Look This Way Please, Madame Minister!

"Hey Will, we need a photo-portrait of the Minister; grab your camera and run upstairs!" Well, it probably didn’t happen just like that, but in any case as part of his duties with the photography bureau of the Communications Department of the French Ministry of the Interior, Will Napier, photojournalism major at Goucher College, was called upon to photograph Michèle Alliot-Marie, or "MAM", Minister of the Interior. During the shoot they fell into conversation, Ms. Alliot-Marie being quite curious about this new rather exotic recruit to the Ministry’s staff. Since then he has regularly been assigned to photograph the Minister with international visitors. More recently, Will was on assignment in Strasbourg for the NATO meetings, far from the plush carpets and 17th century panelling of State reception halls. Covering the events at street level required dodging his share of projectiles and passing clouds of tear gas, until he was assigned to photograph President Sarkozy welcoming President Obama to France – from the tower of the Strasbourg cathedral, where he shared space with a contingent of snipers! After all, they all work for the same Ministry...

Swimming in Think Tanks (and research centers)

Spring semester 2009 in IFE’s Paris Field Study and Internship Program is characterized by a surprising number of students who chose to be placed in research institutes. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, even a classicist are all working as research associates with well known institutes in their chosen field. Several came to IFE having already chosen a theme for their undergraduate education, to culminate in a senior thesis. For these students IFE represents an opportunity to acquire a comparative slant in a hands-on way, while also integrating international study directly into their core undergraduate academic project.

Phillip, a student at Swarthmore College, came to IFE a budding expert in how textbooks in history portray WWII and is working at the Centre d’Histoire, a research center at Sciences Po, analysing French middle school textbooks since 1945.Surprisingly, this topic has attracted little attention among French historiographers, and Phillip’s first task has been combing French archives as far away as Lyons to collect the textbooks themselves. Caryne, a history major from The College of William and Mary and a student of colonialization, is a research associate at the Musée Social or CEDIAS, the major archives of social movements in France where she is writing about the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931, a subject of rich documentation at CEDIAS. Nathan, a history major at Wesleyan University is dovetailing his undergraduate theme in Islamic studies with his research internship at the Institute for the Study of the Islamic World (IISMM), specializing in the memory of the Algerian War in both France and Algeria. Others are in research centers in economics (typology of welfare states), international relations (torture during the Algerian War), sociology (Catholic and Muslim youth in France), European affairs (European public opinion), and classical studies (archaic Greek lyric poetry, at the Center for Comparative Study of Ancient Societies – Centre Gernet).

Whether or not pursuing an overall undergraduate theme at IFE, or discovering a senior thesis topic, researcher interns are clearly more involved with their subject than would be possible in even the best-stocked library back home: participating in research seminars, preparing colloquia, cataloguing holdings, interacting with other researchers in their field (on a daily informal basis as well as through interviews for their research), accessing specialized archives, etc.

Back to the Big Bang: First stop Paris

Imagine a triangle whose corners are a research campus on the wooded bluffs above the Yvette River south of Paris, Europe’s Kourou astroport between the Guyanese jungle and the Atlantic Ocean, and a small college in the upper midwest of the US. Jillian Scudder, physics major from Macalester College and student in IFE’s Paris Field Study and Internship Program, got her work if not her name in the news recently, as the French daily, Libération, reported on launch preparations for "Planck, a jewel of a space telescope, waiting in a white room at the Kourou station for launch in mid-April. Beyond observing fossil radiation, Planck will be testing some of the latest theories and ideas circulating in astrophysics, in particular concerning the mysterious dark matter and even more enigmatic dark energy." Working last Fall as an associate researcher at the renowned Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) at the Orsay science campus (University of Paris – South), Jillian was given the task of writing the program that will scrutinize the space telescope’s observation of the very young universe (fossil radiation) for telltale signs of the existence of an undetectable or "dark" form of energy. Very likely the Ariane rocket launch of the Planck will be followed on a few computer screens in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

"Why Study French?: A world of answers

Most of us not lucky enough to be raised bilingual have had to struggle through language classes, learning to speak French or Spanish or other languages the hard way, and prey to schoolroom doubts about the utility of language requirements ("when will I ever use this?"). The lead essay in the March 21 literary supplement to Le Monde provides – in the case of French – a ringing response by looking at the number of currently published authors whose mother tongue is not French but who have chosen (of their own free will!) to write their works in what the French refer to as the "language of Molière". The list includes natives of Argentina (Hector Biancotti, Sylvia Baron Supervielle), Cuba (Eduardo Manet), Greece (Vassilis Alexakis), Slovenia (Brina Svit), Russia (Andreï Makine), Germany (Anne Weber), Japan (Aki Shimazaki), Sweden (Bjorn Larsson), Denmark (Pia Petersen), Italy (Carlo Iansiti), Romania (Andrei Vieru), China (Ying Chen), Afghanistan (Atiq Rahimi), Guinea (Tierno Monembo), Turkish Kurdistan (Seymus Dagtekin), and even the United States (Jonathan Littel, David Grossvogel). And this is just a partial list. French literary adoptees have won some of the top literary prizes including the Goncourt (Littell, Rahimi), the Renaudot (Monembo) or the French Academy (Dagtekin).

"Why do you write in French?" The list of responses is as long as the list of those queried. "The book started coming out in French"..."the subject is taboo in my language"..."my language is too rigid; if I want to say "woman" I have to write "little sister" ..."I like the power to invent one’s existence in another language"... "I feel freer in French"... "it helps me keep a healthy distance from my work"... and other reasons still. Morroccan writer Fouad Laroui, who lives in the Netherlands and composes his poems in Dutch and his novels in French, recalls feeling invited into the universality of a language spoken by Persians and Hurons alike; "why not I?".

There is of course the stereotype of the ardent defender of the French language, fretting over English entries into the vocabulary of Molière or the slowly shrinking map of the Francophone world. But the literary sensibility of French culture seems at closer look to be not quite so chauvinistic. While writers from many countries are pulled into French by something stronger than themselves, a recent IFE intern and literature major at Brown University, Caitlin, discovered the French love of American literature when she interviewed and analysed the works of American authors who sell more books translated into French than they do in English, producing a research work entitled "They Love me in Paris".