Reviews for Aspects of Contemporary France

The average rating for Aspects of Contemporary France based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-29 00:00:00 Francisco Luis Benvenuty Since Marc Bloch's influential studies on the end of slavery and the emergence of feudal society, medievalists have spent decades debating over the questions and problems raised by him over the social transformation that occurred in pre-millennial Europe. In From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, French historian Pierre Bonnassie analyzes slavery, servitude, lordship, and feudalism in southern France and Spain through a collection of lectures, articles, and excerpts from larger works. While being a collection of shorter writings rather than a monograph, it naturally follows that the work does not have a clear singular argument. However, Bonnassie's general argument is for a significant discontinuity between slavery and feudal society termed a "Feudal Revolution". The book is structured as a collection of different essays on the problematic of a "Feudal Revolution" from various perspectives, rather than as a singular argument. Chapter one, "The survival and extinction of the slave system in the early medieval West (fourth to eleventh centuries)," starts the book off with an exploration of different arguments concerning the disappearance of slavery from both Annales school and Marxist historians. In the last analysis, he finds them all to reach an impasse on their own. Rather than argue from a singular perspective, Bonnassie explores the question of slavery's extinction through juridical, social, economic, and even anthropological history. The second chapter, "Society and mentalities in Visigothic Spain," presents an overview of the era of Visigothic rule in Spain as a bloody and unstable period deleterious to Spain's underclasses. He presents the Visigoth's end as a moment of hope for Spain's people and a significant blow to the slave system with the caveat that he credits this period as the birth of the concept of a Spanish nationality. The third chapter, "From the Rhone to Galicia: origins and modalities of the feudal order," charts the emergence of feudalism in Hispano-Occitanian societies. Bonnassie concludes that the emergence of feudalism was a historical rupture amounting to a social revolution and that feudalism in the southern Mediterranean was not less "complete" or developed than northern models. Chapter Four, "Descriptions of fortresses in the Book of Miracles of Sainte-Foy of Conques," extracts as much information as possible about Occitanian castles from the Occitanian hagiographic source Liber miraculorum sancta Fidis, which paints the image of castles as being centers of power and instruments of social control. "The formation of Catalan feudalism and its early expansion (to c. 1150)" charts the emergence and class formation of feudalism in Catalonia with an emphasis on feudalism as a social rather than legal relation. He comes to attribute the birth of a Catalonian identity to the appearance of feudalism. In the following chapter, "Feudal conventions in eleventh-century Catalonia," Bonnassie argues that the system of contracts called convenietia served as the basis of feudal and feudo-vassalic relations in eleventh-century Catalonia. Then a chapter in collaboration with Pierre Guichard, "Rural communities in Catalonia and Valencia (from the ninth to the mid-fourteenth centuries)," follows the effects of the emergence of a seigneurial or feudal system on rural communities in eleventh century Catalonia via a "Feudal Revolution," and the importation of such a system via Christian conquest in thirteenth century Valencia. Chapter nine, "From one servitude to another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdoms at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987-1031)," explores the Frankish reigns of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious as a crucial turning point in the development of the medieval peasantry. Slavery was in its death throes towards the start of this period, and by the end of it, often despite vicious class struggle and peasant resistance, peasants were subjected to a new form of servitude through the seigneurial ban. The last chapter, "Marc Bloch, historian of servitude: reflections on the concept of 'servile class'" is a defense of the titular historian's concept of a "servile class", which Bonnassie explores by emphasizing both the rupture in society that led to serfdom, but also continuity between agrarian slaves and the later unfree peasantry. After the book's primary content, its end matters contain an index of persons and places, and a glossarial index. In terms of sources and citations, the book lacks a bibliography owing to its nature as a collection of essays. Instead, sources and secondary literature are only cited throughout the book as footnotes except for chapter two, containing a bibliography for itself at the end of the chapter. As a result, the book's citations are cluttered and disorganized with no distinction between sources, scholarly literature, and supplementary information. Speaking in terms of his sources, Bonnassie benefits from his study's regional focus on the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. From his background as a specialist in Catalonian history, he extracts as much information as possible from a region rich in documentation. It is unclear how he pulls from archeological sources as most of