volume.[1]Ford’s book does succeed admirably in showing that French environmental consciousness and policy/legislation long predates the post-World War II era where it is so often located. Furthermore, her suggestion that some of the motivations leading to environmental protection in Francewere more emotional than scientific is persuasive. But this should also function as a warning. More than two centuries of “anxiety” over deforestation leading to climate change, as recent research has demonstrated, has led to a great deal of questionable “reforestation” that has exacerbated warming in Europe rather than ameliorated it.[2] The seventeen illustrations add much to the book, but it would have benefitted further from maps showing both the extent of forested areas and the main rivers of France, as well as the spatial extent of some of the largest floods like that of 1856. A generation of scholars from history as well as environmentally interested disciplines including geography, sociology, and environmental studies will profit from this lovely book.NOTES[1] See, for example, Derek Gregory, “(Post)Colonialism and the Production of nature,” in Noel Castree and Bruce Braun eds., Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 84-111.
H-France ReviewVolume 17(2017)Page 3[2] See Kim Naudts, Yiying Chen, Matthew J. McGrath et. al., “Europe’s Forest Management did not Mitigate Climate Warming,” Science351.6273 (2016): 225-258.Diana K. DavisUniversity of California at Davisgeovet@ucdavis.eduCopyright ©2017 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution of individual reviews for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and the location of the review on the H-France website. The Society for French Historical Studies reserves the right to withdraw the license for edistribution/republication of individual reviews at any time and for any specific case. Neither bulk redistribution/republication in electronic form of more than five percent of the contents of H-France Review nor re-publication of any amount in print form will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France. The views posted on H-France Review are not necessarily the views of the Society for French Historical Studies.ISSN 1553-9172
H-France ReviewVolume 6 (2006) Page 404 H-France Review Vol. 6 (August 2006), No. 94 Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. xi + 170 pp. Bibliography and index. $35.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-8014-4367-9. Review by Carol E. Harrison, University of South Carolina. Historians have long been familiar with the anticlerical argument that French women, because of their persistent dedication to the Catholic Church, posed a threat to the republic. Jules Michelet’s 1845 warning that “[o]ur wives, our daughters, are raised and ruled by our enemies” resonated well into the twentieth century.[1] Caroline Ford takes apart this cliché to argue that the French idea of laïcitéemerged from a nineteenth-century gendered arrangement of political and familial power. Divided Houses unravels the tangled connections between gender and the secular ideal primarily through a series of microhistories, episodes in which female religiosity confronted male ambitions to establish a secular social and political order. Her book thus implicitly seeks to confront the “Catholic woman” of republican anxieties with the experiences of Catholic women who lived and practiced their faith during the nineteenth century. Divided Houses opens with an introduction laying out Ford’s premises about the relationship between laïcité and the “feminization of Catholicism” in nineteenth-century France. A feminized Church, Ford contends, was at the center both of debates about the civil status of women and of France’s insistently secular republicanism. La foi laïque owed as much to the conflicts of private life as to philosophical and scientific materialism; the “intellectual divorce” between believing women and secular men raised male concerns about their authority as fathers, husbands, and citizens (p. 7). The image of the Catholic woman as republicanism’s other emerged during the Revolution; in Jacobin discourse she represented both the fanaticism and the ultimate insignificance of counter-revolution. Chapter one synthesizes recent work on religion and Revolution to trace the emergence of the Catholic dévote, a figure who allowed revolutionaries to limit and then dismiss challenges to the new political order. This revolutionary association between women, unreasoning faith, and hysterical counter-revolution set the stage for the nineteenth century’s projection of gender dichotomy on to questions of politics and religion. At the heart of the book are four chapters, several of which have appeared in print before, which present aspects of the nineteenth-century confrontation between female religiosity and the secular institutions of the state. Three of the four are microhistories focusing on legal cases that saw devout Catholic women testing their rights in civil courts under the Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Second Empire. The fourth focuses on devotion to Saint Philomena whose cult rose and fell in a brief period in the mid nineteenth century. Court cases and the pamphlet literature they produced form the basis of the microhistories that examine the intersection between women’s rights and their religiosity. Chapter two, on the “seduction” of Emily Loveday, sets a young woman’s religious freedom (to convert to Catholicism) against her Protestant father’s right to determine his daughter’s future and his family’s religious identity. Leading political figures of the Restoration era engaged in the debate, taking unexpected and inconsistent sides. Liberals’ distrust of Catholic women overcame their commitment to individual liberty as they supported the father’s right to coerce his daughter. Conservative Catholics abandoned their support for patriarchal authority in order to justify Emily Loveday’s right to follow her conscience.
