The programme “Modernities" is made up of several projects :

Frontiers of Modernity
Law and Literature: Law in Literature
European History

Frontiers of Modernity

This programme on European modernity (focusing on France and Great Britain) from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century is an interdisciplinary initiative. The researchers brought together under its umbrella share interests in the history of ideas and knowledge, in philosophy and literature, and in common questions relating to the Early Modern period. Starting from case studies, the project seeks to understand the processes through which modernity is constructed, working principally from a comparison between France and Great Britain but also remaining alive to broader perspectives.

The group thus focuses on the question of modernity not by attempting to formulate a straightforward definition of the term, or by giving it any all-encompassing meaning, but instead by finding ways of approaching it at its margins, of understanding its constituent parts. The research therefore takes the form not of an investigation into the progress of modernity, but rather that of an inquiry into the processes that has led to the formulation, delimitation or exclusion of knowledge from its domain. In short, modernity is not understood as an initial fixed point, but as the horizon that gives rise to the inquiry.

In 2004-8, the programme was generously supported by the ACI-TTT (Ministry of Research), allowing the organization of numerous study events and the furthering of research in the framework of a bi-monthly seminar. Publication of these proceedings is now well under way, with two volumes due to appear into 2008. The first, entitled The Figure of the Philosopher in the Modern Era, documents the acts of two study days held on the subject in conjunction with the IRCL, Montpellier. The second, provisionally called Frontier Fictions : Law, Literature and Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, is the outcome of research on the uses of fiction in the modern era. 

The project is at present focused on the concept of the “case”, investigating processes circulation of knowledge starting from isolated events rather than from overarching grand theories.

The project “Reading the European novel : from the Renaissance to the Lumières”, directed by Nathalie Ferrand and funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, has been central to the “Frontiers of Modernity” project since September 2007. Taking a comparative approach to the history of literary circulation and based on research in European archives, the project embraces several cultural arenas (France, Britain, Italy, Germany), aiming to write a history of novel-reading in Europe in order to redefine the novelistic literary object through the study of its audiences and their perceptions. The frontiers touched upon by this line of research are thus not only geographical, but also disciplinary and methodological. To bring study of the novel alongside broader histories of the book, of reading, and of cultural transfer is to tackle corpuses that have until now been kept out of literary approaches – translated or illustrated works, for example, since translation and illustration must be considered two major forms of reception of works during the period under study. It is this aspect that has led a first initiative of the programme towards the publication of a collective volume, “Translating and Illustrating the Novel in the Europe of the Lumières”, to which several Oxford researchers have contributed. As well as providing a space for consideration of the fields that are reinvigorating research on the novel in the century of the Lumières, “Reading the Novel” aims to examine the relationship between fiction and the visual culture in the eighteenth century, and to create a catalogue of the illustrated novel. Collaborations on the subject with British colleagues from Oxford, Cardiff, London and Manchester have rapidly taken shape, and a first study day on “Literary illustration: reflections and experiences of Franco-British research” in spring 2008 will be followed by other workshops. In November, a seminar on “The French novel outside France between the Classical age and the Enlightenment” will provide another occasion to think about the forms and contexts of writing and reading the French novel beyond the scene of its original production.

Law and Literature : Law in Literature

The “Law and Literature” movement exploded onto the scene in the United States during the second half of the 1970s. Immediately identifying itself with literary modernism, it took up position in a tradition symbolized by the names of Camus, Kafka, Melville and Dostoyevsky. The rapid establishment of the movement in American law faculties was demonstrated by the convening of numerous courses on the works of these four authors, which in turn consolidated the idea that “Law and Literature” was inseparable from a particular type of literary modernism. However, in attempting to reconstruct the intellectual history of the movement, it is striking that one of its most important branches – “Law in Literature” - is in fact far from going hand in hand with modernity, instead taking literary classics (Dickens, Scott, Dumas, Balzac) as its guiding lights and Victorian novelists as its home ground. It is this “upper middle-brow” canon that inspires the “legal novel”, a genre created and promoted by the pioneer Wigmore, in the hope of encouraging lawyers to read literary texts that were influential in their approach to juridical life understood in a broader sense.