his citations pertain to written sources and secondary literature without much discussion of archeological evidence. Instead, Bonnassie often hints at the use of archeological evidence without ever exploring or making clear from where or what he is referring to. As a result, Bonnassie's arguments rest entirely on his sources' validity without supplement from material archeological evidence. Only in the case of his use of a hagiography source in chapter four does he defend his use of a potentially unreliable source. His use of sources appears rather uncritical in all other cases, which opens his arguments up to potential weaknesses. In terms of Pierre Bonnassie's general historiographical stance, his debt to Marc Bloch is clear. Both the opening and closing chapters of the book act as tributes to the late historian, and the book serves as a vindication of Bloch's conception of a feudal society. His relationship with other schools of thought following Bloch, such as the later Annales school and Marxist historians, is most thoroughly explored in the first chapter. In it, he comes away finding that while there is an element of truth in both the rival schools, they all ultimately reach an impasse due to their inability to answer most of the crucial questions over the end of slavery and the beginning of feudalism. Historians such as Charles Verlinden are criticized for being overly focused on legal history rather than social history. Dismissing more orthodox Marxists out of hand, he finds that more heterodox Marxists provide valuable discussions of class struggle and productive forces while being held back by being doctrinaire. He finds that all previous attempts falter, he turns towards a synthesis of juridical, economic, social, and anthropological history for a broader sociological view of slavery and feudalism. Thus, Bonnassie falls somewhere between the Annales school and Marxians as he takes much influence from the former in the form of Bloch and Georges Duby, while often using Marxist terminology such as "modes of production," "forces of production," "alienation of labor," and so on. As evidenced by his thesis, Bonnassie takes an implicit stance in favor of feudalism as a concept. Rather than reject it like most contemporary medievalists, its existence frames his entire book. His conception of a broader social system relates to his indebtedness to Marc Bloch's profound influence. Throughout the work, another theme is a deep sympathy to medieval Europe's underclasses, whether slave or serf. Pierre Bonnassie devotes much of his attention to the suffering of slaves and the peasantry's heroic resilience. In sum, Bonnassie commits to a synthetic and sympathetic social history of slavery and feudalism to defend the concept of a feudal society. Overall, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe provides a compelling account of feudalism in Hispano-Occitanian society with vivid accounts of the treatment of the region's servile classes add a human touch to the overall work. Beyond that, however, as a work in its totality, the work begins to fall apart. While being a collection of articles rather than a monograph has the benefit of a multiplicity of perspectives on an issue, the inability for a clear central argument to emerge becomes an issue when it begins to cause contradictions. The book's central tension is Bonnassie's inability to clearly distinguish between slavery and feudalism, which is crucial given his conception of feudalism as a complete rupture from slave society being the book's core argument. Throughout the book, he compares slave and feudal society as different modes of production, while defining them with entirely different criteria. While the slave mode of production is defined anthropologically through the existence of a laboring class of unfree de-socialized and alienated beings, he frames the feudal mode production in its sociological totality as a wide range of institutions such as lordship, serfdom, knighthood, seigneurialism, castles, and more. Rather than compare the particularity of both society's laboring classes, i.e. slavery and serfdom, or the general structures of society, Bonnassie instead compares a particular form of labor to a generalized view of society in its totality. His thesis of a fundamental discontinuity between slave and feudal society becomes less clear as a result as he never compares the two directly on equal grounding. This asymmetric comparison often leads to contradicting arguments between different essays. While most of the book argues for discontinuity between slave and feudal society in its institutions and forms of servitude, the last chapter argues for a continuity between slavery and serfdom in the form of a "servile class". Ultimately, this asymmetry most likely stems from the patchwork nature of the entire work. Rather than construct a singular argument in a monograph on slavery and feudalism, the book collects a series of different arguments over decades that often have different levels of analysis and criteria involved in their argumentation. Thus, while filled with moments of brilliance that contribute much to scholarly debate over Hispano-Occitanian society, Bonnassie's overall argumentation is hindered by the book's fragmented nature.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-23 00:00:00 C P Hawley La parte del canibalismo en la Europa Occidental y las siete prohibiciones sobre las carnes que no se podían comer son lo mejor, sin duda alguna.