H-France ReviewVolume 6 (2006) Page 405 The following chapter takes on the case of Jeanne-Françoise Le Monnier, who sued her religious order for illegally incarcerating her in the convent and in an insane asylum. Here Ford focuses on Le Monnier’s lawyer’s use of the melodramatic trope of forced claustration to argue both that his client had been unjustifiably imprisoned and that she should be allowed to return to her order. Rejecting the notion that a nun abandoned her civil personality, he argued that entry into a religious order was a contract and that the Saint Sacrament of Bayeux remained bound to uphold its side of the contract with Le Monnier. The final chapter explores the struggles of Mme de Guerry/Sister Esther to reclaim the substantial dowry she had brought to the convent at Picpus in order to use the funds to establish a new religious order. As ecclesiastical negotiations over the dowry stagnated, Guerry took her demands to civil court, where her lawyer, Emile Ollivier, argued that canon law could not trump the inalienability of property in civil law, and that Mme de Guerry’s property remained her own. Chapter four shifts away from questions of women’s rights to examine the nature of female religiosity, focusing on the cult of Saint Philomena. A saint whose history was fabricated from archaeological remains found in the Roman catacombs and the accounts of a series of visionaries, Philomena received official sanction in 1837, gained a dramatic following in France in the 1840s and 1850s, yet virtually disappeared from the French landscape by 1890. The story of Philomena, an adolescent girl who chose martyrdom over rape, resonated widely in mid-nineteenth-century France. As an attempt to include a discussion of women’s religious experience in a book that is overwhelmingly about secular representations of female religiosity, however, the chapter falls short. Writing about Philomena’s cult, Ford argues that “her popular appeal, particularly among women, had much to do with the nature of her martyrdom and her alleged miraculous healings” (p. 97). She rightly warns, however, that such an analysis “cannot simply be reduced to psychological problems among its adherents or to the Church’s changed social constituency in nineteenth-century France” (p. 99). Although Ford maintains that it is important to balance the “social, ecclesiastical, and political context of postrevolutionary France” with the “‘lived religion’ experienced by men and...women,” (p. 100) she does not really achieve this goal. Her discussion of Philomena is all context: in particular, clerical encouragement of popular religious practices that their eighteenth-century predecessors would have labeled “superstition” and growing Ultramontanism with its interest in relics with Roman connections. Ford has much less to say about devotion to Philomena as “lived religion.” Her discussion of the nineteenth-century’s fascination with girl-saints martyred as they resisted sexual aggression is suggestive, and Ford usefully calls our attention to the proliferation of narratives of sexual danger in novels and melodramas of the period and in the “hagiography” of the French Revolution’s female martyrs. Nowhere, however, do we learn what dedication to Saint Philomena meant to any of her followers or why some women found devotion to Philomena more meaningful than the commemoration of revolutionary heroines or the pleasures of boulevard theater. The same silence on the part of religious women characterizes the other chapters of the book; Ford relies on lawyers’ arguments, not women’s accounts of their religious faith. By articulating the male anxieties about female religiosity that fueled anticlericalism, Divided Houses raises many questions about the role of Catholicism in women’s lives and women’s interpretations of republican anticlericalism. The Loveday affair, for instance, produced a corpus of twenty pamphlets signed by its principal actors and clearly composed with the assistance of lawyers; these pamphlets mapped out the debate in terms of individual liberty vs. the dutiful submission of daughters. If Emily Loveday had other terms with which to tell her story, we do not learn what they were. Similarly, the chapter on Jeanne-Françoise Le Monnier’s suit against her religious order focuses on her lawyer’s mémoire judiciare. Ford emphasizes the role of storytelling in legal process, but an intertextual approach that reads the mémoire in dialogue with other tales of forced claustration leaves us with a major lacuna at the point where Le Monnier’s brief diverged from its narrative predecessors: Le Monnier wanted (or at least claimed to want) to be readmitted to her convent. Le Monnier and the sisters of the Saint Sacrement probably did not
H-France ReviewVolume 6 (2006) Page 406 understand vocation exclusively in terms of civil contract, but the legal mémoire said nothing about other interpretations of the obligations of women religious. Finally, Emile Ollivier shaped Mme de Guerry’s case as an issue over individual property rights and the status of the Picpus convent as an unauthorized association. Ford does not tell us whether Mme de Guerry and the Picpus sisters understood the religious life and its claims on property differently. All of these questions have a real bearing on our understanding of women’s lives and of women’s role in shaping both French Catholicism and French republicanism. Divided Houses is strongest as an account of the role that representations of devout women played in the elaboration of French politics, and it makes an important contribution to elucidating the gendered underpinnings of laïcité. We learn much less about the other side of the divide--the meaning of Catholic faith and practice for devout women and their response to the strongly misogynist strain in republican laïcité. If we follow Ford’s lead and imagine French secularism as emerging from conflicts in private life, then we need to understand the side of the debate that spoke for female devotion and conscience. In the repeated encounters between husbands and wives and fathers and daughters, what alternative, female, Catholic accounts of the relationship between individual liberty, religious belief, national identity, and civil status emerged? Sources, often largely untapped, do exist for exploring how women understood their own piety and the personal and social roles they assigned to their church. Congregational archives and women’s devotional writings, in particular, are useful places to begin the task of understanding the motives of the female protagonists of Ford’s microhistories or the meanings that Philomena’s followers read into the saint’s life. Approaching the question of female religiosity through different sources will further untangle the at least partly fictional Catholic woman of the anticlerical imagination from France’s many practicing Catholic women. NOTES [1] Jules Michelet, Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille, 4th ed. (Paris: Comptoir des Imprimeurs-unis, 1845), p. 44. Carol E. Harrison University of South Carolina ceharris@gwm.sc.edu Copyright © 2006 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution of individual reviews for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and the location of the review on the H-France website. The Society for French Historical Studies reserves the right to withdraw the license for redistribution/republication of individual reviews at any time and for any specific case. Neither bulk redistribution/republication in electronic form of more than five percent of the contents of H-France Review nor re-publication of any amount in print form will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France. The views posted on H-France Review are not necessarily the views of the Society for French Historical Studies. ISSN 1553-9172