Research carried out in the Wigmore archives held at the faculty of Northwestern University (Chicago) gave rise to two publications more specifically examining the lists of “legal novels” put together by Wigmore in the early twentieth century for the use of law students (see especially « Éloge de l’éclectisme. Penser le champ « Droit et Littérature » à partir des listes de Legal Novels  (1900-1987) », Textyles, n° 31, Droit et Littérature, 2007, pp. 12-28). John Henry Wigmore is at the origin of one of the two main branches of the “Law and Literature” movement – law in literature; the Supreme Court judge Benjamin Cardozo (1870-1938), meanwhile, may be considered the father of the alternative approach, law as literature. While much has been written about Cardozo, Wigmore has attracted far less attention: only one bibliography exists on his work, which although very useful was clearly drawn up to order by a librarian. Yet Wigmore is a unique character in the literary world. Sole author of a ten-volume treaty on evidence that makes him one of the major reference points of American criminal law, Wigmore was also a jurist who knew well how to illuminate the magic lamps and kaleidoscopes that could introduce laymen to the universal history of law. His legacy has perhaps suffered more from this general diffusion of a juridical culture usually reserved for an audience of experts than from his misjudged political stances during the 1920s, in particular regarding the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. In short, posterity has been unforgiving not so much of Wigmore’s political ultra-conservatism at this point in his career as of his determination to democratize access to law. He fought this cause by illustrating that practical law is not in fact born from the seed of pure law itself, but instead from the stuff of everyday life – personal character, human emotions, ideas arising out of chance or contingency – all phenomena that are perfectly at home in literature on the other hand, and above all in popular literature (see: « Make the Unorthodox Orthodox : John Henry Wigmore et la naissance de l’intérêt du droit pour la littérature ». In Antoine Garapon, Denis Salas (eds.), Le Droit dans la littérature, Michalon, coll. « Le bien commun », 2008, pp. 27-68).

What is more, Richard H. Weisberg, professor at the Cardozo Law School and one of the most influential figures in the contemporary “Law and Literature” movement in the United States, took part in the first seminar in France to be devoted specifically to “Law and Literature”, convened by Antoine Garapon and Denis Salas at the Supreme Court of Appeal (Cour de Cassation) in October 2006. Whilst fully embracing Cardozo’s legacy, Weisberg was far more ambivalent about that of Wigmore; I was all the more surprised by this since it is to Weisberg’s work in the 1970s that we owe the rediscovery and updating of Wigmore’s lists. A fruitful exchange was established as a result, and led to the organization of a “Law and Literature” study day on the theme “Can democracy do without fiction(s)”, held at Sciences-Po in June 2007; the proceedings were published in a special issue of the journal Raisons Politiques (www.cairn.info/revue-raisonspolitiques-2007) in October of the same year.

The interest generated by the “Law and Literature” approach within the research group on “Frontiers of Modernity” also led to the establishment of collaborations outside the literary arena, bringing in first historians and then jurists. Frédéric Audren was thus invited to present a paper on 1st June 2007 entitled “What is a case in case-law?”, and it became clear that the research group of the Maison Française would benefit greatly from the skills of a historian of law whose different approach could enrich both the history of sciences and literary studies programmes.  

The relations of law and literature have also been explored on the basis of two case-studies: Danton and the Marquis de Sade.

The death of the leader of the “Indulgents” is perhaps one of the most highly literary events of the Revolution, as shown in the works of William D. Howarth (see in particular “The Danton/Robespierre Theme in European Drama”, in H.T. Mason and W. Doyle (eds.), The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness, Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1989, pp. 21-35). The literary arena, however, is not limited to fiction: it also takes in political texts such as the speeches given at the Convention during the session of 11 Germinal, Year II (31st March 1794), which led to the accusation and sending before the revolutionary tribunal of Danton and Dantonist deputies. Applying the counter-factual method formulated by the novelist Manzoni to this parliamentary session reveals many ambiguities: the uncertainty of parliamentary enunciations, for instance, and the difficulty of knowing today exactly what was said by the actors at the time given the vast contradictions encountered in newspaper accounts that claim to report these events. Most importantly perhaps, this method also reveals the “juridical constraints” (Michael Troper) that held sway over the actors, and that took their toll so much more dramatically on the Dantonists than on their accusers, the members of the Committee of Public Safety (Robespierre and Barère). “Who killed Georges Danton” is to appear in the volume of Essays in Honour of Professor of Law Yves Guchet, edited by Pascal Morvan, later in 2008.

On Sade, the “Law and Literature” approach is elaborated principally in Chapter IV of L’Honneur dans la République, a history of indignity from the French Revolution to the 1950s (forthcoming in Editions Grasset in 2008) which attempts to show that the resistance displayed in a text such as One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (1785) perhaps arises from the fact that insufficient account has been taken of the juridical foundations of Sade’s thought. Law is present above all in this work, in which Sade considers an extreme juridical statute that had been in force not only in ancien régime law but also in the anti-emigrant legislation of the Convention: civil death (that is, the deprivation of civil rights). The ambition of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, which can be read as a practical treaty on civil death, is arguably therefore to dare to question how there could be any concrete relationship between individuals completely deprived of their civil rights, since civil death goes hand in hand with social death and the ultimate “de-linking” of natural relationships from law. Can any such relationships then continue to exist? This standpoint was further developed during the discussion on Caroline Warman’s paper on Sade in a study day organized by Alexis Tadié at the Voltaire Foundation on 29th February 2008 on “The figure of the philosopher in non-philosophical prose”.

European History

After the relative failure of attempts made in this direction to date, European history must turn its back on the problem of European identity. The vast majority of attempts to write European history take up the tools of writing national history, changing nothing but the scale of inquiry. This programme sets out to implement instead an evolutive approach, positing no stable definition of Europe a priori and recognizing that political and cultural Europeanization is both a recent and gradual phenomenon. If the outlines of specific attributes are to be drawn, they must be sought in the domain of the unique processes of modernization that are at work in this region. 

We must first identify a historical moment that serves as the turning point at which we can usefully start to observe these processes. This programme holds that it is European expansion, starting in the fifteenth century, that throws into relief and crystallizes phenomena that can be considered uniquely European. The landing of the Portuguese on the Moroccan coast occurred at the same time as the installation of Ottoman armies in the Balkans, and this crucial change on two fronts may be thought of as the moment at which Europeanization can start to be described in terms of contact between strongly contrasted societies. Needless to say, however, it is the invention in the sixteenth century of the European Atlantic, and the setting in motion of Russian expansion towards the Black Sea, that marks the major turning point. Starting from here, the approach of our research will be to establish connections between internal process of Europeanization and its external projection. In short, the aim is to set out a colonial or global history of Europe, a continent which sees itself reflected in the mirror of the relations that it establishes with the rest of the world. 

To attempt to delimit the territory of Europe before describing its unique characteristics is to condemn a study to failure. On one hand the Ottoman Empire stretching up to the Danube basin, and Tsarist Russia expanding into Asia, are both an integral part of European history (even if not fully covered by it). On the other, despite the religious division of the Mediterranean, the South and East of the region must not be allowed to fall outside the European question since the process of osmosis between societies in contact remains the dominant phenomenon in this space of interchange. The Turkish and Russian spheres, as well as Mediterranean Islam, must therefore not be excluded from the European landscape. 

Furthermore, from the early years of the sixteenth century we see Europeans exporting their social, cultural, political and religious models to far-flung regions: Africa, Asia, America. Each of these implantations has particular attributes, and the colonial act cannot be simplified to a single type. In certain cases hybridity and creolization are the dominant phenomena; in others the efficient preservation of a metropolitan character is uppermost. Yet in every case, it is clearly the definition of a European reality that is at stake. The actors of European expansion themselves live out the flexibility or rigidity of the cultural attributes that they transmit. There is thus no convincing reason – except for blind obedience to an inherited taboo – to exclude European implantations from historical reflection on Europe down the centuries. 

In return, the colonial experience can enlighten us on crucial phenomena of intra-European history. Power rivalries were rapidly projected onto a global level; yet it is above all in the realm of forms of politicization of European societies – whether we choose to term them “processes of civilization” or “structural shaping” – that the colonial question can shed light on the European experience. The theme of “internal colonialism” is by no means new, but it has not yet been taken as the guiding thread of a global approach to Europe. In this regard, European history reveals itself as doubly colonial: in relation to external expansion first of all, and then in regard to the processes of imposition of internal political and cultural order.

A French initiative on these questions, organized alongside our British colleagues and with their full cooperation, offers the opportunity to assess what unites and distinguishes research in human sciences on either side of the Channel. Without a doubt, the European question remains one domain in which there is the greatest contrast, and in consequence the greatest room for comparison of different points of view. The Maison Française d'Oxford and the Modern European History Research Centre of the University of Oxford (in conjunction with the Centre for European Studies and the European Humanities Research Centre) will coordinate this series of round tables and seminaries bringing together principally (but not only) French and British researchers. 

It is clear also how the approach outlined above can answer the questions asked today by the citizens of the European Union. The perspective of this programme also investigates the meaning of institutional construction – ideologies of identity versus ideologies of the extension of rights; it puts the question of the place of Europe in its various international settings; finally, it questions into the seismic changes caused by the transformation in population in the post-colonial context. 

Our programme seeks to avoid two pitfalls. The first and most evident is the national framework of thought, explicit or implicit, which is so difficult to shake off. The other is less immediately visible: this is intended as a European undertaking, but its conception and organization are French. Intellectual debate in France on the colonial aspect of European history is somewhat unique; and although, needless to say, the growing delay in confronting the colonial past had to be remedied, this direction must not result in the birth of a separate or autonomous historiographical genre. On the contrary, it is essential that colonial history and metropolitan history develop in symbiosis. Our programme therefore aims precisely to analyse the processes of change through reciprocal influences, showing that the mechanisms of Europeanization cannot be isolated from broader phenomena of interaction between Europeans and other world regions. 

Two workshops were organized in Spring 2007.   

The first tackled the question of production and diffusion of knowledge in the historical framework of Europe, from both an internal and external point of view. The discussion opened up a space for comparison between different types of research carried out in various areas of the history of science, cultural history and the history of political science. 

These were followed by a seminar jointly organized by the MFO and All Souls College in Autumn 2007, entitled “Processes of Change in Early Modern Europe”. This seminar was conceived as a series of discussions around the question of processes of transformation in Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centures. In order to bring in a broad sweep of historiographical areas, the organizers – Robin Briggs and Jean-Frédéric Schaub – addressed themes such as historiography and the conception of historical time, scientific revolutions, conflicts and religious organization, diplomatic and cultural negotiation of relationships to the non-European world, political ruptures between social history of administrative mechanisms and studies on élite circles. The seminars brought together lecturers from the University of Oxford, researchers of the Maison Française and a small group of doctoral students from both institutions.